Long read: Biden’s foreign policy in tray is overflowing
The key word for Joe Biden’s foreign policy is revival – of vital alliances, partnerships in multilateral organisations, the US taking up familiar roles on the world stage. A lot of ‘re’ words have been bandied about by the commentators and analysts – reset, re-engagement, resume, renew. But it cannot be a story of going back to where Biden left off as Vice President to Barack Obama just over four years ago. There can be no back to the future to the world of early 2016.
Too much has happened since then. It cannot be a story of going back to arrangements such as the Iran nuclear deal – the JCPOA – ‘just like that’ as the late, great Tommy Cooper might have said. Even rejoining the clubs that Trump quit like the Paris Climate accord and the World Health Organisation might not be so easy.
Engagement with multilateral groups is just one headline. There are other, more urgent questions raised by some very nasty local crises that directly touch on American presence and policies – which could become not so local within a few weeks or months. Top of these are the continuing wars in Yemen and Afghanistan, and unrest in Iraq and Syria.
Then there are the longer term issues raised by the ambiguous, and some would say poisoned, legacies of Donald Trump – especially on Russia and China.
Foreign policy hardly featured during the Biden campaign, but it is always there in the background. Foreign entanglements and wars have defined most presidencies for the past decades, the debacle of Vietnam for Johnson and Nixon, and the ragged wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq for George W Bush.
The main focus today is domestic, for sure, as America has recorded 500,000 deaths from Covid, and yearns for a revived economy. Even the sharp weather has gone political. Ted Cruz has blamed the power cuts and privations of rural Texas on the Democrats – saying they were responsible for too much reliance on wind and sun for electricity. The Democrat state “was now unable to perform the basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity.” On the other hand, the Democrats charge the Republicans with having done too little to forewarn and forearm against the increase in weird weather events.
Covid and weather may appear to have pushed foreign preoccupations down the agenda. But the Biden team doesn’t have time on its hands to ponder matters like the Iran nuclear deal, and the bitter crises in Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria.
Talks are resuming for the US to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action (JCPOA) of 2015, as the nuclear deal is termed. Iran has said it would consider allowing the inspectors back – though they cannot stage ‘challenge’ or ‘surprise’ unannounced visitations to sensitive sites. For Tehran the prize is to have removed the round of direct and third party sanctions ordered by Trump. Critics in the United States want the deal now to cover Iran’s burgeoning missile arsenal as well as nuclear fuels enrichment.
There is an important, if unofficial, deadline for 18 June – the date Iran is to begin electing a new president. Two of the favourites are from the Revolutionary Guard, Hossein Dehghan, and Saeed Mohammad, the dark horse candidate. They are both regarded as hardliners and less disposed to compromise with the international sponsors of the nuclear deal.
Rejoining the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organisation may not be entirely straightforward, requiring some adroit diplomatic choreography. The US will need to present a detailed policy position on climate by the G7 summit in Cornwall in mid-June to ensure that substantial agreement is achieved at the COP-26 climate summit in Glasgow in early November.
Resuming its commitment to the WHO will mean re-engaging with China in an area of common interest, principally the parameters of Covid-19. Transparency, however, is the source of major controversy – especially over China’s early handling of Covid, and its reluctance to hand over detailed information about what happened in Wuhan at eighteen months ago.
The fourth area for multilateral engagement is the extension of the New START strategic arms agreement with Russia, due to be renewed this summer. At one point it was feared that Trump and Putin wanted to dump the agreement altogether. Russia and America are both updating their nuclear arsenals – the latter at a cost of around $2 trillion. Unofficial UK sources indicate that Moscow is now willing for a five-year extension – to June 2026. Both Russia and America are desperate to invite China into the deal – but so far Beijing has declined.
America finds itself deeply committed, like it or not, in the three hot crises in Yemen, Afghanistan and northern Syria and Iraq. The Trump option of disengagement and damn the consequences just invites more chaos and violence – especially in Syria and Afghanistan. Biden appeared to have acted decisively in ordering suspension of arms delivery to Saudi Arabia if they were likely to be used against civilian populations in Yemen. But this is merely to highlight the problem, and the whole tangle of relations with Saudi Arabia, rather than resolve it to any serious degree.
The war in Yemen is as bloody as ever – with nearly 300,000 dead, 24 million dependent on aid, and hundreds of thousands on the point of starvation. The Houthi offensive this year now brings more than three quarters of the population under its harsh regime. The government forces backed by Saudi Arabia are at risk of losing their main base at Marib in the south-east of the country. Elsewhere the country fragments under tribal autonomies and warlords. America must back gesture – the arms embargo – with real diplomacy to bring some semblance of truce to the country. But any move to peace will be seen by Riyadh, especially the mercurial Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as a deliberate tilt to Tehran and its allies the Houthis. This should not put off Washington from talking.
The same complexity of calculation bedevils the mess in northern Syria and Iraq, where militants, including IS or Daesh, are resurgent. An American contractor was killed and US personnel injured at a US base in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq earlier month. The rockets were fired from a rebranded Shiite militant band calling themselves “the Guardians of the Blood Brigade.” The US administration said it will respond in a mode of its own choosing.
Even so, it raises a question mark over the Trump policy of cutting and running from the fight against extremists in the region – a posture vigorously opposed by Jim Mattis, then defence secretary and one of the few grownups in that administration. Trump’s pull out from northern Syria, agreed overnight with Erdogan of Turkey, left the Kurds in the lurch and led to more fighting. The US forces have to stick with their allies, such as the British, and keep a watching brief now that the militants are on the move again.
More worrying, if possible, is the looming deadline for the US to remove its remaining covering force of 2,500 from Afghanistan, which falls at the beginning of May. Taliban forces are now poised to hit the main areas of Kunduz in the north, Kandahar in the south, and the capital itself, Kabul. Their propaganda proclaims that they are awaiting the next move from the US and the government of Ashraf Ghani in the talks at Doha before their fighters move in. Biden has already signaled he is prepared to reinforce the American presence – and a deal of informed Washington opinion is behind him. He is likely, too, to send more forces and trainers into Iraq. But both would be emergency and stopgap measures.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria seem intractable – the trick will be for the administration to make them more tractable. This means more international engagement, not less.
Of course, there is more than enough potential from ‘Friday surprises’ – Myanmar, Russia and its volatile borderlands, and Israel post the elections next month, are prime candidates. They, and several others, could suddenly thud into the box marked ‘Urgent’ at the National Security Council and Pentagon. Russia will continue to be unpredictable for months to come – Putin has more than enough on his plate with Covid, Navalny opposition, the Duma election, Belarus and Russia’s restive east. With the Pat and Mick act with Trump now over, fake news isn’t what it used to be. It’s a weapon which can easily be turned back on its authors in Moscow.
A far bigger problem is China. How Biden handles Beijing will set the strategy and pattern of external policy for his presidency. Commentators have largely set the issue in binary terms: embrace or confront. China itself has managed the latest phase of its strategy of embrace with remarkable success – and despite Covid. It has signed up to a fourteen nation Pacific trade pact, and forged a trade pact with the EU and looks like becoming the number one giant sleeping partner of Brussels.
There is, however, a surprising level of support for the Trump path of confrontation. Armchair strategists point to the Chinese navy now being stronger than all the allied maritime forces in the region. The militarists fear that China will soon have the ability by its new hypersonic and similar weapons to neutralise all naval and air forces across the Pacific and the Americas at a blow – a sort of multidimensional Pearl Harbour strike.
Is this likely? Chinese strategic doctrine is based on national security against all comers. This drives the defence of the South China Sea – a shallow sea which makes access to its main port vulnerable – and the protection of fishing to the shores of America and the southern islands. The Belt and Road strategy ensures security of supply in food and raw materials. Beijing has just announced a ban on all exports and resale of Rare Earth Elements – REE.
But does this amount to a bid for world domination and occupation ?
One of the more reasonable alarmists in the debate, Roger Boyes, argued in The Times last week that China was now sure to attack Taiwan, and probably sooner rather than later. This might well trigger all-out war with the United States. Of late China has been giving copious training to its amphibious forces.
But think about this for a minute. China hasn’t much of a record at expeditionary warfare. The war it waged with Vietnam between 1978 – 1979, in which it relied on overwhelming numbers – ‘human waves’ of ill-trained troops – did not go entirely in its favour. Invading Taiwan would mean occupying a country the size of the Netherlands, with a geography which partly resembles Norway. Human waves wouldn’t be much good in Taiwan’s mountains and valleys – especially where there is a formidably trained and equipped defending force.
Outright confrontation and provocation of China isn’t an option for Biden – and nor is the soft approach of the Obama years of agreeing with Beijing wherever possible. Biden has to steer between the two, but with a clear set of rules and understandings. This option is articulated with brutal lucidity in Foreign Affairs by the former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, himself a world class sinologist. He argues for “managed strategic competition” in which the western allies, and Russia, would have to accommodate Chinese global leadership in many, but not all, aspects. This, writes Rudd, “is anchored in a deeply realist view of the global order.” Meanwhile China must “dial back on its recent pattern of provocative military exercises.” But he concludes in Delphic mode. “Managed strategic competition would highlight the strengths and test the weaknesses of both great powers – and may the best system win.”
The big surprise in the debate about Biden’s global vision and foreign policy is how little any of the above has been reported or discussed in the mainstream American media. For the past several months almost none of this – beyond a few paltry columns – has graced the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, or New Yorker.
These are urgent matters which need prompt but considered attention. When it comes to America and the world, there’s no space for Biden to be biding his time.