Will President Biden’s foreign policy restore America’s place as the champion of a better world?

Conspicuous by their absence in congratulating Joe Biden so far are the regimes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. In true Soviet style, Moscow media have commented that “the law must take its course” before a result can be declared in the USA. As usual, the People’s Republic is keeping shtum until it feels compelled to act.

China and Russia are the two large prickly pears on the Biden team’s foreign policy agenda. Both will have to be handled with care, but both will also be the hard test of Biden’s style of international engagement.

Engagement is to be the watchword and the whole approach – as has been well advertised in advance. The playpen isolationism of Donald J Trump and his cult followers, including secretary of state Mike Pompeo (who still in denial about electoral defeat), is gone – for the next four years, at least.

Before we get to the what, where, when and how of the Biden foreign and security policy, a statement of the blindingly obvious needs to be entered into the ledger: Biden’s priorities are not in foreign fields, but domestic policy. He must launch, and communicate, a national strategy for tackling Covid-19, which is deepening and worsening according to Dr Anthony Fauci, himself fearing that he might be given the sack in the last blaze of Trump presidential choler.

This must be accompanied by some endeavour to draw the people of the United States together. It is interesting how many of the bien pensant liberal press are discounting this as a feasible option, led by the somewhat perverse editorial meanderings of the New York Times. There is already something in Biden’s post-election speech of the mighty sentence with which Lincoln concluded his second inaugural address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds…”

Finishing the work means swift work on shoring up the economy and putting a seal on the Obama health care programme. These key points in the domestic agenda are explained by Dr Karin Von Hippel in her latest newsletter as Director of RUSI. She worked with and for Biden when she ran the IS/Daesh counter-terrorism department in the National Security Council of the Obama administration.

“The great thing about Biden and where he is now,” she told me in a phone call this week, “is the word that should be written in capital letters: DEPENDABLE. He has told us clearly and consistently what he intends to do.

“He is much more experienced in foreign affairs than Obama. He will put a team together to get on with things, while taking an active interest.”

Tackling the prickly pears, Russia and China, the Biden administration will try to engage wherever possible, but it will not be a return to the status quo ante of the Obama era. With China, there will be active engagement on Covid-19 and a corralling North Korea in its latest flurry of nuclear activity. At the same time, the defence of human rights will be, if anything, more prominent than in the Obama era – so there will be no softening on the mistreatment of the Uyghurs and mashing of  civil and political rights in Hong Kong.

Engagement with Russia will also be on the same premise of international agreements and standards. Gone will be the “Goodfellas” chumminess with Putin. It means, says Von Hippel, that START, the strategic arms treaty which was faltering under Trump, will be renewed for at least two years. This could lead to a new treaty on ballistic nuclear weapons altogether, and it will have to involve China – which ducked out of the most recent START discussions, and very likely all the declared nuclear powers as well – maybe even Israel.

There is likely to be an attempt to revive in new form the INF – Intermediate Nuclear Force – Treaty, a major achievement of Nato-Russian diplomacy. It worked pretty well for more than 20 years and was a casualty to the crazy “frenemy” status Trump accorded to his relations with Putin.

Biden can open a new chapter with Moscow with a following wind, given the serious predicament Putin is in at home and abroad and Russia’s near abroad. Covid is going badly for him, with the provinces highly critical of his lack of strategy. This bodes badly for the Duma elections next year, a showcase beauty contest event in which he is supposed to show off his strength and charisma.

Scanning the near abroad, almost every prospect is unpleasing. Belarus is pitching him into backing an all-time loser in the fake news online propaganda business – Aleksandr Lukashenko. Ukraine and the Donbass rumble on; Crimea is far from a done deal and there is always the prospect of the frozen conflicts of South Ossetia and Georgia as well as Moldova and Transnistria unfreezing and exploding. The three weeks’ war in Nagorno-Karabakh has concluded with Moscow putting boots on the ground in the form of a peacekeeping force to cement the fragile truce. Troops, treasure, and international prestige are committed, and some cases mortgaged, in Syria, Libya, and Lebanon. Russia is overstretched across the Middle East, South West Asia, and North Africa.

Under Biden, commitment to allies will be matched by commitments to international organisations and treaties. We have already had the policy announcement that America will re-join the Paris Climate Agreement. This bodes well for the COP26 summit to be held in Glasgow next autumn. The US will help with a lot of the heavy lifting for the gathering, which will seek to entrench and deepen the Paris norms and goals. It will draw Washington and London together in a common endeavour, along with Italy, which is jointly chairing the conference with the UK.

Two further international arrangements, and Trump’s withdrawal from them, will also be on the “to do” list for the first hundred days: the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, and UN agency support. A pledge has already been given to examine getting back into the arrangement with Iran of 2016, which Trump so spectacularly torpedoed. Again, there will be no turning the clock back but trying to get some working arrangement with Tehran on nuclear development, as well as the growing worry about a ballistic and theatre missiles race, and Iran’s malign influence through Hezbollah and other militias across the arc of the Levant from Lebanon and the Mediterranean to the Gulf.

With the UN agencies, an immediate prospect is for the Biden administration to join up with key Western allies like the UK , Germany and France in re-engaging with the WHO on Covid-19, mitigating the political shenanigans of China. It is also likely that there will be a new commitment to the humanitarian agencies involved with the Palestinian territories. Trump pulled the plug on the Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, which underpinned education for hundreds of thousands of young Palestinians.

The Biden era will mean a reinvigorated approach across the region. Biden has spoken very publicly about his approach to Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the Gulf and Iran. Iran means engagement, but with caution. It will be the same with putatively friendly countries and their leaders, principally Benjamin Netanyahu and Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.

Already, Trump nostalgists are bewailing the trashing of his legacy of bringing peace by disengaging in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Yet I doubt if millions of Kurds, Yazidis, Armenians, Syrians and Iraqis would agree with this assessment, however.

Instead, what comes to mind is the great line of the Roman historian, Tacitus: “they made a desert and called it peace.”  In the latest London Review of Books Patrick Cockburn pens a brilliant depiction of the well of despair and desolation of Syria today – to which Trump’s policies have made no small contribution.

Ultimately, for all the bluster from Team Trump about “ending unnecessary wars”, America is still very much committed across the region.

President-elect Biden now has a golden chance to shake things up in a subtle, but meaningful, way. In Saudi Arabia, there will be no special favours for Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman, given Biden’s outspoken criticism of his record on human rights, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and the war in Yemen. Correspondingly, the soon-to-be President is expected to insist on an end to the isolation of Qatar, home to the biggest US base in the region.

The joker in this regional pack is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his promotion of the new neo-Ottoman Turkey. He is the great alliance and harmony disruptor from Azerbaijan to Syria, the East Mediterranean, Libya and Somalia. More disruption is threatened with his constant efforts to play Russia and Turkey’s Nato allies off against one another – although, not to conspicuous advantage, it appears. Fixing Erdoğan could be a common endeavour for Russia, the USA and European allies.

Equally tricky is the matter of Israel, a matter on which Joe Biden has spent a great deal of time and thought throughout his career. Much, but not all, of the Trump-Kushner policy on the Palestinian question will be halted. The US embassy will not move back from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. But the Kushner plans for accommodation with the Palestinians, a rump dysfunctional statelet with subsidies, will head for the wastepaper bin – primarily because it was unworkable. Biden himself is likely to insist on no more Jewish settlements in the West Bank and on no more talk of Israel annexing large chunks of  Zone C, the most populous area of the occupied West Bank.

Biden believes in a two state solution for Israel and Palestine, and will insist on Palestinians participating fully in future negotiations and discussions – a convention that Kushner blatantly ignored. This is pretty bad news for Benjamin Netanyahu, who anyway has enough trouble on his plate, with a fractious coalition government, a resurgent Covid-19 epidemic, and the matter of his own corruption trial.

Biden has form here. As Vice President, he once accused Netanyahu double dealing with him over pledges to freeze the building of settlements. There will be few in the new White House, I suspect, stretching a hand out to shore up Bibi Netanyahu and his present policies.

This leaves Europe and its institutions, Nato and the EU principally, towards the end of the hundred day to do list. This is not to downgrade their importance – in fact it might be a sign of confidence in the support of old allies. Biden’s America will look for partnership with the EU, still the biggest sophisticated market in the global economy. The same goes for Nato, where the Biden-Harris White House will continue to insist on the allies working and pulling their weight as real partners as the alliance faces new idioms of conflict in cyber, space, and even germ and biological warfare.

In this there is a thinly disguised message for the Johnson government in Downing Street. Britain is only useful to the Biden administration as a working ally, and not as a dependant or supplicant. The slogan “Global Britain” rings hollow if it means the US keeping the UK’s armed services fuelled and tooled up. Instead, Washington wants the UK to take a lead in the realistic tasks of defending its own regional backyard – the North Atlantic and Northern Europe. Further afield, Biden will want the Brits to help the French and Italians with some serious support in the crumbling security of North Africa and the Sahel.

In the recent phone call to Boris Johnson, Joe Biden doubtless was his usual courteous self, but the message should have sounded pretty clear. It was not the suggestion, made by his colleague and friend Barack Obama in 2016, that the UK might find itself drifting to the back of the queue. Instead, it will have served as a reminder that the UK may be lucky to be in the queue at all if it cannot find ways of working with the grain of the new president’s programme rather than against it.