President Biden's foreign policy in half year of Presidency

As President Biden completed six months, some issues were clear in the foreign policy approach.

President Biden's foreign policy in half year of Presidency

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• Rapid pace of Biden's foreign policy: U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has unleashed foreign-policy initiatives at a high pace, since assuming Presidency in January 2021. America reasserted itself globally, and from rejoining multilateral organizations and reinvigorating alliances to donating vaccines, it went the exact other way compared to what Trump did.
• China's first hopes: When U.S. President Joe Biden entered office, China had assumed the new government would move quickly to “reset” U.S.-China relations, scale back trade tariffs, and reduce sanctions imposed over the course of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. They were disappointed. The Biden administration’s Asia policy team rejected Chinese invitations to resume a high-level strategic dialogue and retained virtually the entire sweep of Trump-era restrictions. A full review of U.S.-China strategy spanning diplomatic, security, trade, and technology policy started.

1. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement that the U.S. approach toward Beijing aims to be “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be”, is tell-tale.
2. Only time will tell which parts of this foreign policy are for public rhetoric and declarations, which are delegated to the purely operational domain, and which will be determined by a substantive dialogue with Beijing.
3. China's recent decision to punish Chinese technology company DiDi for its decision to move forward with a U.S. initial public offering signals Chinese President Xi Jinping has concluded a broader financial decoupling from the United States is an acceptable—and perhaps inevitable—consequence of strategic competition. It also reinforces his long-standing quest to make China a “self-reliant” economy in the face of growing U.S. pressure.
4. President Xi is beginning to signal that it is not just the West that can decouple from China, but China also that can start that process. Xi may be signaling that China will become more self-reliant, and accelerate its economic engagement with Europe and other regions of the world through a more accommodating trade and investment policy than in the past.
5. The United States cannot prevail in its strategic competition with China unless it opens its markets fully and reciprocally to the rest of Asia, Europe, and beyond, providing current and future friends and allies with an alternative to the great Chinese global economic juggernaut. That’s why much of the world hasn’t yet followed Washington on China—and continues to hedge.

• Political problems: U.S. President Joe Biden has a major competitive disadvantage in dealing with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The former’s key preoccupations are short term: How can his Democratic Party survive midterm elections in November 2022? The Republicans would slaughter him if he went soft on China. Hence, sensible measures that would serve Washington’s long-term interests are out of reach, including calling off the trade war with China—which has hurt U.S. consumers, workers, and farmers—or joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. But President Xi is free to carry out long-term strategic maneuvers, such as expanding the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to which 139 countries have signed up for, or joining the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), initiated by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and will connect 2.3 billion people to create the most dynamic economic ecosystem in the world.
• ASEAN: Even though ASEAN was born as a pro-U.S. organization in 1967, most Americans are unaware how critical the bloc will be in the U.S.-China contest. In 2000, U.S. trade with ASEAN was $135 billion, more than three times that of China’s $40 billion. Today, China’s trade with ASEAN is more than $641 billion, more than double the United States’ $300 billion. Where trade goes, influence follows. Effectively, the United States has been cutting itself off from East Asia. China is integrating.
• The 21st-century world will be rich and complex: multicivilizational, multipolar, and multilateral. It’s unwise for Biden to base his policies on the notion the world is in a black-and-white contest between democracies and autocracies. Instead, the U.S.-Chinese contest may well be a contest between plutocracy in the United States and meritocracy in China. That’s a contest China can win. Most countries are quietly beginning to accept China will inevitably be the largest economy in the world. Few want to join Washington’s campaign to isolate or cut off Beijing. Within a decade, most countries will be doing more business with China than the United States. If the latter cuts itself off from China, China will not be isolated. Instead, it may be the United States that finds itself isolated.
• Russia-US relationship: When Biden came into office, Russia was a toxic domestic issue in the United States. It had polarized the country during the tenure of former U.S. President Donald Trump because of his unprecedented praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the belief in some U.S. quarters that Russia helped elect Trump. By criticizing Putin and the Kremlin’s policies, Biden succeeded in removing Russia from the domestic agenda and can deal with it as a foreign-policy challenge. Biden has pursued a familiar dual-track policy with Russia: engaging where it is in the United States’ interest and pushing back against adversarial Russian actions.

1. In April, the administration imposed sanctions on Moscow for its 2020 election interference and other malign activities, including cyberattacks. But Biden also met with Putin in Geneva in June after calling him a “worthy adversary.”
2. Three hours of talks produced an agreement to return U.S. and Russian ambassadors to their posts (they had been withdrawn earlier this year amid rising tensions) and to begin a series of talks on strategic stability and cyber issues.
3. Biden gave Putin a list of 16 critical U.S. infrastructure sectors, a cyberattack against any of which would produce retaliation.
4. Climate change, the Artic, Ukraine, and Syria were also on the agenda. In their separate news conferences, the two presidents made their differences clear, but both described the summit as businesslike and pragmatic.

• Europe, divided on China: For Europe, the election of U.S. President Joe Biden was good, because the vagaries of Trump era were replaced by the certainties of the Biden era. Biden quickly rejoined the Paris Agreement and World Health Organization as well as underlined the United States’ commitment to NATO. But two issues are full of tension.

1. The first is how to manage China. U.S. officials stress the growing military, economic, and technological risks emanating from Beijing. Biden has exhorted Americans to “win the 21st century” rather than cede it to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping marked the 100th anniversary of his Communist Party on July 1 by warning that those seeking to “bully or oppress China” will “crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people.”
2. The European Union’s economic health is dependent on strong export performance, and China is now its principal—and growing—export market. Despite increasing disputes over Chinese domestic human rights abuses, Europeans still hope to build a win-win bilateral future. The Europeans’ answer is to stand by Biden rhetorically as they did with recent joint declarations at the G-7, U.S.-EU, and NATO summits, all of which highlighted China for the first time as an issue of joint concern. Their ultimate goal is to buy influence in Washington for a balanced trans-Atlantic approach to China.

• Summary: Clearly, the world is about to witness a conflict of epic proportions, if mishandled.

 

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