News: Will Biden's foreign policy be one of restoration, reformation, or revolution?

2020年12月15日 05:09

When I spoke last week with Gérard Araud, France's ambassador in Washington from 2014 to 2019, I expected to hear about the world's reaction to President-elect Joe Biden and his Cabinet. My aim was to understand the decisions global leaders faced and the effects they 'd have on the world.

But in the course of our conversation, Araud made me realize the most important decision wouldn't be made in some far-off capital. It'd be made in Washington, DC, almost as soon as Biden walks into the White House.

“The question is what will his foreign policy be: Restoration, reformation, or revolution?” the retired diplomat asked me. “That will be one of the main tensions of his earliest days. Will Biden be able to articulate a new foreign policy, and what would it mean?” (He then tweeted out this thought after we hung up.)

It’s the single biggest foreign policy choice Biden faces heading into his presidency. Opting for “revolution” can almost certainly be discarded — this is Biden we’re talking about, not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. But deciding between “restoration,” reverting to traditional statecraft after a four-year diversion, and “reformation,” changing the old ways of America’s global relations to tackle today’s problems, will set the new team’s course for at least a year, if not longer.

Most suspect Biden will select the restoration option. He talked on the campaign trail about putting America back on its post-1945 path — reassuming global leadership, but working with allies to promote democracy, free trade, and human rights — and for decades has championed such a worldview. Plus, with an economic crisis to curb and a pandemic to quash, dusting off the old playbook consumes less effort than rewriting it.

“You can’t divorce the president from the moment or who he or she follows,” said Elizabeth Saunders, a US foreign policy expert at Georgetown University. “After Trump, I think all goes back to basics.”

But a back-to-the-future operation likely won’t satisfy a newer generation of experts who say we face new problems that past practice can’t fully solve. They’re pushing Biden’s team to update US foreign policy’s software.

The single biggest foreign policy decision Joe Biden faces
Will Biden’s foreign policy be one of restoration, reformation, or revolution?

The old way wasn’t working for us. That’s true of domestic policy, and it’s true of foreign policy,” said Desirée Cormier Smith, senior policy adviser at Open Society Foundations, a global advocacy group. “I don’t think it’s radical, as we restore our alliances and credibility, that we reform how we engage in the world and repurpose for the world of 2021, which is not the same world of 2017 when [Biden] left office as vice president.”

Biden thus faces a fork in the road, and he’ll have to decide whether to opt for the path most traveled or blaze a new trail. Whichever he chooses will help define America’s place in the world at this moment in history. For better or for worse, that’s Biden’s charge now.

“We know who he is very well,” Araud said. “But who will he be?”

Biden the restorationist
In August, I asked Derek Chollet, a former top Pentagon official in the Obama administration and now a Biden transition team member, how the then-Democratic nominee planned to deal with the world he might inherit. His answer was instructive: “He’s looking at an across-the-board restoration project.”

Since the end of World War II, Democrats and Republicans have pursued largely similar approaches to US foreign policy. Presidents from both parties have used US power to underwrite and maintain what’s called the “liberal international order,” which basically means a set of economic and political rules and values that major democratic powers believe help the world function.

The US never did this out of the goodness of its heart. Promoting free trade and liberal democracy was meant to provide America with markets to sell goods to and countries with which to build alliances against adversaries. It was never a perfect system, and the US made many, many errors along the way. But overall, that grand strategy helped the US maintain its position as the world’s preeminent power.

That, in a nutshell, is the world Biden wants to restore and protect.

“For the past seven decades, the choices we have made — particularly the United States and our allies in Europe — have steered our world down a clear path,” Biden said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in January 2017, just three days before leaving office as vice president.

“In recent years it has become evident that the consensus upholding this system is facing increasing pressures, from within and from without,” he continued. “It’s imperative that we act urgently to defend the liberal international order.”

The best way to do that, Biden contended, is to maintain and bolster America’s system of alliances that form the heart of that order.

He hit that theme in a July 2019 foreign policy address at the City University of New York. “The Biden foreign policy agenda will place America back at the head of the table, working with our allies and partners — to mobilize global action on global threats , Especially those unique to our century, ”he said.

この記事が気に入ったらサポートをしてみませんか？