US foreign policy

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Why a Biden presidency might not mean a return to pre-Trump foreign relations

      by

      European leaders, desperate for an end to the Trump presidency, are being warned that four years of Joe Biden may present them with new challenges and not a simple restoration of the benign status quo in transatlantic relations prior to 2016.An evolving Biden doctrine about ending “forever wars” and protecting American workers from Chinese competition would require collective military and economic commitments from the EU that it is still ill-equipped to meet, foreign policy specialists have suggested.The overall tenor of the platform, emphasising post-Covid multilateralism and cooperation with fellow liberal democracies, is already welcome in Europe. Biden’s promised end to the institutionalised mayhem, animus towards allies and pandering to authoritarians will be a relief. Competence, reliability and dialogue may not be a high bar to set a presidency, but simple normality would amount to a revival of the idea of the west, such has been the chaos of the past four years.Forsaken multilateral institutions, such as the World Health Organization, would be rejoined, ending the US practice, in the words of Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser Tony Blinken, of simply going awol. “Ninety per cent of life is about showing up,” Blinken told Chatham House, adapting Woody Allen.Biden may seem to personify an old-school nostalgic Atlanticism of the foreign policy establishment. But the Democrat’s draft policy platform released last month reflects the influence of the progressive left, and an effort to absorb the lessons from the shock 2016 defeat.Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy adviser, speaking to the European Council on Foreign Relations podcast, agreed that Biden had moved to the left, saying he had faced mobilisation on foreign policy from progressives in a way that Barack Obama never experienced. As a result, foreign policy is no longer a backwater in democratic politics, and new links between foreign and economic policy are being drawn.Many of the Obama-era foreign policy advisers now clustered around Biden, dismissed as a horror show by some on the left, also deny that they crave simple restoration, saying everything has changed since 2016.Stung by Hillary Clinton’s defeat, they recognise the populists’ claim to have better constructed a foreign policy to help Americans’ daily lives at home. William Burns, a former state department official under Obama and one of Biden’s many advisers, recently wrote: “The wellbeing of the American middle class ought to be the engine that drives our foreign policy. We’re long overdue for a historic course correction at home.”Jeremy Shapiro, a senior researcher with the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR), also says there has been a pressure on Democrats to make their foreign policy more relevant to daily American lives. “There was this sense that in the Obama administration foreign policy was a plaything of the elites divorced from Americans’ daily existence. The change from Obama to Biden is there will be more focus on America.”Without threatening tariff wars, the Biden platform hints at a new scepticism about globalism and free trade. In broader policy terms, Europe will welcome Biden’s commitment to the Paris climate change treaty, and to Nato, “the single most significant military alliance in the history of the world,” as Biden described the organisation to the Munich security conference in 2019. To the relief of Berlin, the withdrawal of US troops from Germany would stop. A more consistent approach to Turkey would be sought. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      US push for global alliance against China hampered by years of 'America first'

      by

      The confrontation between the US and China is gathering pace with each passing week. In the past few days, the Chinese consulate in Houston has been shuttered amid allegations it was a spy hub, and the US mission in the south-western city of Chengdu was closed in retaliation, on similar grounds.The FBI has started arresting Chinese researchers at US universities with suspected links to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), one of whom temporarily took refuge in the consulate in San Francisco, before surrendering.US academics and businessmen are being put under greater scrutiny for ties to Beijing and have been warned to come clean about them under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.The tougher legal moves have been accompanied by a concerted set of speeches assailing China by the Trump administration’s major national security and foreign policy officials, culminating in an address on Thursday by the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, declaring: “The free world must triumph over this new tyranny.”Pompeo travelled to Yorba Linda, California, home of the Richard Nixon presidential library, to declare that the Republican president’s historic opening to China in 1972 had begun an exercise in failure in east-west detente.“The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change in China that President Nixon hoped to induce,” Pompeo said. “The truth is that our policies – and those of other free nations – resurrected China’s failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that fed it.”Some of the grand geopolitical language can be put down to the importance of anti-China sentiment in Donald Trump’s bid to salvage his presidency in the November election. And some of it is inspired by Pompeo’s own efforts, increasingly at the expense of his day job, to position himself for a presidential run in 2024.But much of what Pompeo had to say will have global resonance thanks to Beijing’s rising aggression on multiple fronts around the globe. At the same time as rounding up more than a million Muslim Uighurs in internment camps, the regime has quashed the liberties enjoyed by Hong Kong, taken over disputed atolls, reefs and shoals in the South China Sea and turned them into concrete redoubts, and conducted a dangerous land grab on its border with India.Pompeo argued that combatting the grip of the Chinese Communist party “is the mission of our time”, a declaration likely to get heads nodding in large parts of Asia and the Pacific at least. But his claim, in his next breath, that “America is perfectly positioned to lead it” will ring hollow among many of Washington’s bewildered allies.In their eyes, China has expanded in a vacuum left by the US retreat under the Trump administration into “America First” jingoism and unilateralism. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      US-China tensions escalate after closure of Houston consulate

      by

      Diplomatic tensions between the US and China has escalated sharply with the Trump administration’s closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston to protect “American intellectual property and private information”.A Republican senator claimed that the Texas consulate, which covered several southern states, was an “espionage hub”. China described the closure as “unprecedented” and an “outrageous” escalation, and threatened retaliation.“China strongly condemns such an outrageous and unjustified move, which will sabotage China-US relations,” the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a regular news briefing on Wednesday. “We urge the US to immediately withdraw its erroneous decision, otherwise China will make legitimate and necessary reactions.”Fire services were called to the Houston consulate overnight after smoke was seen rising from the compound. US officials said staff, who were given 72 hours to leave the country, were burning documents in its grounds.It was unclear whether the closure of the consulate was triggered by a new development. During a visit to Denmark on Wednesday, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, suggested the move reflected a US decision to be less tolerant of Chinese behaviour.“President Trump has said ‘enough’. We’re not going to allow this to continue to happen,” Pompeo said. “We are setting out clear expectations for how the Chinese Communist party is going to behave, and when they don’t, we’re going to take actions that protect the American people, protect our security, our national security, and also protect our economy and jobs.”The state department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said: “The United States will not tolerate the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China’s] violations of our sovereignty and intimidation of our people, just as we have not tolerated the PRC’s unfair trade practices, theft of American jobs and other egregious behaviour.”Marco Rubio, the acting chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said: “It’s kind of the central node of a massive spy operation: commercial espionage, defence espionage, also influence agents to try to influence Congress. They use businessmen as fronts in many cases to try to influence members of Congress and other political leaders at the state and local level. And so it’s long overdue that it’d be closed.”The consulate closure came a day after the US accused two Chinese nationals of trying to steal Covid-19 vaccine research, claims that China described as “slander” on Wednesday.This month the FBI director, Christopher Wray, said China was the “greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property and to our economic vitality”. The Chinese foreign ministry accused US authorities of targeting its diplomats in the US, including opening their pouches without permission “multiple times” and confiscating items intended for official use.The ministry said its embassy in the US had received bomb and death threats, the result of the US “fanning hatred against China”. Beijing accused US diplomats in China of “infiltration and interference activities”.“If we compare the two, it is only too evident which is engaged in interference, infiltration and confrontation,” it said.Ties between the two countries have deteriorated further in recent weeks as the US has taken a harder position against China and lobbied its allies to do the same. The closure of the consulate follows a tightening of restrictions for Chinese nationals working in state media in the US, which Beijing claims as the reason for it expelling more than a dozen western journalists over the last few months.On Wednesday Chinese state media suggested the possibility of closing US consulates, posting a poll on Twitter asking users to choose between missions in Hong Kong, Chengdu, Guangzhou and others.China has blamed international criticism of its passage of a harsh and broadly applied national security law in Hong Kong on the US, making the closure of the Hong Kong consulate a possible but escalatory measure.Nick Marro, a China analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said: “In recent weeks we’ve seen some appetite on the Chinese side in trying to de-escalate tensions. Whether that agenda survives these recent developments will be a critical thing to watch.” More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      China calls US 'pathetic' amid reports of visa ban on Communist party members

      by

      China has accused the Trump administration of being “very pathetic” amid reports that Washington is considering a sweeping visa ban on Communist party members.Donald Trump is reportedly reviewing a proposal to refuse entry for all members of China’s ruling party – which encompasses a who’s who of the political and business elite in the world’s most populous nation.Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state, asked about the reports on Fox News, said the administration was looking at “pushing back against the Chinese Communist party”.“We want to make sure we do it in a way that reflects America’s tradition, and there are lots of ideas that are under review by the president and by our team,” he said, without commenting directly.White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said of Trump at a briefing: “He has not ruled out any action with regard to China.”Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying called the reported visa ban idea “very pathetic” for the world’s “strongest power”.“We hope the US will refrain from doing more things that disdain the basic norms governing international relations and undermine its reputation, credibility and status as a major country,” she told reporters.Hu Xijin, editor in chief of the state media title Global Times, described the plan as “crazy and vicious, reflecting the Trump administration has lost rationality”.“The US ruling team is committing a crime ruining the foundation for world peace,” he said.Reaction to news of the proposed ban was mixed among Chinese netizens. Some were supportive of the idea, saying that party members should stay in China anyway out of patriotism, and that ending travel could help stop corruption. Others accused the US of hypocrisy with an attack on political freedom.“The US protests against everything except the pandemic,” wrote one on Weibo. Another said: “The ban on party and family members is basically equivalent to breaking off relations. Aren’t the embassy staff party members?” However by Friday, hashtags relating to news of Hua’s response had been removed from search functions.Trump has been ramping up pressure on China, repeatedly blaming the Asian power for not preventing the coronavirus pandemic, which is taking a heavy toll in the United States months ahead of elections.Last week the US state department said it would refuse visas for three senior Chinese officials over abuses in the Xinjiang region, where rights groups say more than one million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims are incarcerated.But a sweeping ban on members of the Chinese Communist party would be an extraordinary undertaking, requiring US authorities to step up screening of the approximately 3 million Chinese people who visited each year before the pandemic disrupted travel.Chinese state media last year said that more than 90 million people belonged to the party, with 35% of them “workers and peasants.”For many Chinese, membership in the 99-year-old party is seen as vital for advancement. Many observers were startled in 2018 to learn that Jack Ma, the billionaire businessman behind e-commerce titan Alibaba, belonged to the party.Additional reporting by Pei Lin Wu. More