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      Existential challenges from China, climate and more demand new US industrial policy | Robert Reich

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      America is about to revive an idea that was left for dead decades ago. It’s called industrial policy and it’s at the heart of Joe Biden’s plans to restructure the US economy.When industrial policy was last debated, in the 1980s, critics recoiled from government “picking winners”. But times have changed. Devastating climate change, a deadly pandemic and the rise of China as a technological powerhouse require an active government pushing the private sector to achieve public purposes.The dirty little secret is that the US already has an industrial policy, but one that’s focused on pumping up profits with industry-specific subsidies, tax loopholes and credits, bailouts and tariffs. The practical choice isn’t whether to have an industrial policy but whether it meets society’s needs or those of politically powerful industries.Consider energy. The fossil fuel industry has accumulated “billions of dollars in subsidies, loopholes and special foreign tax credits”, in Biden’s words. He intends to eliminate these and shift to non-carbon energy by strengthening the nation’s electrical grid, creating a new “clean electricity standard” that will force utilities to end carbon emissions by 2035 and providing research support and tax credits for clean energy.It’s a sensible 180-degree shift of industrial policy.A proper industrial policy requires that industries receiving public benefits act in the public interestThe old industrial policy for the automobile industry consisted largely of bailouts – of Chrysler in 1979 and General Motors and Chrysler in 2008.Biden intends to shift away from gas-powered cars entirely and invest $174bn in companies making electric vehicles. He’ll also create 500,000 new charging stations.This also makes sense. Notwithstanding the success of Tesla, which received $2.44bn in government subsidies before becoming profitable, the switch to electric vehicles still needs pump priming.Internet service providers have been subsidized by the states and the federal government and federal regulators have allowed them to consolidate into a few giants. But they’ve dragged their feet on upgrading copper networks with fiber, some 30 million Americans still lack access to high-speed broadband, and the US has among the world’s highest prices for internet service.Biden intends to invest $100bn to extend high-speed broadband coverage. He also threatens to “hold providers accountable” for their sky-high prices – suggesting either price controls or antitrust enforcement.I hope he follows through. A proper industrial policy requires that industries receiving public benefits act in the public interest.The pharmaceutical industry exemplifies the old industrial policy at its worst. Big pharma’s basic research has been subsidized through the National Institutes of Health. Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act bankroll much of its production costs. The industry has barred Americans from buying drugs from abroad. Yet Americans pay among the highest drug prices in the world.Biden intends to invest an additional $30bn to reduce the risk of future pandemics – replenishing the national stockpile of vaccines and therapeutics, accelerating the timeline for drug development and boosting domestic production of pharmaceutical ingredients currently made overseas.That’s a good start but he must insist on a more basic and long-overdue quid pro quo from big pharma: allow government to use its bargaining power to restrain drug prices.A case in point: the US government paid in advance for hundreds of millions of doses of multiple Covid-19 vaccines. The appropriate quid pro quo here is to temporarily waive patents so manufacturers around the world can quickly ramp up. Americans can’t be safe until most of the rest of the world is inoculated.Some of Biden’s emerging industrial policy is coming in response to China. Last week’s annual intelligence report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warns that Beijing threatens American leadership in an array of emerging technologies.Expect more subsidies for supercomputers, advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence and other technologies linked to national security. These are likely to be embedded in Biden’s whopping $715bn defense budget – larger even than Trump’s last defense budget.Here again, it’s old industrial policy versus new. The new should focus on cutting-edge breakthroughs and not be frittered away on pointless projects like the F35 fighter jet. And it should meet human needs rather than add to an overstuffed arsenal.Biden’s restructuring of the American economy is necessary. America’s old industrial policy was stifling innovation and gouging taxpayers and consumers. The challenges ahead demand a very different economy.But Biden’s new industrial policy must avoid capture by the industries that dominated the old. He needs to be clear about its aims and the expected response from the private sector, and to reframe the debate so it’s not whether government should “pick winners” but what kind industrial policy will help the US and much of the world win. More

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      Biden faces pressure to end practice of rewarding allies with plum foreign posts

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      Joe Biden is coming under pressure from former state department career staff to match the diversity of his cabinet and senior administration positions in foreign postings – and to reform the longstanding practice in the US of rewarding political supporters with plum ambassadorial jobs.More than three months into his first term, Biden’s foreign diplomatic slate remains open, with only one top ambassador – Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to the United Nations, nominated and confirmed.Appointments, typically made soon after a new president is inaugurated, have taken longer to fill under Biden in part because of a balancing act between three competing, interconnected pools of potential appointees: diplomatic staff who endured the chaos of Trump who feel they should be rewarded; returning Obama staff; and Biden political supporters and donors.But in recent days, the White House has signaled it is ready to act after vacating the posts of all but one of Donald Trump’s political appointees – US ambassador to Moscow John Sullivan – and restocking the state department at the level of under secretary, deputy and assistant secretaries. At state, those staff typically run policy and administration in a department of 13,000 foreign service, 11,000 civil service and 45,000 local employees on a $52bn budget.With Biden’s soft power leanings illustrated by his commitment to pull troops from Afghanistan by 11 September, the burden of US foreign policy will fall on a foreign service corps that was undermined by Trump’s unpredictable approach to diplomacy.First order, says one seasoned ambassador, has been to restore the function and morale to the department; second, to reform the balance between political and career staff appointments.“It’s clear they’re going to appoint some political ambassadors but it won’t be as many and they’re going to be more interested in quality,” said Ronald E Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, who notes that Trump appointed only two career officers out of 50 appointments at assistant secretary level or above.“The administration is trying to rebuild American diplomacy – but not from the ground up because they already have good career officers,” Neumann said. “The job is to bring them in and use them.”In so doing, the administration has to choose between officials who served during Obama and Clinton administration and existing state department staff that endured serving under the turmoil of Trump’s four years in office.“There’s a certain amount on nail-biting among career officials who stuck it out through the Trump administration who feel they need to recognized and not just bringing back career people,” Neumann added.But the administration’s willingness to follow US political custom to reward non-foreign service allies with foreign appointments has become clearer in recent days.On Monday, Politico reported that Cindy McCain, widow of the Republican senator John McCain, is undergoing vetting to be nominated for US ambassador to the UN World Food Programme, a mission based in Rome.McCain, who had been rumored to be headed to London, gave Biden an electoral boost in the critical state of Arizona with her endorsement of the Democrat over Trump – helping Biden to become the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry the state since Bill Clinton 25 years ago. Others rumored to be in line for a foreign posting include the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is considered too controversial for a domestic administration post.Pressure to conform to a pattern of diversity hiring followed by the administration in Washington, once subtle, is now overt. As it stands, 60% of US diplomatic posts are filled by men and 40% by women. In an 9 April letter, a group of 30 female former ambassadors and national security leaders urged Biden to prioritize gender parity.“Our vision of gender parity means that a man or a woman has an equal chance, at all times, of ascending to each ambassadorship. This should be true across all geographic regions, in posts both large and small,” the Leadership Council for Women in National Security (LCWINS) said in the letter.The letter concluded: “We hope you will pay attention to growing allies within the US government who will also focus upon the diversity America’s representatives to the world should demonstrate.”Piper Campbell, former ambassador to Mongolia and the US mission to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), later told PBS that the timing of the letter was to influence the ongoing selection process. “That’s something that we hope can still be impacted,” she said.But pressure, too, to dismantle longstanding pay-for-play operations is also upon the administration. “Handing out ambassadorships to favored campaign donors is a sordid bipartisan tradition in Washington,” wrote Matt Ford in the New Republic in February, adding: “President Joe Biden has a chance to make a sharp break from this unseemly past.”While political appointments typically number one-third, Trump took the practice to the next level. The American Foreign Service Association found that 43.5% of Trump’s choices were political appointees, compared with 30% for Barack Obama, 31% for George W Bush, and 28% for Bill Clinton.Trump spared some of his nominees even cursory knowledge of the distant lands they would be serving their country in. Fourteen of Trump’s ambassadorships to Canada and the European Union went to people who donated at least $1m to his inaugural committee.Some were tasked with unusual diplomatic errands to run. After his appointment to Britain, Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets and a Republican fundraiser, was reportedly asked to campaign for the British Open to be held at Trump’s Scottish golf resort, Turnberry.Following complaints, Johnson was in August last year found by a state department watchdog to have “sometimes made inappropriate or insensitive comments” and directed to watch a video on workplace harassment.One simply never made it to their post. Mark Burkhalter, a Georgia real estate developer, had his nomination for ambassador to Norway returned after he failed to disclose his participation in circulating a racist flyer during a Georgia political contest.While the practice of rewarding supporters with ambassadorships was super-sized by Trump, the Biden administration’s desire to create daylight between it and its predecessor could help to usher in reforms of practice. Echoing Neuman, Axios recently reported that the White House is “tempering the ambassadorial expectations of his big-dollar donors”.According to Sarah Bryner, research director at Center for Responsive Politics, “Trump was a deviation from the norm with patronage appointments” and the Biden administration is likely to reduce but not eliminate the practice.“While the whole concept of patronage is problematic, the thing about ambassadorships is that they’re a pretty low-cost way to reward supporters and allies by placing them in foreign positions that are unlikely to have serious negative consequences,” Bryner told the Guardian.But, Bryner said, “there has been a lot of pressure put on Biden to restore morale in the state department and restore America’s image abroad, so that might result in him being a little bit more cautious. Does that mean we’re not going to see Rahm Emanuel, or other Democratic donors and supporters appointed? No, but there’s still a lot of pressure in this space.” More

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      The Guardian view on the Afghanistan withdrawal: an unwinnable war | Editorial

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      Britain’s former prime minister Harold Macmillan is said to have told colleagues that the first law of politics should be “never invade Afghanistan”. It was a lesson that imperial Britain had learned the hard way, following three separate casualty-strewn incursions in the 19th and 20th centuries. After 11 September 2001, when al-Qaida radicals, based in Afghanistan and protected by the Taliban government, successfully attacked New York and Washington, the lesson was quickly forgotten.Instead, the United States, backed by Britain and Nato, launched a retaliatory campaign to destroy al-Qaida and overthrow the Taliban. After spectacular initial success, marked by the unexpected collapse of Kabul and massive bombing of the al-Qaida presence in the eastern mountains, the military campaign became overcommitted and, in the end, even faced defeat. Western ambitions were long on idealised visions of the postwar order, but short on a grasp of regional realities and military capabilities. The Taliban regrouped and rearmed. Long attritional years of civil conflict followed. This week, almost 20 years in, Joe Biden has decided America has at last had enough of an unwon and unwinnable war. He is bringing the troops home. America’s allies, including Britain, will now follow the US through the exit door.In his televised address this week, Mr Biden announced that nearly 10,000 US and Nato troops – including 750 from the UK – will start pulling out within weeks. All of them will be gone in time for the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks later this year. The president’s words were a valediction over what, in the end and in spite of its achievements, has been a failed campaign. “We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal and expecting a different result,” the president said. He is surely right. Donald Trump had reached a similar conclusion from a different, more isolationist standpoint, although, unlike Mr Biden, without consulting his allies first. None of that will stop congressional Republicans denouncing Mr Biden’s decision as reckless.The US president’s announcement exposes some of the limits of 21st-century American power. It is true that, while the US has been engaged in Afghanistan, education has blossomed across much of the country, including for girls, who were largely excluded by the Taliban. Life expectancy, now at 65, has risen each year. But these gains remain fragile and their future is highly uncertain. When the Russian-backed Afghan regime collapsed in the early 1990s, the Taliban were able to take back control quickly. The same thing may happen after America’s departure 30 years later. Peace talks are continuing, but the Taliban will now have less reason to treat them seriously.Mr Biden’s decision marks the death of a particular kind of American hubris. New forms of warfare, increasingly technologically ambitious and involving fewer ground troops than in earlier wars such as Vietnam, were championed two decades ago by the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They have not achieved the goals that he claimed. Winning this kind of war without major troop commitments has not worked. Afghan opinion has been more divided and is marked by greater hostility to the US than the simplistic western assumptions of 2001 ever allowed. Regional hostilities have not been overcome. American public opinion has also become increasingly hostile towards committing to the conflicts. The nation-building claims that were made about Afghanistan and, later, Iraq have been exposed as unachievable. A lot of this was predicted and predictable when the conflict was launched. But there is very little satisfaction to be drawn from seeing it come to pass amid continuing uncertainty and insecurity for so many Afghan men and women. More

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      Ramsey Clark, attorney general who represented Saddam Hussein, dies at 93

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      Ramsey Clark, who was attorney general in the Johnson administration before becoming an outspoken activist for unpopular causes and a harsh critic of US policy, has died. He was 93.Clark, whose father, Tom Clark, was attorney general and a supreme court justice, died on Friday at his Manhattan home, a family member announced.After serving in President Lyndon B Johnson’s cabinet in 1967 and 1968, Clark set up a private law practice in New York in which he championed civil rights, fought racism and the death penalty and represented declared foes of the US including former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. He also defended former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.The New York civil rights attorney Ron Kuby, who worked with Clark on numerous cases, said his death was “very, very sad in a season of losses”.“The progressive legal community has lost its elder dean and statesman,” Kuby said. “Over many generations, Ramsey Clark was a principled voice, conscience and a fighter for civil and human rights.”Clark defended antiwar activists. In the court of public opinion, he charged the US with militarism and arrogance, starting with the Vietnam war and continuing with Grenada, Libya, Panama and the Gulf war. When Clark visited Iraq after Operation Desert Storm and returned to accuse the US of war crimes, Newsweek dubbed him the Jane Fonda of the Gulf war.Clark said he only wanted the US to live up to its ideals. “If you don’t insist on your government obeying the law, then what right do you have to demand it of others?” he said.The lanky, soft-spoken Texan went to Washington in 1961 to work in John F Kennedy’s justice department. He was 39 when Johnson made him attorney general in 1967, the second-youngest ever – Robert Kennedy had been 36.Supreme court justice Tom Clark, Harry Truman’s attorney general before he joined the high court in 1949, swore in his son, then retired to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.Ramsey Clark said his work drew him into the civil rights revolution, which he called “the noblest quest of the American people in our time”. He also maintained opposition to the death penalty and wiretapping, defended the right of dissent and criticized FBI director J Edgar Hoover when no one else dared take him on.As Johnson’s attorney general, Clark had the job of prosecuting Dr Benjamin Spock for counseling Vietnam-era youths to resist the draft, a position with which he sympathized.“We won the case, that was the worst part,” he said years later.The Dallas-born Clark, who was in the US Marine corps in 1945 and 1946, moved his family to New York in 1970 and set up a pro bono-oriented practice. He said he and his partners were limiting their annual personal incomes to $50,000, a figure he did not always achieve.“Money’s not an interest of mine,” he said, but at the same time he was meeting steep medical bills for his daughter, Ronda, who was born with severe disabilities. He and his wife, Georgia, who were married in 1949, also had a son, Thomas, a lawyer.Clark took one shot at elective office, losing a 1976 Democratic Senate primary to Daniel P Moynihan.Clark’s client list included such peace and disarmament activists as the Harrisburg seven and the Plowshares eight. Abroad, he represented dissidents in Iran, Chile, the Philippines and Taiwan, and skyjackers in the Soviet Union.He was an advocate for Soviet and Syrian Jews but outraged many Jews over other clients. He defended a Nazi prison camp guard fighting extradition and the Palestine Liberation Organization in a lawsuit over the killing of a cruise ship passenger by hijackers.There were usually two to three dozen active cases on Clark’s legal calendar, and about 100 more in the background. Capital punishment cases were a staple.“We talk about civil liberties,” he said. “We have the largest prison population per capita on Earth. The world’s greatest jailer is the freest country on Earth?” More

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      Biden restores $200m in US aid to Palestinians slashed by Trump

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      The US will restore more than $200m (£145m) in aid to Palestinians, reversing massive funding cuts under the Trump administration that left humanitarian groups scrambling to keep people from plunging into poverty.
      “[We] plan to restart US economic, development, and humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people,” the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in a statement.
      The aid includes $75m in economic and development funds for the occupied West Bank and Gaza, which will provide food and clean water to Palestinians and help small businesses. A further $150m will be provided to the United Nations relief and works agency for Palestine refugees in the near east (UNRWA), a UN body that supports more than 5 million Palestinian refugees across the region.
      After Donald Trump’s row with the Palestinian leadership, President Joe Biden has sought to restart Washington’s flailing efforts to push for a two-state resolution for the Israel-Palestinian crisis, and restoring the aid is part of that. In his statement, Blinken said US foreign assistance “serves important US interests and values”.
      “The United States is committed to advancing prosperity, security, and freedom for both Israelis and Palestinians in tangible ways in the immediate term, which is important in its own right, but also as a means to advance towards a negotiated two-state solution,” he said.
      Palestinian leaders and the UN welcomed the resumption of aid. Israel, however, criticised the decision to restore funds to UNRWA, a body it has long claimed is a bloated, flawed group.
      “We believe that this UN agency for so-called refugees should not exist in its current format,” said Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan. Pro-Israel US lawmakers joined the country in opposition to the aid and said they would scrutinise it in Congress.
      From 2018, Trump gradually cut virtually all US money to Palestinian aid projects after the Palestinian leadership accused him of being biased towards Israel and refused to talk. The US president accused Palestinians of lacking “appreciation or respect”.
      The former president cancelled more than $200m in economic aid, including $25m earmarked for underfunded East Jerusalem hospitals that have suffered during the Covid-19 crisis. Trump’s cuts to UNRWA, which also serves Palestinian refugees in war-stricken Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, was described by the agency’s then head as “the biggest and most severe” funding crisis since the body was created in 1949. The US was previously UNRWA’s biggest donor.

      To outcry from aid workers, leaked emails suggested the move may have partly been a political tactic to weaken the Palestinian leadership. Those emails alleged that Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner had argued that “ending the assistance outright could strengthen his negotiating hand” to push Palestinians to accept their blueprint for an Israeli-Palestinian deal.
      The cuts were decried as catastrophic for Palestinians’ ability to provide basic healthcare, schooling and sanitation, including by prominent Israeli establishment figures.
      Last April, as the coronavirus pandemic hit, Trump’s government announced it would send money to Palestinians. The $5m one-off donation was roughly 1% of the amount Washington provided a year before Trump began slashing aid. More

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      ‘Momentous error’: Italian businessman mistakenly blacklisted by Trump to sue

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      A small business owner in Italy is preparing to sue the US Treasury after accidentally being put on a sanctions blacklist before Donald Trump left the presidency.Alessandro Bazzoni, who owns a graphic design company in Sardinia, has been unable to trade since 19 January, when his business was slapped with sanctions as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on blacklisted Venezuelan crude oil.In a case of mistaken identity, the US Treasury erroneously blacklisted Bazzoni’s graphic design company, SeriGraphicLab, along with a restaurant and pizzeria in Verona owned by another businessman called Alessandro Bazzoni. Both were removed from the blacklist on 31 March. But while the restaurant owner’s bank account has been reactivated, the blunder led to the Sardinian businessman’s account being closed.“It was a momentous error on their part, and one that is having serious implications as it is preventing me from working,” he said.Bazzoni, who works independently, was able to withdraw the money that was in his account but can no longer trade because, as per Italian law, he needs a bank account in order to receive payments from clients. The absence of a bank account also means he cannot access the financial support he is entitled to receive as part of the Italian government’s Covid-19 relief scheme.“I have to go to another bank to see if I can open an account there,” he said. “But for now, I cannot sufficiently operate my business, so much so I have started to look for other jobs.”Bazzoni claims the US Treasury did not notify him about being on the sanctions blacklist, nor did it apologise for the mistake.“The only notification I got was from my bank telling me my account was closing,” he said.He has made a legal complaint to the Italian police, with the aim of suing the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a unit of the US Treasury.In 2019, Trump’s government imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), in an attempt to force the resignation of the president, Nicolás Maduro, whom the US accused of corruption, human rights violations and rigging his 2018 re-election. On his last day in office, Trump sanctioned a network of oil firms and individuals tied to PDVSA.A US Treasury official told Reuters that the department realised the companies were owned by different individuals than the Bazzoni it blacklisted in January.The Guardian has contacted the US Treasury for a response to the Sardinian businessman’s case. “First and foremost, I want an apology,” said Bazzoni. More

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      Antony Blinken says the US will 'stand up for human rights everywhere'

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      The United States will speak out about human rights everywhere including in allies and at home, secretary of state Antony Blinken has vowed, turning a page from Donald Trump as he bemoaned deteriorations around the world.Presenting the state department’s first human rights report under President Joe Biden, the new top US diplomat took some of his most pointed, yet still veiled, swipes at the approach of the Trump administration.“Some have argued that it’s not worth it for the US to speak up forcefully for human rights – or that we should highlight abuse only in select countries, and only in a way that directly advances our national interests,” Blinken told reporters in clear reference to Trump’s approach.“But those people miss the point. Standing up for human rights everywhere is in America’s interests,” he said.“And the Biden-Harris administration will stand against human rights abuses wherever they occur, regardless of whether the perpetrators are adversaries or partners.”Blinken ordered the return of assessments in the annual report on countries’ records on access to reproductive health, which were removed under the staunchly anti-abortion Trump administration.Blinken also denounced a commission of his predecessor Mike Pompeo that aimed to redefine the US approach to human rights by giving preference to private property and religious freedom while downplaying reproductive and LGBTQ rights.During Pompeo’s time in office, the state department was aggressive in opposing references to reproductive and gender rights in UN and other multilateral documents.“There is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others,” Blinken said.In another shift in tone from Trump, Blinken said the United States acknowledged its own challenges, including “systemic racism.”“That’s what separates our democracy from autocracies: our ability and willingness to confront our own shortcomings out in the open, to pursue that more perfect union.”Blinken voiced alarm over abuses around the world including in China, again speaking of “genocide” being committed against the Uighur community.The report estimated that more than one million Uighurs and other members of mostly Muslim communities had been rounded up in internment camps in the western region of Xinjiang and that another two million are subjected to re-education training each day.“The trend lines on human rights continue to move in the wrong direction. We see evidence of that in every region of the world,” Blinken said.He said the Biden administration was prioritising coordination with allies, pointing to recent joint efforts over Xinjiang, China’s clampdown in Hong Kong and Russia’s alleged poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny.Blinken also voiced alarm over the Myanmar military’s deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, attacks on civilians in Syria and a campaign in Ethiopia’s Tigray that he has previously called ethnic cleansing.The report, written in dry, factual language, did not spare longstanding US allies.It pointed to allegations of unlawful killings and torture in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, quoting human rights groups that said Egypt is holding between 20,000 and 60,000 people chiefly due to their political beliefs.Biden earlier declassified US intelligence that found that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman authorised the gruesome killing of US-based writer Jamal Khashoggi.While the human rights report remained intact under Trump, the previous administration argued that rights were of lesser importance than other concerns with allies such as Saudi Arabia – a major oil producer and purchaser of US weapons that backed Trump’s hawkish line against Iran, whose record was also heavily scrutinized in the report.The latest report also detailed incidents in India under prime minister Narendra Modi, an increasingly close US ally.It quoted non-governmental groups as pointing to the use in India of “torture, mistreatment and arbitrary detention to obtain forced or false confessions” and quoted journalists as assessing that “press freedom declined” including through physical harassment of journalists, pressure on owners and frivolous lawsuits. More

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      How Joe Biden Looks at the World

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      In his first foreign policy speech as president, delivered at the State Department on February 4, 2021, Joe Biden laid out his vision of America’s engagement with the world. In its conventional combination of the stick of military power and the carrot of diplomacy, Biden’s address heralded a return to the foreign policy status quo of the “a la carte multilateralism” that has characterized the US global approach since the end of the Cold War.

      As Biden explained, US engagement is based, first and foremost, on US global power, “our inexhaustible source of strength” and “abiding advantage.” That power has historically consisted of military force, economic pressure and diplomatic engagement. Rhetorically at least, Biden has favored a recalibration away from a reliance on the military, insisting that force will be a “tool of last resort.”

      Biden’s America Is the New “Middle Kingdom”

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      In practice, however, Biden has adopted a more ambiguous position toward military power. Reflecting both budgetary concerns and public skepticism of America’s recent record of military interventions, the new president has promised a global posture review of the US military footprint overseas, which would likely lead to a redeployment rather than a radical reduction of American military power.

      Biden’s early actions have reflected this cautious approach, ending US support for offensive military operations in the Saudi-led war in Yemen but freezing some of the troop withdrawals his predecessor had instituted at the end of his term. Looking to the future, the president has promised to phase out America’s “forever wars” but has also pledged to focus more on pushing back against other great powers, namely Russia and China.

      Because the February 4 speech took place in front of an audience of diplomats, Biden unsurprisingly focused most of his remarks not on the hard power wielded by the Pentagon, but the “smart power” of diplomacy. The president pledged to renew alliance relationships that “atrophied over the past few years of neglect and, I would argue, abuse.” At the same time, he stressed the importance of diplomacy even when “engaging our adversaries and our competitors.”

      MAGA Lite?

      In what marked perhaps the most significant break with the foreign policy of his immediate predecessor, Biden promised to restore the United States as a full participant, if not a leader, in working multilaterally to solve global problems. He identified those problems as global warming, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, cybersecurity, the refugee crisis, attacks on vulnerable minorities, racial inequality and the persistence of authoritarianism. Although the president mentioned a few global institutions and agreements, notably the World Health Organization (WHO) and the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the emphasis was clearly on the US reclaiming global leadership rather than leading “from behind,” as the Obama administration famously said about its involvement in efforts against former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In establishing the tone of his administration’s foreign policy, Biden didn’t enunciate a new doctrine. Rather, in what might be called an approach of “multilateral restoration,” he sought to repudiate the inconsistent, unilateral and anti-global positions of former President Donald Trump, while placing his own administration in the comfortable, pre-Trump foreign policy mainstream that European and Asian allies have come to expect and that is embodied, for instance, in the Franco-German-led Alliance for Multilateralism.

      Given Biden’s role as vice-president in the Obama administration and his appointment to high-level positions of many policymakers from that period — Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, climate czar John Kerry, UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell — many observers believe that his presidency will represent Obama 2.0, a resumption of the globally aware, generally predictable, but periodically unorthodox foreign policy of the earlier administration.

      The world of 2021, however, is very different from the one that Barack Obama and Joe Biden navigated across their two terms in office. New global problems have emerged such as COVID-19, while others have become more urgent, such as the climate crisis. The four years of Trump’s presidency weakened certain traditional elements of statecraft, such as arms control.

      Given the persistence of American exceptionalism under Biden, it’s difficult not to view his foreign policy approach as MAGA Lite: making America great again with the assistance of foreign partners rather than over their objections. As Steven Blockmans of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels puts it, “In all but name, the rallying cry of America First is here to stay,” reflected in the Biden administration’s prioritization of domestic investments over new trade deals and his expansion of Buy American provisions in federal procurement. Whether represented as America First, MAGA Lite or even liberal internationalism, the conventional US approach to multilateralism has been instrumental, as a means to the end of preserving US global power.

      Executive Orders

      At the same time, the inconsistency of US foreign policy over the years — seesawing back and forth from Bill Clinton’s modified multilateralism to George W. Bush’s aggressive unilateralism to Obama’s cautious multilateralism to Trump’s anti-globalist posturing — has led both allies and adversaries alike to hedge their bets by investing their political capital either in other alliances or in more self-reliant economic and security strategies. The most dramatic examples of this hedging have been China’s establishment of rival multilateral economic institutions and the European Union’s investment into autonomous military structures.

      The Biden administration’s rapid use of executive orders to reverse Trump’s positions — for instance, bringing the United States back into the WHO and the Paris climate agreement — has been welcomed in many of the world’s capitals. But it also confirms what many in the international policymaking community have long viewed as America’s overly volatile foreign policy. The new administration’s reversals of Trump policies extend to immigration, as Biden has canceled the “Muslim travel ban” and ended funding for the largely unbuilt wall on the border with Mexico. He quickly hit rewind on the environmental deregulations of the Trump administration and the previous president’s approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. In addition, the Biden team has taken steps to reenter the 2016 Iran nuclear deal, has revived arms control negotiations with Russia and plans at least to mitigate the impact of the trade sanctions against China.

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      But if Trump could reverse Obama’s positions on all these matters, and Biden with a stroke of the pen could do the same to Trump’s reversals, who’s to say that the next president in 2024 will not perform the same U-turns?

      Indeed, as it looks to engage more deeply on these issues, the Biden administration faces a number of obstacles to realizing even its modest multilateral restoration: congressional opposition, corporate lobbying, public indifference or hostility, the mistrust of allies and bureaucratic inertia. It also must deal with a set of interlocking crises on the home front, from the pandemic and the resulting contraction of the US economy to crumbling infrastructure, endemic racial inequality, political polarization and rising poverty rates.

      Finally, the administration must reckon with challenges within the multilateral project itself, including a democratic deficit and the problem of non-compliance. But on certain key issues, such as global health and environmentalism, progressives will have an opportunity to push US policy in the direction of greater equitable international engagement during the Biden years. On a case-by-case basis rather than through a transformative agenda, then, the Biden administration might alter — or be pushed to alter — the way the United States engages the world.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More