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      The Guardian view on Biden and the world: undoing Trump’s damage | Editorial

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      Donald Trump is a “symptom of malaise, and decline, and decay” in the US, his former top Russia expert Fiona Hill has observed. If some countries have thus seized upon his presidency as an opportunity, many have been horrified.
      Few US elections were watched quite as anxiously as this one around the world. Widespread relief at Joe Biden’s victory is evident. Much foreign policy, unlike domestic, can be enacted by executive order, without the backing of the Senate. At the most basic level, he will be a president who is patient enough to read a report and knowledgeable enough to understand it; who grasps that America cannot prosper alone; who does not lavish praise on dictators while humiliating democratic allies; who listens to his own intelligence services over Vladimir Putin; and who will entrust Middle East policy to seasoned officials rather than his son-in-law.
      Mr Biden has already vowed to undo many of Mr Trump’s decisions, rejoining the Paris climate change agreement and rescinding the order to withdraw from the World Health Organization. He plans to extend the soon-to-expire New Start treaty with Russia – the last arms control agreement standing. Tackling the pandemic is likely to be a priority for his international diplomacy: signing up to Covax – the global initiative to ensure that poorer nations also get a share of coronavirus vaccines – would send a powerful signal. More than 180 countries have already done so, including China.
      The wait to enter the White House has dangers of its own. Other nations may take advantage of US distraction. The president-elect is not receiving intelligence briefings, leaving him in the dark as he prepares for office. There are anxieties that Mr Trump’s replacement of the defence secretary, Mark Esper, and other senior officials with loyalists may not just be payback for public disagreement, but about paving the way for action at home or abroad. Key administration officials have visited Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia since the election to discuss Iran, raising concerns that Mr Trump might yet pursue a scorched-earth policy – perhaps upping the pressure on Tehran so that it hits back, making it far harder to salvage the nuclear deal.
      The Trump administration has been much tougher on Beijing than anticipated, and has taken measures such as imposing sanctions on officials over human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Yet on this relationship, as elsewhere, the president has been both erratic and crudely transactional, making it clear that human rights concerns are barterable for a better deal on trade. The turn against China has also come across the political spectrum, in response to its actions in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and above all internationally. Countering such behaviour will require intelligence, experience (the state department has been hollowed out and politicised) and consistency. Shoring up international alliances is essential. Finding ways to support Taiwan that don’t backfire in the response they trigger from Beijing will be crucial – and extremely hard.
      Critics of Mr Trump have sometimes taken an overly rosy view of US foreign policy before him. Mr Biden is likely, in essence, to pursue the status quo ante. But if Mr Trump recognised that America’s place in the world was changing, he has also sped its decline. That such a man could become president, and that he could govern as he has, has fundamentally diminished US standing. The world has watched in disbelief as the president has allowed coronavirus to ravage his nation – and now as he refuses to concede. Last week, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, attacked Beijing for crushing democracy in Hong Kong – but while opining, with a smirk, that at home there would be “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”.
      If large parts of the world thought the US was malign or at least deeply flawed before, they also thought it mostly functioning and competent, and often enviable. Demolition is an easier task than construction. Mr Biden will undo some of the worst aspects of the last four years, but he cannot erase them from the record. More

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      UK to become WHO's largest state donor with 30% funding increase

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      Boris Johnson will announce a 30% increase in the UK’s funding of the World Health Organization, making the UK the single largest national donor after the US leaves.In an announcement at the UN General Assembly, he will urge it to heal “the ugly rifts” that are damaging the international fight against coronavirus.While Trump has denounced the WHO as corrupt and under China’s influence, Johnson will announce £340m in UK funding over the next four years, a 30% increase. He will also suggest the body be given greater powers to demand reports on how countries are handling a pandemic.The proposals will form part of a British vision, drawn up in conjunction with the Gates Foundation, of how future health pandemics could be better controlled, including “zoonotic labs” capable of identifying potentially dangerous pathogens in animals before they transmit to humans.Johnson’s pre-recorded video, on the final main day of the UN General Assembly and four days after most world leaders have spoken, comes at the end of a week in which China and the US have argued over responsibility for the virus. Both have refused to join the WHO effort to find a global coronavirus vaccine, preferring a national approach.Johnson will say: “After nine months of fighting Covid, the very notion of the international community looks tattered. We know that we cannot continue in this way. Unless we unite and turn our fire against our common foe, we know that everyone will lose.“Now is the time therefore – here at what I devoutly hope will be the first and last ever Zoom UNGA – for humanity to reach across borders and repair these ugly rifts. Here in the UK, the birthplace of Edward Jenner who pioneered the world’s first vaccine, we are determined to do everything in our power to work with our friends across the UN to heal those divisions and to heal the world.”Earlier at the UN this week, he said that the coronavirus “came out of left field, humanity was caught napping, let’s face it, we were woefully underprepared”.The extra UK cash comes ahead of WHO board meeting next week at which a joint Franco-German paper is to be discussed calling for more reliable, larger and less conditional funding of the WHO.The UK contribution will be set at £340m over the next four years, making it the most generous nation state contributor, Downing Street said. While the US is currently the largest funder, if Trump is re-elected president, it will pull out by next summer, taking with it as much as $900m in voluntary and compulsory contributions over two years.Apart from funding increases designed to help multilateral bodies and ensure equitable distribution of a coronavirus vaccine, once it is discovered, Johnson will also call for new pandemic early-warning systems, new global protocols for health crises and the removal of trade barriers.The WHO has set up an internal inquiry into its handling of the pandemic, including China’s role in informing the WHO that the virus was on the loose in the country.Johnson will also use his address to announce significant new investment in Covax, the international coronavirus vaccines procurement pool announced in April. The UK will contribute an initial £71m to secure purchase rights for up to 27m vaccine doses for the UK. He will also announce £500m in aid funding for the Covax advance market commitment, a facility to help 92 of the world’s poorest countries access any coronavirus vaccine at the earliest opportunity. The commitment is also designed to guarantee to private manufacturers that they will have a market for their vaccines, ensuring the necessary research and development takes place. Neither China nor the US have agreed to join Covax, preferring to keep their vaccine research under their own control.Johnson will use his UN speech to call for “a vast expansion of our ability to collect and analyse samples and distribute the findings, using health data-sharing agreements covering every country”.His speech contains no direct criticism of China’s sharing of data at the beginning of the crisis, Downing Street said. More

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

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      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

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      Coronavirus live news: Italy to get €210bn from new EU Covid-19 recovery fund

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      €750bn EU Covid-19 recovery plan agreed in early morning talks; Trump to resume daily briefings; two Brazil ministers test positive
      EU leaders agree spending and €750bn Covid-19 recovery plans
      Global report: Trump says masks ‘patriotic’
      Oxford coronavirus vaccine triggers immune response, trial shows
      France reveals 400-500 new Covid-19 clusters as mask rules tighten
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      WHO's Covid-19 inquiry is a shrewd move in a sea of disinformation

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      In the world of epidemiology it’s sometimes said that pandemics are lived forwards and understood backwards.We encounter them head-on, chaotically, trying to fathom the disease in real time even while trying to mitigate its impact. Lessons generally come later as the evidence accumulates.What’s also true is public health, especially on a global scale, is rarely separable from politics. One of the complicating factors of the recently ended outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was the country’s long history of conflict and the toxic relationship between central government in Kinshasa and the affected population in the country’s east, which led to deep and sometimes violent distrust.One of the most depressing subtexts of the coronavirus pandemic is how these kinds of conflicts are now being writ large as a range of actors, including western ones, have used the crisis to spread disinformation.The past months have been marked by dodgy dossiers leaked to the media and conspiracy theories, pushed by US officials engaged in a struggle for global influence with Beijing, suggesting that the virus was deliberately cooked up in a Chinese lab. More

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      Global report: WHO says 'evidence emerging' of airborne coronavirus spread

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      WHO bows to pressure from scientists about risk from aerosol transmission; Brazil’s Bolsonaro tests positive; Israel health chief resigns Coronavirus latest updatesUS still ‘knee-deep’ in pandemic says FauciBrazilian president Jair Bolsonaro tests positive for Covid-19 Play Video 1:11 ‘Evidence emerging’ of airborne Covid-19 spread, says WHO – video The World Health Organization has acknowledged new […] More

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      in World Politics

      The EU Should Collect Health Data Centrally

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      When the COVID-19 disease began to spread in Europe, France and Germany prohibited the export of medical equipment, while Italy asked in vain for supplies of protective equipment under the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. Neither the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) nor the member states of the EU themselves were aware of […] More