The end of 'America First': How Biden says he will re-engage with the world

Those who have known President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. for decades say they expect him to move carefully, providing reassurance with a few big symbolic acts.

President-elect Joe Biden makes no secret of the speed with which he plans to bury "America First" as a guiding principle of the nation's foreign policy.

He says he will re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, assuming the Iranians are willing to reverse course and observe its limits.

He would sign up for another five years of the only surviving nuclear arms treaty with Russia and double down on US. commitments to NATO after four years of threats from President Donald Trump to withdraw from the alliance that guided the West through the Cold War.

At the same time, Biden says he will make Russia "pay a price" for what he says have been disruptions and attempts to influence elections — including his own.

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But mostly, Biden said in a statement to The New York Times, he wants to bring an end to a slogan that came to define a United States that built walls and made working with allies an afterthought — and, in Biden's view, undermined any chance of forging a common international approach to fighting a pandemic that has cost more than 1.2 million lives.

"Tragically, the one place Donald Trump has made 'America First' is his failed response to the coronavirus: We're 4 per cent of the world's population, yet have had 20 per cent of the deaths," Biden said days before the election. "On top of Trump embracing the world's autocrats and poking his finger in the eye of our democratic allies, that's another reason respect for American leadership is in free fall."

But it is far easier to promise to return to the largely internationalist approach of the post-World War II era than it is to execute one after four years of global withdrawal and during a pandemic that has reinforced nationalist instincts. The world does not look remotely as it did when Biden last engaged it from the White House four years ago. Power vacuums have been created, and filled, often by China. Democracies have retreated. The race for a vaccine has created new rivalries.

So while foreign allies may find Biden reassuring — and smiled when they heard him say in a town-hall meeting that "'America First' has made America alone" — they also concede that they may never fully trust that the United States will not lurch back to building walls.

In interviews in the past several weeks, Biden's top advisers began to outline a restoration that might be called the Great Undoing, an effort to reverse course on Trump's aggressive attempt to withdraw to US borders.

"Whether we like it or not, the world simply does not organise itself," said Antony J. Blinken, Biden's longtime national security adviser. "Until the Trump administration, in Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States did a lot of that organizing, and we made some mistakes along the way, for sure." Now, however, the United States has discovered what happens "when some other country tries to take our place or, maybe even worse, no one does, and you end up with a vacuum that is filled by bad events."

Blinken acknowledged that for those allies — or opponents of Trump — looking to reset the clock to noon on January 20, 2017, "it's not going to happen."

Those who have known Biden for decades say they expect him to move carefully, providing reassurance with a few big symbolic acts, starting with a return to the Paris climate accord in the first days of his administration. But substantive rebuilding of U.S. power will proceed far more slowly.

"He'll inherit a situation which both gives him enormous latitude and, oddly, constrains him," said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a longtime friend of Biden's. "Clearly, what Trump did by executive order can be undone by executive order."

But "any act that requires Senate approach or any new use of force, absent a clear provocation, will be pretty much off the table," he added.

At 77, Biden has his own back-to-the-future vision of how to dispense with "America First": "This is the time to tap the strength and audacity that took us to victory in two world wars and brought down the Iron Curtain," he wrote in Foreign Affairs in March.

President Trump met with leaders of NATO countries in Herfordshire, England, last year. Biden would like to double down on American commitments to NATO. Photo / Al Drago, The New York Times

Yet in a campaign in which foreign policy was rarely mentioned, Biden was never pressed on how the current iteration of superpower competition differs from what he remembers from early in his political career.

He never stated what kind of "price" he had in mind for President Vladimir Putin of Russia to pay, though one of his longtime foreign policy advisers, Jake Sullivan, offered a bit of detail. Just before Election Day, he said that Biden was willing to impose "substantial and lasting costs on perpetrators of the Russian interference," which could include financial sanctions, asset freezes, counter cyberattacks and, "potentially, the exposure of corruption by the leaders of foreign countries."

That would signify a hardening in US policy. But it would also involve steps that the Obama administration considered taking in its last six months, when Biden was vice president, and never carried out.

The sharp change on Russia offers a glimpse of the detailed planning that Biden's transition team, organised late last spring, has engaged in to reverse Trump's approach to the world. It has built a foreign policy team of formal and informal advisers, largely drawn from midlevel and senior Obama administration officials who are poised to return. There are timelines for opening negotiations, re-entering treaties and early summit meetings.

But their plans show some notable breaks from the Obama administration's strategy. Biden is clearly rethinking positions he took in the Senate and in the White House.

The most vivid example, officials say, will come in rethinking China strategy. His own advisers concede that in the Obama years, Biden and his national security team underestimated the speed with which President Xi Jinping of China would crack down on dissent at home and use the combination of its 5G networks and its Belt and Road Initiative to challenge US influence.

"Neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted," Kurt Campbell, who served as the assistant secretary of state for Asia, and Ely Ratner, one of Biden's deputy national security advisers, wrote in a Foreign Affairs article in 2018 that reflected this shift. "Diplomatic and commercial engagement have not brought political and economic openness. Neither U.S. military power nor regional balancing has stopped Beijing from seeking to displace core components of the US-led system."

China is just one arena — though probably the most important — where Biden's long-held views will come into first contact with new realities.

Afghanistan and the use of US force

Robert Gates, the defense secretary who served both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, described Biden as "impossible not to like" because he was "funny, profane and humorously self-aware of his motormouth." But Gates also famously declared that Biden "has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."

That assessment included Biden's view on Afghanistan — where he argued, in the early days of the Obama administration in 2009, for a minimal force focused on a counterterrorism mission. Gates later recalled in his memoir that Biden was convinced that the military was trying to put the squeeze on the president to send more troops for a war the vice president thought was politically unsustainable.

Biden argued during the early days of the Obama administration for a minimal force focused on a counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan. Photo / Erin Schaff, The New York Times

Biden was overruled — by Obama, who nearly doubled the force size in Afghanistan in 2009 before moving to a drawdown.

But what was once a setback for Biden has now become something of a political asset: Trump's effort to cast him as an advocate of "endless wars" fell flat. Biden, according to Sullivan, "wants to convert our presence to a counterterrorism capability" aimed at protecting the United States by keeping al-Qaida forces or the Islamic State group from establishing a base in Afghanistan.

"It would be limited and targeted," Sullivan said. "That's where he was in 2009, and that is where he is today."

Confronting Russia

In the Cold War, Democrats were often portrayed as the party of appeasement to Moscow. Biden is the first Democrat to turn the tables: He is neither dismissive of the Russian threat as Obama was when he debated Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in 2012, nor is he eager to bring a big red "reset" button to Moscow, as Hillary Clinton did in her opening days as secretary of state.

In the campaign, Biden seized on the US intelligence assessment that Russia preferred Trump, telling reporters in Nevada that "Putin knows me, and I know him, and he doesn't want me to be president." He is probably right: After details of the extent of the Russian interference in 2016 became clear, followed by Trump's unwillingness to confront Putin, Democrats have become the party of Russia hawks.

For most of the campaign, Biden assailed Trump for "cosying up to dictators" and describing how, if elected, he was prepared to punish Russia.

Joe Biden with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in 2011. Biden's sharp change on Russia offers a glimpse of his transition team's planning to reverse Trump's approach to the world. Photo / AP

As president, Biden will have to deal with a Russia whose arsenal includes 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons and a raft of tactical nuclear weapons that it has been deploying freely, even before Trump exited the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

How would Biden end the downward spiral? He would start with a five-year extension of New START, Blinken said, because the treaty lapses 16 days after inauguration. Then he would seek to expand the treaty to other types of weapons and perhaps more countries. And he would play on Putin's growing economic fragility.

"We will deter, and impose costs for, Mr. Putin's meddling and aggression," Blinken said. "But there's a flip side" to dealing with Moscow, he added. Putin is "looking to relieve Russia's growing dependence on China," Blinken said, which has left him in "not a very comfortable position."

That suggests the Biden administration could try to use the suspicions that Moscow and Beijing have of each other to split the two superpowers — just as President Richard Nixon used it, in reverse, to win his opening with China nearly 50 years ago.

On Iran, a resurgent crisis

"Oh, goddamn," Biden fumed in the Situation Room in the summer of 2010, according to participants in the meeting, as news began to leak that a highly classified effort by the United States and Israel to destroy Iran's nuclear program with a cyberweapon — later called "Stuxnet'' — was about to be exposed because the computer code was being replicated around the world. "It's got to be the Israelis. They went too far."

A decade later, that effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear effort appears to be the birth of a new age of conflict, one in which Biden was a key player. He favoured the covert effort, because he was looking for any way to slow Iran's progress without risking war in the Middle East. He later told colleagues that he believed the covert program helped bring the country to the negotiating table for what became the Iran nuclear deal five years later.

Now Biden says the first step with Iran is to restore the status quo — which means re-entering the deal if Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is willing to return to production limits announced in 2015. But it won't be that simple. The Iranians have indicated there will be a higher price to pay for Trump's breach. And some of the key restrictions on Iran begin to lift soon: The first phase of an arms embargo expired in October, clearing the way for the Russians and the Chinese to begin resuming sales. And there will soon be a new Iranian president, with unknown effects on potential talks.

Biden's aides say that returning to the deal that Trump exited "shifts the burden" back on Tehran.

"If Iran decides it's not going to come back into compliance," Blinken said, "we're in a much stronger position to elicit support from allies and partners" who are now blaming Trump for starting the crisis by rejecting an agreement the United States had already made.

The China challenge

In 2012, Biden was the host when Xi came to Washington. The vice president praised the guest from Beijing as a rising reformer who was "prepared to show another side of the Chinese leadership." Biden was among those to celebrate China's inevitable but "peaceful rise," followed by assurance that trying to contain its power was a fool's errand.

By this year, he had revised his view. "This is a guy who is a thug," Biden said.

So during the campaign, he went after Trump for "fake toughness" and argued that "Trump lost a trade war that he started." What he meant was that the Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods were ultimately underwritten by American taxpayers in the form of government subsidies to compensate farmers and others who lost sales.

Biden has said little about how he would push back. And even if he settles the long-running arguments over agricultural goods and the theft of intellectual property by Beijing, Biden will face challenges never discussed when Xi was visiting eight years ago: managing technological inroads by firms like Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, and TikTok, the app that has seized the imaginations and phones of 100 million Americans.

"This is a guy who is a thug," Biden has said about President Xi Jinping of China. Photo / AP

Biden has suggested that the Trump crackdowns might continue — though surrounded by more skilful diplomacy to bring European and other allies on board.

"God only knows what they're doing with information they're picking up off of here," he said of the Chinese. "So as president, I will go into it very deeply. I'll get the cyberexperts in with me to give me what is the best solution to deal with it."

Complicating the issue is Biden's insistence that, unlike Trump, he will put values back at the centre of foreign policy, including how to approach the U.S.-China relationship, a milder echo of Bill Clinton's pledge in the 1992 race to take on "the butchers of Beijing."

Presumably that means making China pay a price for Xi's controls on dissent, including the national security laws that led to detention camps in Xinjiang, arrests of dissidents in Hong Kong and the ouster of foreign journalists who were the last bastion of independent reporting in China.

Written by: David E. Sanger
Photographs by: Kriston Jae Bethel, Jim Wilson and Erin Schaff
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES