Tag Archive for: Joe Biden

Ending the forever war in Afghanistan

Speaking in Kabul on 14 February on the 32nd anniversary of the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the country’s president, Ashraf Ghani, made an important distinction. The civil war that devastated Afghanistan after the withdrawal was caused not by the departure of Soviet troops, but by the failure to formulate a viable plan for Afghanistan’s future. As the United States considers its own exit from the country, it should heed that lesson.

After withdrawing its troops in 1989, the Soviet Union continued to provide financial support to the communist-nationalist regime, led by President Mohammad Najibullah. But, lacking domestic legitimacy, Najibullah’s regime quickly collapsed when Russia withdrew its financial support in 1992, triggering the civil war. Then, in 1996, the Taliban gained control of Kabul and, ultimately, the country.

The Taliban remained in power until 2001, when a US-led invasion—spurred by the 9/11 terrorist attacks—ended its rule. But last February, US President Donald Trump’s administration reached a deal with the Taliban intended to end the nearly 20-year-long war: the US and its NATO allies would withdraw all troops by May 2021 if the Taliban fulfilled certain commitments, including cutting ties with terrorist groups and reducing violence.

The Taliban would also have to engage in meaningful negotiations with the Afghan government, which was not involved in the deal. The Trump administration apparently hoped that an intra-Afghan peace agreement would materialise by the designated withdrawal date, ending the fighting and minimising the risk that Afghanistan would become a haven for terrorists.

That hasn’t happened. While US force levels are down to around 2,000 troops, fighting in Afghanistan hasn’t decreased. On the contrary, a US watchdog agency reports that the Taliban carried out more attacks in the last quarter of 2020 than during the same period in 2019. Moreover, the latest intra-Afghan talks, which began in Doha in September, have produced virtually no results.

It seems that the Taliban’s plan was to keep fighting until US troops left, at which point they might be able to secure a victory in the long war. Now, however, they face the possibility that US troops won’t leave nearly as soon as expected. President Joe Biden’s administration has announced that it is reviewing the deal to determine whether the Taliban is ‘living up to its commitments’.

The Biden administration must also decide what to do about America’s NATO allies, which together have substantially more forces in Afghanistan than the US does. And—as the post-Soviet experience indicates—it must devise a plan for influencing the situation in the country and region after the withdrawal.

The challenge is formidable. Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest countries. Today, the Afghan state’s income amounts to little more than a third of what the US pays only to sustain its various security forces, to say nothing of US aid to the civilian sector (which, to be sure, amounts to less than half Europe’s contributions). In fact, Afghanistan has depended on outside support to sustain its statehood since Russia and Britain played their ‘Great Game’ in the 19th century.

As it stands, the US seems to be leaning towards maintaining some sort of security presence, focused on fighting the terrorists of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, beyond the May deadline. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has advocated this approach.

But there are risks. The Taliban could reject this solution, leading to an intensification of fighting and renewed attacks on international forces. Zalmay Khalilzad, the US special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, is most likely already working to assess this risk.

The Taliban’s acceptance of a continued security presence may depend on progress in the intra-Afghan talks, though no one seems to have a clear vision for a power-sharing agreement. The gap between today’s Islamic Republic and the Taliban’s desired Islamic Emirate is wide, and narrowing it will require a recalibration of the diplomatic process concerning Afghanistan.

To that end, regional powers—including Iran, Russia and China—should be engaged in all talks about the country’s future, with one or two also taking a more active role in facilitating the intra-Afghan political dialogue. In this process, managing the dynamics between India and Pakistan, for which developments in Afghanistan hold profound national security implications, will undoubtedly emerge as a key challenge. Indeed, at the moment Russia is taking the initiative in this regard.

The pressure in the US and elsewhere to end the ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan is understandable. But, as Ghani wisely warned, simply withdrawing international forces is unlikely to yield that result. To avoid a new spiral of violence, we must first determine what will come after.

Policy, Guns and Money: QAnon primer, protests in Russia and geopolitics

In the first episode of ASPI’s Policy, Guns and Money podcast for 2021, Jacob Wallis and Ariel Bogle of ASPI’s International Policy Centre provide a primer on QAnon. They discuss the conspiracy theory’s origins, its translation from an online phenomenon into violence and the ensuing real-world consequences that encompass everything from the US Capitol riots to Australian policy responses.

Next, The Strategist’s national security editor Anastasia Kapetas speaks with Russia expert and ANU visiting fellow Kyle Wilson about the unfolding situation in Russia, including the arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the widespread protests across the country. They discuss the similarities between China’s and Russia’s media censorship, Putin’s strategy when it comes to Navalny, how resilient this protest movement will be and whether it poses a real threat to Putin’s power.

Finally, ASPI’s Peter Jennings and Michael Shoebridge talk about some of the big developments that happened in the world while the podcast was on hiatus—the storming of the US Capitol, Joe Biden’s inauguration, a military coup in Myanmar, the persistent challenge of Covid-19 and growing tensions around Taiwan—and what they will be watching closely in the year ahead.

Where to for Biden on the bitter fruits of Trump’s trade wars?

Former US president Donald Trump’s unfinished and unsuccessful trade wars with both China and some of America’s allies will be hard for his successor Joe Biden to untangle. Biden won’t want to lower unilaterally the Trump-era tariffs on either China or US allies without getting something in return.

On China, he wants to build a united stand with allies to force changes in Beijing’s economic policy. ‘The best China strategy, I think, is one which gets every one of our—or at least what used to be our—allies on the same page. It’s going to be a major priority for me in the opening weeks of my presidency to try to get us back on the same page with our allies’, he told the New York Times in December.

Biden indicated that the Trump administration’s tariffs on China would remain in place and said, ‘I’m not going to prejudice my options.’

During the era of Trump unilateralism, allies have drifted apart on China. The difficulty of achieving a united stand was exposed in the closing days of 2020 when Biden’s nominee for national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, took to Twitter to make a plea for ‘early consultation with our European partners on our common concerns about China’s economic practices’.

A few days later, the EU handed China a diplomatic coup by sealing a far-reaching bilateral agreement to underwrite both European investment in China and Chinese investment in Europe.

South Korea’s government is preparing for a state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping, the first such trip since the bilateral tensions over the US deployment of a US anti-missile system in 2017. Two days before Biden’s inauguration, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in declared that his nation wouldn’t be taking sides in any dispute between China and the US. ‘South Korea–US and South Korea–China relations are all equally important for us’, he said.

Japan’s new prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, is likely to support a strong US security stance towards China, but Japan’s economic integration with China may make it wary of joining a US campaign on Chinese human rights and labour practices.

In Australia, the government has consistently rejected China’s claims that it does the bidding of Washington. Even as it deals with China’s assault on its export markets, the Australian government wouldn’t want to be seen to be the first to join a Biden campaign on Chinese trade practices.

In the meantime, US businesses are left wearing the cost of Trump’s tariffs of between 7.5% and 25% on around US$360 billion of imports from China. The US Tax Foundation estimates that these tariffs represent a US$71 billion tax on the US business sector. US companies also face retaliatory tariffs from China, curbing their sales.

The trade deal with China that Trump struck at the beginning of 2020 has failed to deliver the promised increase in US exports, with China’s purchases of US goods falling short of agreed targets by more than 40%. The US trade deficit with China, which Trump vowed to eliminate, has increased since the trade war began—the 2020 deficit was the highest since 2015.

US businesses are also suffering from increased steel and aluminium costs as a result of tariffs that Trump imposed, invoking national security exemptions, on Canada, Mexico, the European Union, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The Tax Foundation estimates that these tariffs are raising US$6.4 billion in tax; however, their impact on the input costs for US manufacturers would be greater, as the tariffs have allowed US steel and aluminium makers to lift their prices. Some US manufacturers, including motorcycle maker Harley Davidson, have shifted operations offshore to avoid the tariffs.

While the Trump tariffs on steel and aluminium were seen as an abuse of national security provisions, reversing them would bring howls from the US steel and aluminium manufacturers, which have benefited from the protection. Biden’s electoral victories in the steel states of Pennsylvania and Michigan will make him wary of any unilateral withdrawal of protection.

The best opportunity for the US to build a coalition around its vision for global trade was squandered with Trump’s decision to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership as one of his first actions in 2017. The TPP had been negotiated by the Obama administration as a ‘best practice’ trade agreement setting standards on issues like intellectual property protection and competitive neutrality for state-owned businesses that would have been too demanding for China to meet.

There has been speculation that the Biden administration will seek to rejoin the now-renamed Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Biden has argued that the US must engage with global trade negotiations. In his key foreign policy essay ahead of the election, he said:

The wrong thing to do is to put our heads in the sand and say no more trade deals. Countries will trade with or without the United States. The question is, who writes the rules that govern trade? Who will make sure they protect workers, the environment, transparency, and middle-class wages? The United States, not China, should be leading that effort.

However, he has also said that he would seek bipartisan support for labour and environmental provisions to be included in any trade deals that the US concludes and would not be making trade negotiations an early priority.

CPTPP members such as Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam would resist the addition of the labour and environmental provisions that the Democrats succeeded in inserting into the reworked North American trade agreement during the Trump negotiations.

While the Biden administration would prefer to defer embarking on trade negotiations, it will be forced to declare its intentions early because its authority to conclude trade deals independently of the US Congress is due to expire in July. The trade negotiating authority is a six-year provision, last concluded by the Obama administration. The Biden administration will have to make a case for renewing the authority for a further six years, and it’s possible that Congress may seek to curb the unilateral power of the US executive over trade that was exploited by Trump.

From a global perspective, the Biden administration’s highest trade priority should be the revitalisation of the World Trade Organization. The Trump administration’s refusal to nominate judges to its appeal panel brought the WTO’s crucial dispute-settlement function to a halt while aspects of its trade wars were in open violation of WTO rules.

More fundamentally, the WTO has been unable to advance negotiations for further deregulation of global trade for the last 25 years. Since at least the Obama administration, the US has been chafing at the failure of the WTO to tackle subsidies provided to state-owned enterprises, particularly in China, while it also grumbles about the developing-country status claimed by China and a range of other middle-income countries (including South Korea) which confers some (relatively paltry) trade advantages.

However, developing countries contend that the US imposes excessive restrictions on the use of intellectual property through onerous trademark, copyright and patent provisions that they claim represent barriers to their growth.

These are the earliest days in the Biden administration, but there was no sign ahead of the election of either a strategy or the political will to cut through that thicket.

How will Biden intervene abroad?

American foreign policy tends to oscillate between inward and outward orientations. President George W. Bush was an interventionist; his successor, Barack Obama, less so. And Donald Trump was mostly non-interventionist. What should we expect from Joe Biden?

In 1821, John Quincy Adams famously stated that the United States ‘does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’ But America also has a long interventionist tradition. Even a self-proclaimed realist like Theodore Roosevelt argued that in extreme cases of abuse of human rights, intervention ‘may be justifiable and proper’. John F. Kennedy called for Americans to ask what they could do not only for their country, but for the world.

Since the Cold War’s end, the US has been involved in seven wars and military interventions, none directly related to great-power competition. George W. Bush’s 2006 national security strategy proclaimed a goal of freedom embodied in a global community of democracies.

Moreover, liberal and humanitarian intervention isn’t a new or uniquely American temptation. Victorian Britain had debates about using force to end slavery, Belgium’s atrocities in the Congo and Ottoman repression of Balkan minorities long before Woodrow Wilson entered World War I with his aim to make the world safe for democracy. So, Biden’s problem is not unprecedented.

What actions should the US take that cross borders? Since 1945, the United Nations charter has limited the legitimate use of force to self-defence or actions authorised by the Security Council (where the US and four other permanent members have a veto). Realists argue that intervention can be justified if it prevents disruption of the balance of power upon which order depends. Liberals and cosmopolitans argue that intervention can be justified to counter a prior intervention, to prevent genocide and for humanitarian reasons.

In practice, these principles are often combined in odd ways. In Vietnam, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson argued that the US military was countering North Vietnamese intervention in South Vietnam. But the Vietnamese saw themselves as one nation that had been artificially divided on the basis of realist Cold War balance-of-power considerations. Today, the US has good relations with Vietnam.

In the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush used force to expel Iraq’s forces from Kuwait to preserve the regional balance of power, but he did so using the liberal mechanism of a UN collective security resolution. He considered himself a realist and refused to intervene to stop the shelling of civilians in Sarajevo, but after devastating images of starving Somalis appeared on US television in December 1992, he deployed troops for a humanitarian intervention in Mogadishu. The policy failed spectacularly, with the death of 18 US soldiers under Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, in October 1993—an experience that inhibited US efforts to stop the Rwandan genocide six months later.

Because foreign policy is usually a lower priority than domestic issues, the American public tends towards a basic realism. Elite opinion is often more interventionist than that of the mass public, leading some critics to argue that the elite is more liberal than the public.

Nonetheless, polls also show public support for international organisations, multilateral action, human rights and humanitarian assistance. As I show in Do morals matter? Presidents and foreign policy from FDR to Trump, no one mental map fits all circumstances. There’s little reason to expect the public to have a single consistent view.

For example, in the second Gulf War, American motives for intervention were mixed. International relations specialists have debated whether the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a realist or a liberal intervention. Some key figures in George W. Bush’s administration such as Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were realists concerned about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and the local balance of power; but ‘neo-conservatives’ in the administration (who were often ex-liberals) stressed the promotion of democracy and the need to maintain American hegemony.

Outside the administration, some liberals supported the war because of Saddam’s abominable human rights record, but opposed Bush for failing to obtain the institutional support of the UN, as his father had in the first Gulf War.

Broadly defined, intervention refers to actions that influence the domestic affairs of another sovereign state, and they can range from broadcasts, economic aid and support for opposition parties to blockades, cyberattacks, drone strikes and military invasion. From a moral point of view, the degree of coercion involved is important in terms of restricting local choice and rights.

Moreover, from a practical point of view, military intervention is a risky instrument. It looks simple to use, but it rarely is. Unintended consequences abound, implying the need for prudent leadership.

Obama used force in Libya, but not in Syria. Both Trump and Hillary Clinton said in 2016 that the US had a responsibility to prevent mass casualties in Syria, but neither advocated military intervention. And there was remarkably little discussion of foreign policy in the 2020 election.

Some liberals argued that the promotion of democracy is America’s duty, but there’s an enormous difference between democracy promotion by coercive and non-coercive means. Voice of America broadcasts and the National Endowment for Democracy cross international borders in a very different manner than the 82nd Airborne Division does.

In terms of consequences, the means are often as important as the ends. Where will Biden land on the spectrum of interventions intended to promote security, democracy and human rights? We may find an encouraging clue in his history of good judgement and contextual intelligence. But we must also bear in mind that sometimes surprises occur, and events take control.

The Middle East challenges awaiting Biden

It’s been a decade since the popular uprising known as the Arab Spring swept several Arab countries in pursuit of democratic societal transformations. Yet, of all the affected states, only Tunisia has remained on that path. The rest of them have either returned to authoritarianism or become mired in bloody conflicts. Although the forces of the status quo prevailed and the uprisings failed to achieve their objectives, they marked a significant energising of the Arab peoples that vibrates to this date. The grievances underpinning the uprisings have continued to pose serious challenges to the Arab regimes and, for that matter, the Middle East. The incoming Joe Biden administration in the US will also need to grapple with the fall-out.

Commencing in late 2010, the Arab Spring brought initial successes that promised the dawn of a new reformist era. It caused the overthrow of dictatorial rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and, with the help of a NATO intervention, Libya. It also triggered a popular upheaval in Syria and Bahrain and put on notice the rest of the Arab states, especially in the Gulf.

The uprisings were spontaneous, lacking in leadership and organisational strength. Yet they reflected the yearning of most across the Arab world to free themselves from authoritarianism and to build popularly mandated and participatory political systems as a prerequisite for better living conditions. The US administration of Barack Obama initially voiced moral and political backing for them. But it all proved to be short-lived. The forces of the status quo in the region, led by the military in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, struck back and Washington yielded to their position. After all, these actors served as the pillars of America’s traditional influence in the Middle East.

After Egypt—a pivotal state in the Arab domain—returned to military rule in 2013 following the overthrow of the elected Islamist government of the Muslim Brotherhood a year earlier, the tide began to turn in favour of the status quo forces to suppress the uprisings. The oil-rich conservative Arab kingdoms in the Gulf prevented the Arab Spring from metastasising into their domains and launched a massive clean-up of opposition forces, whether inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood or any other undesirable ideological strand.

Syria, Yemen and Libya, and Bahrain to some extent, were drowned in protracted conflicts with competing regional and extra-regional actors’ involvement for regional geopolitical gains. In Syria, Iran, joined later by Russia, propped up the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, and in Yemen, Saudi Arabia led an Arab coalition to shape the destiny of that country vis-à-vis Iranian influence, not to mention involvement of various regional actors, including Turkey, in Libya.

The power vacuums that were generated in the conflict zones provided ample space and oxygen to allow violent extremist forces, such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda, to fill the gaps. As America and its allies from one side, and Russia and its backers from the opposite side, sought to combat these forces, and protect and expand their interests, the Middle East entered a new, very complex phase, in addition to what had already marred the region traditionally.

However, nothing fuelled the regional conflicts and rivalries more than the impulsive and authoritarian populist US President Donald Trump’s policy actions. His support for the conservative forces and the forging of an anti-Iranian Israeli–Arab alliance at the cost of the Palestinians’ demand for freedom and independence crystallised the regional division between America’s ‘friends’ and its ‘adversaries’.

In the midst of all this, the Arab Spring lost its velocity, but did not die: public protests have persistently broken out across the region—in some countries with more intensity, as in the case of Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan, than others. These protests have echoed the same demands as the instigators of the Arab Spring: democratic rights and freedoms, political pluralism, social and economic equity and justice, and improved living conditions, free of corruption, human rights violations and foreign interference.

Biden will have to deal with an Arab world and a wider Middle East that are in a mess. It will be a daunting task to balance the new administration’s emphasis on liberalist and human rights values as well as America’s overall geopolitical and strategic interests against the entrenched prevailing forces of the status quo. To play a constructive and stabilising role is going to be one of the administration’s main foreign policy challenges.

Yet all is not lost. Biden can expect to have a favourable window of opportunity to be reasonably assertive in promoting a reformist and stable Middle East along the lines demanded by the Arab Spring. The regional regimes, including those of Israel and Iran, which are domestically troubled by compounding political and pandemic-induced crises, know that the divisive era of Trump has ended and that they may have little choice but to respond positively to Biden’s reasonable engagement for reform and cooperation in the region.

Although the Middle East may not figure at the top of the Biden administration’s priorities, given the range of pressing domestic and foreign policy issues confronting it, a calmer Middle East can help him focus more on those issues.

Trump talked the talk, but Biden may prove tougher on China

Is President-elect Joe Biden’s administration set to go soft on China?

That seems to be the view of officials in outgoing President Donald Trump’s administration, who in recent days and weeks have been implementing a flurry of rule changes and policy pronouncements aimed at tying Biden’s hands on China.

In rapid succession, the Trump administration has targeted dozens of Chinese companies, including chipmakers and drone manufacturers, for the US sanction blacklist; banned eight Chinese software applications, including the popular Alipay and WeChat Pay mobile payment apps; lifted restrictions on high-level diplomatic contacts between America and Taiwan; and sanctioned more officials in response to Beijing’s rollback of freedoms in Hong Kong.

The Biden ‘soft on China’ trope is also being pushed by Trump’s Republican Party enablers in the Congress. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for example, in a typically classless tweet after last year’s election, disparaged Biden’s cabinet picks, saying the former vice president was ‘surrounding himself with panda huggers who will only reinforce his instincts to go soft on China’.

Not to be outdone, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, for four years another Trump enabler, tweeted his own critique of Biden’s foreign policy team, charging they ‘will be polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline. I support American greatness. And I have no interest in returning to the “normal” that left us dependent on China.’

Perhaps more oddly, the view of Biden as potentially more pliant to Beijing has also come from some local Hong Kong and Asian human rights activists and pro-democracy advocates. They see the former vice president as too eager to revert to the status quo of ‘normal’ relations between Washington and Beijing in pursuit of loftier goals, like cooperation on climate change.

These activists have praised Trump’s tough talk, his trade war and his seeming willingness to disrupt the so-called Washington consensus that prioritised constructive engagement with Beijing. Finally, they believed, an American president who talked of ‘America first’ was holding China to account.

But was Trump really all that tough on China, beyond the bombast and the tweets? And is Biden really about to reverse course and begin cosying up to Beijing?

First on Trump: as is often the case, his rhetoric and self-aggrandising boasts mask a record of scant accomplishment. And even his rhetoric until recently wasn’t all that tough.

Almost from the time he was elected in November 2016, Trump fawned over ‘my good friend Xi Jinping’, sparing the Chinese leader from his normal Twitter broadsides even while attacking the heads of longtime US allies like Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In 2017, Xi flattered Trump with a rare tour and dinner inside the Forbidden City. Trump was so taken by his VIP treatment in China that he even changed his Twitter banner to a photograph of himself and first lady Melania Trump being treated by Xi and his wife to the opera.

Until the early months of 2020, even after the start of the coronavirus pandemic that he blamed on China, Trump continued to offer fulsome praise for Xi personally. ‘He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus’, Trump tweeted in February last year. ‘Great discipline is taking place in China, as Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.’

Trump’s singular focus during his term was to secure a new trade deal with China, and he was willing to forgo criticism of China’s human rights record to achieve it. According to former national security adviser John Bolton and other insiders, Trump openly endorsed Xi’s crackdown on Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and the building of concentration camps there, and he largely ignored the crushing of the protest movement in Hong Kong. Those were irritants for Trump’s pursuit of a trade pact.

Trump did manage to sign a narrow ‘phase one’ trade agreement with China in January last year, but the impact has been limited, partly due to the pandemic, the global economic slowdown and the fall China’s import demand. Between January and November, China purchased some US$82 billion in American goods, far below the level promised in the deal. And a ‘phase two’ trade pact is nowhere in sight.

The fear that Biden will hark back to the Barack Obama administration’s days of doing business as usual with China also seems badly misplaced, and about as exaggerated as Trump’s boasts of his own accomplishments.

First, that view ignores how the American foreign policy consensus on China has shifted in the past several years, a shift that actually started during Obama’s second term.

Obama in 2009, with Hillary Clinton as his first-term secretary of state, seemed intent on trying to publicly downplay human rights concerns and to bring China into the fold as a global ‘stakeholder’—the phrase at the time—on big issues like climate change, nuclear proliferation, joint exploration of space and stabilisation of the global financial system. China’s response at the time was simply, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

For example, when the Obama team tried to persuade China to use its leverage to get Iran and North Korea to forgo their nuclear weapons programs, Beijing was decidedly uninterested. As one foreign affairs official in Beijing told me at the time, ‘When we hear a country has nuclear weapons, our only question is, are they pointing them at us?’

During Obama’s second term, around the time Xi ascended to power, the US was already adopting a tougher line, seeing China’s build-up in the South China Sea as a major military challenge. Obama was already trying to form an alliance to keep China in check, including through the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement that excluded China and that Trump later disavowed. More recently, China has joined the 15-nation Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and this time it is the US on the outside looking in.

Biden will have to decide whether to negotiate to join either or both of those pacts.

The shift in thinking on China has been spelled out most starkly by Kurt Campbell, one of the architects of the Obama administration’s ‘pivot’ to Asia, who has been tapped to lead Biden’s Asia policy. In several recent articles, Campbell has explained the existential challenge China poses to America, and the altered view in Washington.

‘Although Washington remains bitterly divided on many issues, a rare area of apparent consensus across the political aisle has emerged around the need to pursue a more robust approach when it comes to China’, Campbell wrote in one piece last year.

In a seminal 2018 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, Campbell laid out how the entire foreign policy establishment wrongly believed that engagement with Beijing would eventually make China more liberal, open and less repressive.

‘Neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted’, Campbell wrote. ‘China has instead pursued its own course, belying a range of American expectations in the process.’

Biden will inherit Trump’s tariffs, and will likely find them useful tools in his future negotiations with Beijing. His incoming national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, recently told CNN that the incoming American president was in no hurry to roll back the tariffs, but was looking for ‘a clear-eyed, leverage-based approach to bring China to the table and get them to alter or amend their most problematic trade practices that harm the American economy’.

Biden will find an American public largely unified on the need to be firmer with Beijing on trade and other issues, from Rubio and Cotton on the right to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on the left. The US business community, which once provided the ballast for the Sino-American relationship, has lately soured on China and will be in favour of a more hardline approach to pry open markets and level the playing field.

And Biden has indicated he will eschew Trump’s go-it-alone approach and bring along America’s traditional allies, who are similarly worried about the challenge from a more assertive China.

During the hard-fought 2020 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly disparaged the former vice president as ‘Beijing Biden’, claiming he would roll back tariffs and become more accommodating to China. The irony is that while Trump talked tough, it may be Biden who gets more done.

China’s green gambit

Can US President-elect Joe Biden walk and chew gum at the same time? If walking is managing domestic pressures and chewing gum is pursuing a balanced foreign policy, the answer is far from clear. The tension between bipartisan calls to contain China and the imperative of cooperating with Chinese President Xi Jinping on climate change is a case in point.

Biden plans to marshal a broad alliance of democratically minded Pacific and European countries to check China’s expansionism. In Xi’s view, however, China may be able to use the promise to cooperate on climate change as a source of leverage with which to thwart Biden’s containment strategy, especially in light of Republican opposition to climate action and hostility toward China.

The stakes could not be higher. Humanity faces a truly calamitous future if the world’s two largest economies—and largest CO2 emitters—don’t commit to cooperating to address climate change. And yet the grim prospect that the Sino-American geopolitical competition will hamper climate cooperation is rarely discussed in either Washington or Beijing.

In the United States, the prevailing wisdom is that curtailing its CO2 emissions is in China’s self-interest. Beyond being the world’s largest CO2 emitter, China is the world’s leading consumer of coal, accounting for 52% of global use. And high levels of pollution threaten to undermine support for the Chinese Communist Party among a growing middle class demanding a cleaner environment. International pressure is also mounting.

Unfortunately, this view fails to account for China’s belief that, on climate change, the West needs it more than it needs the West. It will thus demand a high price, especially from the US and its European allies, for its contributions. And, to avoid losing the international community’s goodwill—or overplaying its hand—it will likely proceed in a calculated manner.

The first prong of China’s strategy is already visible. At the recent Climate Ambition Summit, convened by the United Nations, Xi reiterated his pledge to reach peak CO2 emissions before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.

Xi also vowed to meet even more ambitious climate goals by 2030. These include lowering CO2 emissions per unit of GDP by 65% (from 2005 levels), ensuring that renewables account for a quarter of primary energy consumption and increasing total installed wind and solar capacity to more than 1.2 billion kilowatts (roughly three times China’s installed capacity in 2019). Such declarations aim to boost China’s international profile—and put the US on the spot.

The second prong of China’s strategy has not yet been unveiled, but it’s reasonable to expect it to try to leverage its apparent climate leadership to secure economic and political concessions. China would first call for broadly cooperative, non-confrontational international dialogue and request tariff reductions—outgoing President Donald Trump’s administration imposed a 30% tariff on Chinese solar panels—and clean-technology transfers, to help it meet its climate commitments. Besides these pragmatic demands, China’s leaders will be tempted to pressure the West to tone down its criticisms of Chinese human-rights abuses, particularly over the crackdown in Hong Kong and the mass incarceration of largely Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

This two-pronged strategy will put Biden in a bind. If his climate pledges fall short of the international community’s expectations, China will look like the more responsible power. If he commits to ambitious climate goals, Republicans will undercut his credibility by sabotaging the relevant policies in Congress and the courts. Even if Republicans do not manage to block climate action today, there is the risk that a Republican administration—possibly even led by a second-term Trump—could reverse climate policies in 2024, as Trump did when he became president in 2017.

At the same time, given bipartisan antipathy toward China in the US, Biden would probably not be able to grant even modest concessions on tariffs or technology transfers, and he would be under intense pressure to confront Xi over human-rights abuses. China could then use this as an excuse to adopt a similarly hardline stance, insisting that Biden make irrevocable climate commitments—an impossible demand given Republican opposition—before it takes more action.

The resulting stalemate would appear to be America’s fault, undermining its position vis-à-vis China on the world stage. But it is from a climate perspective that this scenario would be truly catastrophic. The Biden administration must recognise how easily it could happen—and do everything possible to ensure that it doesn’t.

Can Joe Biden’s America be trusted?

Friends and allies have come to distrust the United States. Trust is closely related to truth, and President Donald Trump is notoriously loose with the truth. All presidents have lied, but never on such a scale that it debased the currency of trust. International polls show that America’s soft power of attraction has declined sharply over Trump’s presidency.

Can President-elect Joe Biden restore that trust? In the short run, yes. A change of style and policy will improve America’s standing in most countries. Trump was an outlier among US presidents. The presidency was his first job in government, after a career spent in the zero-sum world of New York City real estate and reality television, where outrageous statements hold the media’s attention and help to control the agenda.

In contrast, Biden is a well-vetted politician with long experience in foreign policy derived from decades in the Senate and eight years as vice president. Since the election, his initial statements and appointments have had a profoundly reassuring effect on allies.

Trump’s problem with allies was not his slogan ‘America first’. As I argue in Do morals matter? Presidents and foreign policy from FDR to Trump, presidents are entrusted with promoting the national interest. The important moral issue is how a president defines the national interest.

Trump chose narrow transactional definitions and, according to his former national security adviser, John Bolton, sometimes confused the national interest with his own personal, political and financial interests. Yet many US presidents since Harry Truman have taken a broad view of the national interest and haven’t confused it with their own. Truman saw that helping others was in America’s national interest, and even forswore putting his name on the Marshall Plan for assistance to post-war reconstruction in Europe.

Trump had disdain for alliances and multilateralism, which he readily displayed at meetings of the G7 or NATO. Even when he took useful actions in standing up to abusive Chinese trade practices, he failed to coordinate pressure on China, instead levying tariffs on US allies. Small wonder that many of them questioned whether America’s (proper) opposition to the Chinese technology giant Huawei was motivated by commercial rather than security concerns.

And Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization sowed mistrust about America’s commitment to dealing with transnational global threats such as climate change and pandemics. Biden’s plan to rejoin both, and his reassurances about NATO, will have an immediate beneficial effect on US soft power.

But Biden will still face a deeper trust problem. Many allies are asking what is happening to American democracy. How can a country that produced as strange a political leader as Trump in 2016 be trusted not to produce another in 2024 or 2028? Is American democracy in decline, making the country untrustworthy?

The declining trust in government and other institutions that fuelled Trump’s rise didn’t start with him. Low trust in government has been a US malady for half a century. After success in World War II, three-quarters of Americans said they had a high degree of trust in government. That share fell to roughly one-quarter after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal of the 1960s and 1970s. Fortunately, citizens’ behaviour on issues like tax compliance was often much better than their replies to pollsters might suggest.

Perhaps the best demonstration of the underlying strength and resilience of American democratic culture was the 2020 election. Despite the worst pandemic in a century and dire predictions of chaotic voting conditions, a record number of voters turned out, and the thousands of local officials—Republicans, Democrats and independents—who administered the election regarded the honest execution of their tasks as a civic duty.

In Georgia, which Trump narrowly lost, the Republican secretary of state, responsible for overseeing the election, defied baseless criticism from Trump and other Republicans, declaring, ‘I live by the motto that numbers don’t lie.’ Trump’s lawsuits alleging massive fraud, lacking any evidence to support them, have been thrown out in court after court, including by judges Trump had appointed. And Republicans in Michigan and Pennsylvania resisted his efforts to have state legislators overturn the election results. Contrary to the left’s predictions of doom and the right’s predictions of fraud, American democracy proved its strength and deep local roots.

But Americans, including Biden, will still face allies’ concerns about whether the US can be trusted not to elect another Trump in 2024 or 2028. They note the polarisation of the political parties, Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat, and the refusal of congressional Republican leaders to condemn his behaviour or even explicitly recognise Biden’s victory.

Trump has used his base of fervent supporters to gain control of the Republican Party by threatening to support primary challenges to moderates who don’t fall into line. Journalists report that about half the Republicans in the Senate disdain Trump, but they also fear him. If Trump tries to maintain control over the party after he leaves the White House, Biden will face a difficult task working with a Republican-controlled Senate.

Fortunately for US allies, while Biden’s political skills will be tested, the US Constitution provides a president more leeway in foreign than in domestic policy, so the short-term improvements in cooperation will be real. Moreover, unlike in 2016 when Trump was elected, a recent Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll shows that 70% of Americans want an outward-oriented cooperative foreign policy—a record high.

But the lingering long-run question of whether allies can trust America not to produce another Trump can’t be answered with complete assurance. Much will depend on controlling the pandemic, restoring the economy, and Biden’s skill in managing the country’s political polarisation.

Stabilising US–China relations after Trump

Devising an effective strategy to compete, cooperate and coexist with China will be one of US President-elect Joe Biden’s toughest foreign policy challenges. And over the next two months, Sino-American relations are almost certain to get worse.

On the eve of the election, President Donald Trump openly blamed China for the Covid-19 pandemic that was going to doom his second term and made thinly veiled threats. Now that he is about to exit the White House, Trump will likely approve more punitive measures to vent his anger and to bind the hands of Joe Biden’s incoming administration. Even if China refrains from responding in kind to Trump’s parting shots, some of which may be too painful or humiliating for it to swallow, the US–China relationship that Biden inherits could be damaged beyond repair.

Given the current strong antipathy towards China among much of the US political establishment and the public alike, Biden is unlikely to change the fundamental tenets of Trump’s China policy. China will remain America’s foremost geopolitical adversary, and containing its rise will be the organising principle of US foreign policy for the foreseeable future.

But the Biden administration’s China policy will also differ substantially from Trump’s zero-sum ‘America first’ approach. Biden’s strategic calculation is that the Sino-American conflict will be a decades-long marathon whose outcome will depend first and foremost on whether the United States can sustain and strengthen its competitive advantages: economic dynamism, technological innovation and ideological appeal.

Besides rallying traditional US allies, therefore, Biden will focus on strengthening America at home by addressing its dilapidated infrastructure, inadequate base of human capital, and underfunded research and development. Whereas the Trump administration sees no room for cooperation with China, the Biden administration will regard mutually beneficial collaboration on issues such as climate change, pandemics and nuclear non-proliferation as both desirable and essential.

Biden’s focus on fashioning a more nuanced and sustainable long-term China strategy will bring about an immediate and welcome pause in the Sino-American cold war. It is also in his short-term political interest to de-escalate or even end Trump’s trade war, because the US economy needs all the help it can get to climb out of its pandemic-induced slump.

Ironically, although China’s leaders have likewise concluded that they are now locked in an open-ended conflict with the US, de-escalating bilateral tensions is in their short-term political interest too. China apparently believes that time is on its side, because its economy will continue to grow faster than America’s in the coming decade, gradually shifting the overall balance of power in its favour. For now, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s main priority is to avoid a further escalation of tensions with the US while his country is in a position of relative weakness.

Although Biden and Xi’s short-term interests might be aligned, achieving a comprehensive reduction in US–China tensions will require both of them to invest a modest amount of political capital and demonstrate their willingness to stabilise bilateral ties.

The lowest-hanging fruit relates to culture. China should readmit the American journalists it expelled earlier this year, a step taken to retaliate against US restrictions on Chinese journalists. China should further commit to giving American reporters longer-term visas and greater freedom to work inside the country, with the US reciprocating by rescinding the curbs it placed on state-owned Chinese news organisations.

Reopening consulates would be another positive step. In late July, the US ordered China to close its consulate in Houston, citing unspecified economic espionage activities. In response, China shuttered the American consulate in Chengdu. Such tit-for-tat tactics needlessly intensified mutual antagonism. Rectifying this mistake and reversing these decisions would benefit both countries.

Next, the US and China should underscore their readiness to cooperate on climate change. China’s top climate negotiator and the new US climate envoy, former secretary of state John Kerry, should arrange a meeting to reaffirm each country’s commitment to the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement, and to explore potential joint initiatives to inject new momentum into global efforts to combat climate change.

A thornier issue is Taiwan, which has re-emerged as a potential Sino-American military flashpoint. China will undoubtedly press Biden to reaffirm America’s adherence to the ‘one China’ policy, but the Biden administration should also demand that China tone down its threats against Taiwan, and reiterate its preference for a peaceful resolution of the island’s status. With appropriately choreographed diplomacy, a realistic compromise could result in lower tensions across the Taiwan Strait.

But the biggest obstacle to a more stable US–China relationship is the trade war. In January, the two countries concluded a ‘phase one’ agreement that temporarily paused, but did not end, the worst trade conflict in recent memory. If Trump does not abrogate the deal before he leaves office, Biden and Xi should immediately restart talks to avert a looming catastrophe—namely, the impossibility of China meeting the Trump administration’s demand that it purchase an additional US$200 billion worth of American goods and services over two years. A realistic solution may require a more comprehensive phase two agreement that extends the timeframe for China to fulfil its purchase commitment and pledge structural reforms that were left out of the phase one deal.

This modest roadmap may not alter the trajectory of the Sino-American great-power conflict. But by demonstrating their willingness to cooperate despite their fundamental differences, Biden and Xi can reassure the international community that cooler heads have prevailed in both countries.

Crafting a diplomacy-first US foreign policy

US President-elect Joe Biden has made it clear that diplomacy will be at the centre of his administration’s foreign policy. Biden has pledged to rejoin the Paris climate agreement on day one of his administration, recommit to NATO allies, return the United States to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and convene a ‘summit for democracy’ to ‘renew the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world’. As he wrote in Foreign Affairs in March, ‘[D]iplomacy should be the first instrument of American power.’

Rebuilding America’s treaties and alliances will be a welcome development after four years of President Donald Trump’s transactional approach to the world. Trump’s ‘America first’ foreign policy has eroded the country’s relationships with its allies and impeded its ability to confront increasingly complex global challenges such as pandemics, climate change, nuclear proliferation, democratic backsliding and inequitable trade practices.

But crafting a diplomacy-first foreign policy to address issues like these depends on more than the new administration’s policy choices in its first year, as important as they will be. It requires fundamentally revamping the relevant US institutions to make diplomacy and development the permanent centre of America’s foreign and national security policies.

Such efforts should begin with a rethink of what security is and who it is for. Practitioners and political scientists have traditionally defined security in the narrow sense of protecting a nation-state’s territorial integrity and political independence, which naturally leads to a focus on military capabilities.

But national security should actually mean protecting people from the threats—ranging from disease and violence to fire and floods—that affect their everyday lives. The fact that these threats disrupt the most vulnerable communities the most is a result of policy, not chance. Security must therefore begin with developing a set of national and global tools to reduce the risks that these groups face.

Diplomacy, on this calculus, starts at home. If pandemics threaten national security, for example, then the US will need to invest in a more robust health system while substantially ramping up its engagement in international institutions like the World Health Organization to prepare for the next virus.

If political violence threatens Americans’ safety—and the New America think tank has shown that more Americans have died from right-wing terrorism than from jihadi terrorism since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks—then the US will need to invest more in tracking tools at home and abroad. We must also invest in rebuilding trust in our democratic institutions, including our voting system, while working with partners around the world to counter democratic backsliding and fight the spread of disinformation.

Likewise, if unequal internet access prevents some Americans from obtaining education and health care, as well as a growing number of government and private services, then the US government must focus on how to make digital connectivity as ubiquitous as electricity across the country. At the same time, it must work with other governments and international organisations to create a far more equal and accessible digital world.

The incoming Biden administration should also devise a plan to reinvent the US State Department, starting with the Foreign Service. As one of us recently argued in the journal Democracy, the 21th-century conception of the Foreign Service as a corps of career officials ‘deprives the United States of the talent, connections, and agility we need to advance national interests and address global challenges effectively in the twenty-first century’. A service that welcomed the talents of professionals from non-profits, universities and faith-based groups, among others, would be better equipped to tackle complex transnational problems that demand personnel from diverse backgrounds with a wide range of experience and expertise.

Finally, a diplomacy-first US foreign policy would recognise a far greater role for development, which requires its own diplomacy. Ideally, the Biden administration would work with Congress to overhaul the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act and establish a new cabinet-level department of global development. Short of that, elevating the director of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to a cabinet-level position could signal that the US regards economic development as a critical tool in its efforts to increase global human welfare.

Other countries can similarly rethink their diplomatic strategies and how they define diplomacy and security. This will require their legislatures to play a role. In the US, Congress is responsible for deciding how much funding each federal agency and program gets. In the 2019 fiscal year, defence accounted for about half of the federal government’s total discretionary spending, while the entire international affairs budget amounted to less than 4%.

Congress can help to build America’s diplomatic capacity by devoting more resources to reforming and increasing funding to the State Department and USAID. In addition, via its oversight role, it can prevent the executive from relying too much on military tools. At its most assertive, Congress can revoke its authorisations for the use of military force, block US arms sales, and restrict or place conditions on funding for security cooperation.

Faced with a global pandemic and climate change, political leaders around the world should re-examine exactly what makes their citizens more or less secure. They will find that investing in domestic resilience and international diplomacy and development makes more sense than boosting military budgets. As Biden prepares to take office, we need a collective surge of new global diplomacy to enable greater cooperation in the face of common threats.