Catchphrase Diplomacy Is Back

By Jimmy Quinn

Friday, February 05, 2021

 

For days, the White House teased Joe Biden’s first major foreign-policy address as a noteworthy event. Jake Sullivan, the national-security adviser, even made an appearance at the briefing room podium to talk it up on Thursday: “He wants to send a clear message that our national-security strategy will lead with diplomacy” and re-establish American strength on the global stage.

 

His boss delivered on that preview during his speech at the State Department later that afternoon. “America is back,” declared Biden, just as he did in his November remarks introducing his foreign-policy appointees. And he said it again for emphasis: “America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.” He’d said the same thing an hour earlier when he spoke to U.S. foreign-service officers.

 

No one promised that the speech would be particularly interesting. The 46th president’s first foreign-policy speech amounted to a hash of warmed-over talking points about standing with U.S. allies and the need to revitalize American democracy and strength at home.

 

Biden did make some news, announcing his decision to end U.S. support of Saudi-led offensive operations in Yemen and to appoint a special envoy to deal with the conflict. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, the president said, will begin a review of the U.S. global force posture. And underscoring the extent to which this foreign-policy vision is about projecting a values-based diplomacy, Biden also announced a directive to focus U.S. efforts on the promotion of LGBTQ rights. To his credit, he also announced his intent to review and reverse particularly wrongheaded Trump-era policies, such as the Germany troop drawdown and the evisceration of America’s refugee resettlement efforts.

 

Working with U.S. allies is important, but the overriding vision that Biden presented about renewing national strength failed on two crucial counts.

 

His talk about alliances presupposed a wholly decimated U.S. global posture, rather than the mixed bag left by the previous president, whose early diplomatic missteps were eventually eclipsed by fourth-quarter foreign-policy successes. Donald Trump’s disinterested management of the policy process empowered high-octane foreign-policy advisers — who, among other things, built alliances to counter the Chinese Communist Party, isolate Iran, and forge diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East.

 

Although Trump alienated certain European allies — whose behavior doesn’t seem likely to change significantly with a friendlier U.S. administration in power — his administration revitalized the Indo-Pacific’s Quad alliance and built the Clean Network initiative to counter China. It left behind stronger coalitions to go after ISIS, and worked closely with Israel and the Gulf countries. (For all of Biden’s talk about alliances, he neglected to mention the U.S. alliance with Israel.) The new team can’t rely on such an obvious caricature of the previous administration forever.

 

Biden’s broader foreign-policy vision also falls flat because it fixates on meeting transnational challenges, such as climate change and global public health, while crowding out talk of confronting America’s authoritarian adversaries.

 

It’s not that the president didn’t talk about confronting Russia and China, but where he did, he emphasized cooperation on shared interests just a bit too much: “By leading with diplomacy, we must also mean engaging our adversaries and our competitors diplomatically, where it’s in our interest.”

 

As Biden went on to explain, this meant signing on to a five-year extension of an arms limitation treaty with Moscow in the early days of his administration while also continuing to call out Russian misbehavior, such as the attempted assassination of Alexei Navalny and his recent imprisonment. But the agreement on arms control failed to produce an outcome more in line with U.S. interests. And Biden pledged that, despite the Chinese Communist Party’s “advancing authoritarianism” and threat to human rights, intellectual property, and global governance, “we are ready to work with Beijing, when it’s in America’s interest to do so,” echoing comments made last week by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

 

But “reclaiming our credibility and moral authority, much of which has been lost,” as Biden put it, requires a clear-eyed approach to confronting the CCP’s unique threat to human rights and global democracy. Biden set out to demonstrate a commitment to these values by emphasizing that the U.S. is working with its partners on a response to the coup in Myanmar, and by calling on the country’s military junta to relinquish power. But for all his discussion of values, he neglected to mention the human-rights elephant in the room: the recent disturbing BBC report on the systematic rape and torture of Uyghurs that goes on in Xinjiang’s concentration camps.

 

What interests can America possibly share with the Chinese regime? Biden himself has previously accused it of gross human-rights abuses, even genocide. The abject cravenness of the Chinese party-state should be the primary thing that the U.S. president highlights in a foreign-policy address, not the potential for cooperation.

 

Biden saw fit to spend more time featuring a set of vague paeans to press freedom, science, and fighting systemic racism. “America cannot afford to be absent any longer on the world stage,” he concluded. But for all the tumult of the Trump years, America was never actually absent. What has in fact returned is the misplaced priorities of the center-left foreign-policy establishment.