In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead recaps the status of the Biden Administration’s attempted reset of our relationship with our presumed European allies:
It hasn’t been the most promising start. Less than a month into Joe Biden’s presidency, and his administration is already engaged in spats with China, Russia and Iran. It is also discovering that U.S. allies are not quite as happy with Mr. Biden’s Feb. 4 announcement that “America is back†as many Democrats might have hoped.
In Asia the administration’s Myanmar policy—imposing sanctions that signal displeasure without materially affecting the army’s ability to rule—has attracted little enthusiasm. On Feb 15, India’s foreign minister hailed Indo-Japanese cooperation on regional infrastructure projects that link Myanmar with its neighbors, a not-so-subtle signal that India intends to go on cooperating with Myanmar no matter what Washington wants. Simultaneously, the large portion of the Indian press that supports the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is aflame with resentment that Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece, Meena Harris, seems to be siding with protesters against BJP policies.
European leaders are also dismissive of American moralism. French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the importation of U.S.-academic and cultural wokeness as a threat to the French way of life, while pragmatists on the Continent are pushing to strengthen economic relations with Russia and China—virtually ignoring the Biden administration’s efforts to raise the pressure on human-rights abusers in Moscow and Beijing. With the U.S. trade representative’s recent announcement that Trump-era retaliatory tariffs on European wine, cheese and food imports aren’t going away soon, this has been one of the shortest and coldest diplomatic honeymoons on record.
In the Middle East, Iran is showing no eagerness to ease the administration’s path back into the 2015 nuclear deal. And both Israel and the conservative Arab states resent the American shift in that direction. As for restless NATO ally Turkey, Mr. Biden promised during the campaign to help President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opposition. The new administration has so far criticized a crackdown on pro-LGBTQ student demonstrators and called on Ankara to release the dissident Osman Kavala.
Closer to home, the unceremonious cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline miffed Canadians. The Biden administration appears headed for a fight with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro over deforestation in the Amazon basin—a sensitive issue for the Brazilian right. Mexico’s left-populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador delayed congratulating Mr. Biden on his election, passed a law limiting U.S.-Mexican collaboration over drug trafficking, and offered political asylum to Julian Assange.
His summation: some turbulence was inevitable.
I have never understood American diplomacy predicated on the assumption that European countries are waiting, longing for American leadership. I don’t see that it has any basis in fact. Any notion that we can lead European countries by example is fatally flawed as well. We may not have been providing leadership but they haven’t been providing a good deal of followership lately.
Mead nails it. After (almost) a month Biden’s foreign policy has failed.
Steve
It’s too early to say it “has failed”. It’s not too early to issue a status report or suggest that it’s operating under false premises.
As I have said my view is that we are on our own. We can and should solicit other countries to join us in specific enterprises. We should not expect them to follow our lead.
How soon we forget. Did not the Trump Presidency reveal the extent to which the back room bureaucrats control policy? LtC Vindman testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee that Presidents had no authority to direct foreign policy. Amb. Jeffers (ret) said in an interview that the Depts. of Defense and State actually lied to Trump about troop deployments in Syria. How did anyone miss that?
Because of his dementia, Biden will be an unusually weak President, and US policies, domestic and foreign, will be the outcome of Byzantine maneuvers by his wife, Jill Biden, by VP Kamala Harris, and by back roomers like Susan Rice. Coalitions and cliques will dominate.
A number of Biden’s appointees, like Rice, are aggressive interventionists, so we can expect the continuation of our many small wars and even some new ones, hopefully small, too. We are likely to see experiments in Green ideology that damage the economy, perhaps even wreck it. Low income workers will suffer competition from the wave of immigrants soon to arrive, and they will lose their jobs to automation once $15/hr minimum wage kicks in.
Laissez le mal temps rouler. (Mardi Gras without a parade or booze. Jeesh.)
bob sykes:
There are Foggy Bottom denizens who refer to the president, VP, etc. as “the temporary help”.
Prescient comments by bob sykes. Most of us will become peasants under the dreary, over reach of the current regime.
“Most of us will become peasants”
Finally, a field I’m experienced in.
You won’t all become peasants. We are planning on eating the children.
Steve
Telling about Biden, he’s a lifelong Senator, compromiser, on the $50,000 student loan forgiveness he rejected it as welfare for the well to do, then said he’d go $10,000. Window into his mind.
As a teamster we know how to negotiate with his kind. Ask for way more than you hope for. Grudgingly accept his compromise, then complain you were cheated until the next contract comes up.
At least he got us back into the Paris Climate Accords. I feel safer already.
https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/lets-review-50-years-of-dire-climate-forecasts-and-what-actually-happened