How the global politics would look under Biden's presidency
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America under Biden won’t go soft on China
A Biden White House is likely to oversee a steadier and more coherent China policy than the Trump administration, whose erratic approach careened from President Donald Trump’s fawning praise of Chinese President Xi Jinping—including reportedly condoning concentration camps in Xinjiang—to name-calling and fighting a failed tariff war. A consistent approach will bring more stability to a delicate and difficult relationship. But a more stable approach does not mean a soft one, since there is now a bipartisan recognition in the United States that China is a strategic competitor. Indeed, while Beijing may appreciate soon having a more predictable set of interlocutors, it should not expect them to be more pliable.
Helping Biden is the fact that much of US foreign policy is the prerogative of the president and therefore less constrained than domestic policy by the legislative branch. But if Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell remains in control of the US Senate, one of the first tests for the Republicans in the Senate will be whether they will cut off America’s nose in order to spite the new president’s face. The United States needs a robust economic stimulus, including significant investment in infrastructure, in order to make it to the other side of the pandemic and jump-start the economy. Republicans who want to be tougher on China must recognize that a strong US economy is a strategic imperative.
Some commentators have suggested that the Trump presidency, and its undignified end, has emboldened Chinese government leaders and raised their confidence in the superiority of their own system. On Election Day, the editor of the Chinese government propaganda newspaper Global Times, Hu Xijin, gleefully posted on Twitter about storefronts being boarded up in US cities, writing that unrest is usually a “complication of elections in poor countries, but people are worried it may appear in the US. The US is in degradation.” It should be noted, of course, that the Chinese Communist Party boards up its windows from the inside, metaphorically speaking, to keep citizens from seeing how the leaders of its authoritarian regime are selected.
We cannot deny or dismiss the damage done to the global reputation of US democracy by Trump’s antics. But neither should we overstate that damage. In the end, the United States—a giant, multiethnic, multiconfessional, industrialized democracy—had an election where the result was unknown ahead of time. It generated record voter participation and was held with relatively few problems in the midst of a global pandemic. It delivered a defeat for the incumbent and a new president.
Biden will most likely lead the United States with a divided government. His administration will have to work with senators and representatives from diverse constituencies and make compromises in order to strike deals that equip the county to confront the challenges of the 21st century, including its strategic rivalry with China. It will be messy and challenging, and progress will not be linear. But this is not a new story—it is a very old one. Chinese leaders pride themselves on taking a long view. The United States faces plenty of foreign and domestic challenges today, including in its democratic institutions. But in the long view, its democracy is not a source of weakness; it is a source of strength.
Daniel Baer is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was US ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from 2013 to 2017. Twitter: @danbbaer
Why a Biden win is bad news for Boris Johnson
The United States’ cultural dominance isn’t always benign. The election of Donald Trump told trashy politicians across the world that they could lie continuously, tear up conventions, smash up their countries, and—far from being punished by their electorates—they would win.
Shakespeare’s Richard III complains he must “clothe my naked villainy” and “seem a saint, when most I play the devil.” Trump taught leaders from Brazil to Hungary they no longer needed to pretend to be saintly. However basely they behaved, their base would applaud them. No one learned the lesson better than Britain’s Boris Johnson.
With Joe Biden on the path to victory, the British prime minister now looks like yesterday’s man. The spirit of the age has left him behind, and he seems a relic of a discredited past. This change in culture will matter more than any political change in formal Anglo-American relations.
Living in the UK, it has been dispiriting to watch how quickly Trumpian tactics were accepted as normal. Johnson suspended Britain’s supposedly sovereign Parliament in an attempt to push Brexit through, threatened the independence of the judiciary, and said he would break international law by renouncing a treaty he signed with the European Union if he did not get his way. Trump said of Johnson in 2019, “They call him Britain’s Trump and people are saying that’s a good thing.”
When then US President Barack Obama warned Britain against leaving the EU in 2016, Johnson sounded like a birther, suggesting that Obama was no friend to this country because of his “part-Kenyan” heritage and “ancestral dislike of the British empire.” More recently, faced with a deadly pandemic, Johnson may not have embraced the pseudo-scientific claptrap of the US president, but his failure to deal with Covid-19 has been almost as egregious.
One can exaggerate Johnson’s affinity with Trump. When it comes to foreign policy, the British Conservatives have been closer to the Democrats than the Republicans. They continue to support Obama’s deal with Iran, and say they are concerned about climate change, although whether they are prepared to take the hard decisions to combat it is another matter.
But ever since it started to become clear that Obama’s vice president was likely heading to the White House, something close to panic has gripped Downing Street.
The fantasy world of “the Anglosphere” has become the never-never land of the British right-wing imagination. Britain could leave the EU and join an English-speaking bloc led by the United States, or so the story ran, and build a pact with its true friends.
With Biden as president, Washington may not even give Britain the fast-track trade deal that Brexit supporters pretended could compensate for the loss of the vastly more significant trade with the EU.
Meanwhile, Biden and the US Congress’s determination to stop Johnson building a hard border on the island of Ireland will mean that Dublin’s voice will carry more weight in Washington than London’s—a reversal of 800 years of English dominance of Ireland.
Britain will have abandoned its European alliance while failing to secure an American alliance. Its isolation will be painful—and painfully obvious.
Nick Cohen is a columnist for the London Observer and the author of “What’s Left?: How the Left Lost Its Way.” Twitter: @NickCohen4
Biden and Harris could be bad news for India’s Modi
Indian Americans love Kamala Harris. The daughter of an Indian biologist who moved to the United States and became one of the country’s most respected cancer researchers, Harris embodies the values of hard work, intellectual accomplishment, and political engagement. As a US senator, she pushed for immigration policies favored by the Indian American community, including a lifting of country caps on H1-B temporary employment visas and the retention of employment rights for spouses of H1-B visa holders. And Indian Americans are understandably proud to see one of their own rising to the top of the US political system.
But good for Indian Americans does not necessarily mean good for the current government of India. On the contrary: The Biden team’s priorities (from what we know so far) are likely to drive a wedge between the United States and continental Asia’s oldest democracy at a time when Washington is looking for new allies in its strategic rivalry with China.
Harris may be a part of that wedge herself. As senator, Harris has been diplomatically circumspect in her few public comments about India’s government but has shown no love for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Last year, she even publicly criticized Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar while he was on an official visit to the United States. Jaishankar had refused to share a platform with US Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the Indian American sponsor of a House of Representatives resolution calling out the Indian government for its policies in Kashmir.
Harris’s own family connection to India may color her attitude. Her mother hailed from Tamil Nadu in southern India, a state in which Modi’s BJP did not win a single seat in last year’s national parliamentary elections. The BJP is often described as a Hindu nationalist party, but it can also be seen as a regional movement centered on the Hindi heartland of northern India. That regional base has expanded in recent years, but Tamil Nadu—which is almost 90 percent Hindu but not Hindi-speaking—remains a bastion of opposition.
Harris herself has been critical of the Indian government’s policies in Kashmir and strongly suggested (without explicitly saying) that she would put human rights at the center of her approach to India—and the rest of the world. That sounds like political boilerplate until you realize that in India, “human rights” often translates as “anti-BJP.” Unable to beat Modi at the polls, his domestic critics have focused on what they say are policies and incitement directed against minorities, such as India’s 172 million Muslims. With Harris in the West Wing, Modi’s opponents in India may suddenly have much more leverage at their disposal.
Salvatore Babones is an adjunct scholar at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney and an associate professor at the University of Sydney. Twitter: @sbabones
Saudi Arabia’s Worst Nightmare
Over the last couple days, few capitals have awaited the results of the US presidential election with as much anxiety as Riyadh, particularly its young and ruthless would-be king, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Even though he’s well aware that the US-Saudi relationship may still be regarded as too big and important to fail, an impending victory for Joe Biden means the end of the zone of immunity the Trump administration crafted around Saudi Arabia. The country’s human rights record, its dealings in Yemen, and its reckless efforts to amass influence in its region are likely to emerge as sources of rhetorical tension, particularly with a Biden administration that isn’t looking to invest heavily in the Middle East.
The crown prince has every reason to be worried. He played US President Donald Trump and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and pro-Saudi Middle East advisor, well, convincing them that Saudi willingness to buy billions of dollars in US weapons, oppose Iran, and reach out to Israel mandated allowing the Saudis to do just about anything else in the region they wanted. But a President Joe Biden would be less likely to go along with Saudi Arabia: He has described the country as a pariah, called for ending the “disastrous war” in Yemen, and urged a reassessment of the US relationship with Riyadh. “America’s priorities in the Middle East should be set in Washington, not Riyadh,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations last year.
Under Biden, those priorities, it seems, would be soothing tensions with Iran through reentering the nuclear accord while avoiding a blowup with Israel. In those efforts, there will also be a new rival for Washington’s affections—the United Arab Emirates’ Mohammed bin Zayed, who has already normalized ties with Israel, is less reckless than Mohammed bin Salman, and may thus seem to a Biden administration a more reliable partner.
Assuming Tehran is interested in rapprochement and is looking for an agreement on the nuclear issue, especially if it’s accompanied by a Barack Obama-like pledge to inject more balance into US policy and stay out of Saudi Arabia and Iran’s regional games, US regional efforts are likely to roil Riyadh. And with Biden mostly interested in not getting sucked back into the Middle East, the administration may not be prepared to invest all that much time or attention to Saudi Arabia. What impact this distancing might have on Riyadh is unclear.
It might push Saudi Arabia to expand ties with China, especially on the nuclear issue, or perhaps the country could borrow a page from the UAE and accelerate normalization with Israel in an effort to curry favor with Washington. Whatever it does, though, it’s fair to say that under a Biden administration, with its priorities elsewhere, Saudi Arabia won’t be Washington’s darling any longer.
Aaron David Miller is a geoeconomic and strategy senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served as a State Department Middle East analyst and negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations. He is the author of The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President. Twitter: @aarondmiller2
Is Biden bad news for Bibi?
The effects of Tuesday’s vote will ripple far beyond the shores of the United States. With Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden increasingly on track to a victory—barring unforeseen legal challenges—and a move into the White House in January 2021, Israel is one of the places whose political calculus stands to be impacted most directly and significantly by the impending personnel changes in Washington. The prolonged delay in declaring a winner hasn’t overly traumatized Israelis, who are accustomed to waiting weeks, if not months, after Election Day until the final picture emerges.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister since March 2009, heads a wildly unstable coalition government. Its key leaders feud incessantly and publicly about everything from the national budget and senior appointments to regional strategy and even the country’s response to Covid-19.
Conventional wisdom has been suggesting that Israelis are speeding toward an imminent election, which would be their fourth since April 2019. But the advent of a Biden presidency could precipitate a grudging cease-fire between Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who is slated to replace him as premier in a rotation next November.
The past four years have generated a diplomatic windfall for Israel. Netanyahu—a uniquely talented Trump-charmer among world leaders—has leveraged these gains domestically, fashioning himself as the Israeli politician most capable of shepherding his nation’s critical relationship with Washington.
That argument has been an almost impossible sell, however, when Democrats have occupied the Oval Office. Netanyahu’s dealings with Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were notoriously strained; in his December 2016 parting shot, after a rare US abstention on a United Nations Security Council resolution censuring Israeli settlement activity, Netanyahu lashed out at the Obama administration, accusing it of having “colluded with [the UN] behind the scenes” in a “gang-up” on Israel.
Polls forecasting President Donald Trump’s defeat were not lost on Netanyahu. It was no accident when the prime minister chose to articulate last week that bipartisan US support for Israel has been “one of the foundations of the American-Israeli alliance.” (That episode came on the heels of Trump’s clumsy October 23 attempt to embroil Netanyahu in the campaign when he asked him, in front of assembled media, whether “you think sleepy Joe could have made this deal [with Sudan], Bibi?” Netanyahu dodged the bullet.)
Expectations are that Biden’s Middle East policy will place him on a collision course with Netanyahu and his right-wing boosters. A renewed US focus on pursuing a “path of diplomacy” with Iran and jump-starting the currently dormant negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians—including a resolute US commitment to a two-state solution—are certain to spark clashes between Biden and Netanyahu, about whom Biden once famously said, “I don’t agree with a damn thing you say.”
A depreciation in the value of Netanyahu’s stock on the world stage could make Israelis more amenable to considering an alternative investment. Netanyahu will seek to make a case for continuing as premier on the grounds that, if Israel is indeed destined to spar with the US government, there is no person better positioned than him to wage those battles. That may not be enough for him to survive at Israel’s helm. Gantz met on Wednesday with Netanyahu’s nemesis, former Defense Minister Naftali Bennett, in a conspicuous sign that the vultures might already be circling and plotting the prime minister’s overthrow in parliament.
If the 14 members of Gantz’s Blue and White faction were compelled to break ranks and join together with the opposition in what’s known as a constructive no-confidence motion, it could be curtains for the incumbent.
Any attempt to eject Netanyahu from power will meet with formidable resistance. Netanyahu is a political master, and his rivals will surely encounter difficulties in resolving their own differences en route to mounting a unified challenge against him. He’s unlikely to make their task that much easier by rushing now to call a snap vote. That said, the same political turmoil buffeting the United States could soon propel Israel—where the situation is fluid—back into the vortex of yet another election.
Shalom Lipner is a nonresident senior fellow of the Middle East program at the Atlantic Council. From 1990 to 2016, he served seven consecutive Israeli premiers at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. Twitter: @ShalomLipner
Don’t expect a Biden win to boost US favorability
When Barack Obama won a landslide victory over John McCain in 2008 to become US president, it was a boon for America’s global image. According to the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes poll, after years of falling under President George W. Bush, US favorability ratings leaped back up to pre-Bush levels in much of the world, especially Western Europe and Latin America. In Germany, for instance, the favorability figure was 31 percent in 2008 and 64 percent in 2009; in Mexico, it was 47 percent in 2008 and 69 percent in 2009. (In some countries, such as Turkey and Russia, US favorability remained flat or slightly fell.) Trust in the US president himself to “do the right thing” in global affairs also leapt massively, often by 60 or 70 points.
Donald Trump’s presidency has seen US favorability ratings—and trust in the president—plummet globally to levels even lower than Bush’s. Between the end of Obama’s presidency and Trump’s inauguration, US favorability ratings dropped by an average of 15 percentage points, and trust in the US president by 42 percentage points. Just 22 percent of the world had confidence in Trump to do the right thing. The sole exceptions were Israel and Russia—and, over time, India, where Trump’s favorability grew. The figures plummeted even further in 2020 as a result of America’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus under Trump.
Trust in Joe Biden himself if he takes office will doubtless be higher in most of the world. But US favorability ratings are unlikely to see a boost on par with that seen after Obama’s election for several reasons. For one, this is the second time around. Bush might have been seen as an aberration, but Trump can’t be. The narrowness (in the Electoral College) of his defeat will only reinforce that image; fears that either Trump himself or a possibly even worse successor will return in 2024 or 2028 will remain. And while Biden might project normality and reassurance, his story doesn’t have the resonance that that of the first African American president did—a symbolic role so powerful that it won Obama the Nobel Peace Prize essentially just for his presidential victory. With the US-China cold war taking shape, too, attitudes toward both superpowers are likely to sharpen—although a hugely unpopular Chinese President Xi Jinping still managed to poll above Trump in the global popularity contest.
James Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
Trump promised to end America’s wars. Biden might actually do it.
US President Donald Trump never seemed overly concerned about the deaths of thousands of Yemeni civilians at weddings, on school trips, and in their homes. He was more interested in getting to know the new young power in Saudi Arabia responsible for the bombing, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. On two occasions, the US Congress passed a resolution to ban the sale of precision-guided missiles to Riyadh, hoping to wipe America’s conscience clean. Trump, however, vetoed it without compunction both times.
By contrast, in 2017 he claimed that images of dead “beautiful little babies,” killed in a chemical attack allegedly ordered by the Syrian regime, had compelled him to order strikes on regime territory. Many saw the contradiction as showing that his attack on Syria was just an attempt to score a point over his predecessor, who had failed to observe his own red line that a chemical weapons attack by Bashar al-Assad would trigger a military response.
Trump’s policies in countries afflicted by war were transactional and, at times, amounted to a betrayal of US allies. He displayed unprecedented fickleness for an American president when he went back and forth on the decision to keep or withdraw American troops in northeast Syria. Dareen Khalifa, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, said Trump’s indecision undermined the position of the West’s Syrian Kurdish allies, “because any US backing could end with a tweet.” The Kurds had to keep a door open to the regime in case Turkey, which sees the Kurds as secessionists and terrorists, intensified its attacks on their territory.
Trump failed to deliver on his promise to end America’s wars. Instead, he almost started one with Iran when he walked out of the nuclear deal and approved the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani. Desperate to show a victory before the election, Trump pushed for a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, but according to a US watchdog there has been a 50 percent increase in violence in Afghanistan since the deal was signed in Doha, Qatar, earlier this year.
Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee who may be poised to win the presidency, intends to walk the middle path, somewhere between Barack Obama and Trump, to mitigate the damage unleashed by wars that started during his tenure as vice president and those in Iraq and Afghanistan that he signed off on as a senator.
“It’s long past time we end the forever wars,” Biden said in his first speech on his foreign policy in New York in 2019. He opposes the war in Yemen and is unlikely to veto if Congress decides to pass another resolution to stop the sale of weapons to Riyadh. But while he has been openly critical of Saudi Arabia, few believe that any American president can for long stop deals worth billions of dollars to one of its most prominent clients. He can, when he has the time and when Yemen figures on his long list of priorities, push the Saudis toward diplomacy and force Mohammed bin Salman to make enough concessions to the opposition, the Houthis, that an agreement can be reached. But it is unclear exactly how he would go about it.
In Syria, Biden has more to answer for. In its 10th year, the Syrian war has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and half the population displaced. Obama and Biden were criticized for not doing enough to help the protesters and washing their hands of Syria as the regime bombed cities.
Biden, unlike Trump, is certain to keep at least a small number of troops in northeast Syria to support the Kurds, maintaining a foothold in a country now predominantly in the Russian orbit. He wishes to retain the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration to squeeze the regime into making political concessions. The Biden campaign’s policy paper says he will press all actors to pursue political solutions, facilitate the work of nongovernmental organizations and, “mobilize other countries to support Syria’s reconstruction.” But it does not say how he would go about it, especially given he failed to do any of these when he was vice president. “He does not know how to do it,” said Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat currently in exile in the United States. “Biden’s team is split among those who talk to Assad, those who don’t see a point in it.”
The biggest difference between Trump’s and Biden’s approaches to the region is Iran. While Trump was obsessed with punishing Iran through his campaign of “maximum pressure,” Biden wants to reinstate the nuclear deal. Beyond that, it’s hard to judge the extent of Biden’s ambitions. The real prize would be to facilitate talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with a view to easing tensions between the Islamic powers, each vying for supremacy in a region fraught with fundamentalist religious doctrines. But Biden’s plate will be full enough trying to bring existing wars to an end, before he starts contemplating a lasting regional peace.
Anchal Vohra is a Beirut-based columnist for Foreign Policy and a freelance correspondent for Voice of America and Al Jazeera English. She is also a TV commentator on the Middle East.
Disclaimer: These articles first appeared on Foreign Policy, and are published by special syndication arrangement
