Joe Biden is right to restore America to a prominent international role

Foreign policy speeches are usually long on concepts and rhetorical flourishes, and short on action and urgency. Joe Biden, no stranger to woolly diplospeak himself, has at least done some demonstrable good in his first outline of the future of US foreign policy. 

All things being equal, the new president has probably already saved the lives of some blameless Yemeni civilians caught up in the proxy war in their country. In ceasing support for Saudi-led coalition offensives in Yemen, including halting supplies of relevant arms, Mr Biden has taken the first step towards ending this cruel and futile war, long since declared a humanitarian disaster by the United Nations.

In seven years no one has achieved anything, and never will. The president is right to begin the de-escalation of this almost forgotten, pitiless, conflict. The move may conceivably lead to a better outcome with Iran, which has Yemeni allies.

Donald Trump, erratic as he was, was still shrewd and realistic enough to see that the Iranians were not entirely trustworthy partners in the quest for regional peace; but his angry disengagement from diplomacy – and the targeted assassination of a senior Iranian official linked to terrorism – has done little. After the failure of the Trump strategy, President Biden has no option but to try diplomacy again and reach some new arrangement with Tehran.

Much the same goes for that other pivot in George W Bush’s “axis of evil”, North Korea. In that case, Mr Trump tried the most dramatic of peace initiatives, man-to-man meetings with Kim Jong-un and historic handshakes across the DMZ; but again to little lasting effect. Mr Biden, like every president since the 1950s, has to deal with America’s cold war with North Korea. The stakes are high: Mr Biden will find it difficult to explain away how Mr Kim and Iran got their hands on nuclear missiles on his watch. 

America “is back”, says Mr Biden, and its allies are already relieved to have old friendships reaffirmed – and vice versa. As Mr Biden says, if America is to “live in peace, security and prosperity” then it has to have strong allies. 

This is “in America’s naked self-interest”. However, America’s security will be all the more damaged if, apart from having to deal with the usual rogue states and gangs of terrorists, it is going to drift simultaneously into a cold war with the other two military superpowers on the planet. For the first time since Richard Nixon’s China initiative and detente with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, the United States finds itself on unfriendly, antagonistic terms with both China and Russia.

Unlike the world half a century ago, though, America is no longer strong enough economically to sustain such a stance. As we have seen during the long conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American public is also less prepared to spend trillions of dollars and lose thousands of lives more in remote foreign wars without end. That was an important strand of public opinion that Mr Trump was especially attuned to, and Mr Biden is aware of it – “there is no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy”.

The president is right to chastise China for its economic crimes, for menacing its neighbours and for its abuse of human rights, though he failed to mention the persecuted Uighur people by name. Likewise, his warning to Vladimir Putin that Washington will no longer roll over after cyber attacks is certainly long overdue. America has means at its disposal to inflict pain on China and Russia, through sanctions – but there are limits to its leverage, and especially when China holds such vast quantities of US government debt and the Kremlin is allegedly able to hack the Pentagon at will. 

The lesson of past cold wars is that even with the threat of mutually assured destruction through thermonuclear war there was only so much America could do to try to restrain its heavyweight rivals. Today, President Biden and his newly revivified diplomatic corps will need to rely more heavily on friendly allies, such as Nato members, to wield diplomatic clout.

There is talk in Biden circles of developing a regional “alliance for democracy”, the “quadrilateral” established by the Trump administration with India, Japan and Australia, to work as a better counterweight to China, for example, just as a revived Nato and stabilised EU would with Russia. 

Mr Biden is returning America to globalism and restoring the international role it has played since the Second World War. But America is no longer able to be the world’s police officer, because the economy and public opinion simply cannot sustain it. America needs its friends, old and new, and they will support America in return; but in the long run, the US will have to find a way to have fewer enemies, large or small.