Biden has many hills to climb at G-20 and COP26

Almost the entire world, especially Europeans, showered Joe Biden with hope and goodwill because his election promised an end to Donald Trump’s abrasive swagger across international affairs.

But disappointments of allies and friends with his foreign policies have gnawed at the goodwill. Biden’s actions continue to fuel a perception that he is too preoccupied with domestic political squabbles to break away decisively from Trump’s insensitive foreign policies, which created wide-spread distrust of US intentions.

On Saturday, Biden will attend a summit in Rome of the G-20, the world’s 20 most powerful nations that are home to two-thirds of humanity and 85 percent of global wealth. They also include the biggest greenhouse gas emitters.

Then, he heads to Glasgow, Scotland, for the United Nations COP26 summit billed as a defining moment for the fight to slow down climate change and speed up decarbonization.

Despite his bracing talk of America being back to lead allies and friends, Biden will face much skepticism. Many doubt his political skills in light of his struggle to win congressional support for his domestic agenda and, more importantly, to repair the damage that Trump wrought to relations with Europe, China and in the Middle East.

During his travels, he will find many who think Trump was not an aberration because large swathes of America’s voters distrust the liberal values of other swathes. Foreign governments are translating that distrust as the likelihood that no White House occupant can be a reliable friend.

To them even Biden, the anti-Trump, seems to be Trump’s acolyte. For instance, he has not lifted punishments on Cuba and Iran and is continuing muscular diplomatic combat with China. He has not ended all threats of trade sanctions on Europe and has spurned France in his recent nuclear submarine deal with Australia. His messy withdrawal from Afghanistan disrespected allies to advance Trump’s policies.

Battered by the global Covid-19 pandemic, the G-20 is rudderless with governments drifting towards mutual suspicion and nationalism. Worse, there is lack of political will to build genuine cooperation to face climate change and pandemic diseases. The Group is ripe for a leader.

But Biden seems to have lost the moral authority to be that leader, capable of rallying fractious foreign peoples, several with ancient civilizations, behind common cause. So far, he has not even been able to narrow rifts among his own country’s strident people, including brazen partisan conflict in parliament.

G-20 governments and those at COP26 would overlook Biden’s discomfiture on domestic issues if they were convinced that he is not a Trump foreign policy acolyte with nicer manners.

The blame does not lie necessarily on Biden’s shoulders. US foreign policy, as that of other major countries, is driven by world events and geopolitical power shifts. For instance, phenomena like China’s rise as an increasingly assertive rival to the US and Europe happen regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or directs congressional politics.

Neither the world nor American interests and values shift because of a US presidential change. Trump did not conjure his push back against China and maximum pressure on Iran. Geopolitical changes and the imperatives of US interests did so.

That America is back seems not to matter to anyone. What matters is that the old free-market trade and globalization, and unchallenged supremacy of the US dollar and financial institutions, have been eroded because many more countries are asserting their own interests.

American leadership has lost much of its legitimacy because of these changes rather than Biden’s missteps or havoc that Trump may have spurred. Washington’s “blob” will have to fashion new foreign policy directions rather than continuing to insist on an existential combat between liberal democracy and authoritarianism in guise of protecting human rights, open-markets and private-sector capitalism.

Regardless of Biden’s and Washington’s beliefs, the time before Trump when allies trusted US presidents cannot be resuscitated. The world has moved on to a place where no one at all, anywhere, can escape pandemics, supply chain disruptions and negative climate change.

And almost no one believes that adopting a democracy like the one in Washington and America’s states is the best way to handle these and many other problems of conflict, governance and poverty besetting their people.

The time now is for Biden to listen carefully to the foreign peoples he needs as friends to fulfill his duty to protect the American people. Many of them have found their voices and coercion through US government sanctions and exhibitions of military and economic power impress them less. Even an American president must now earn the cooperation and loyalty of allies and friends.