How Joe Biden is reshaping America’s global role

THE BIG red button was meant as the emblem of a renewed, warmer relationship, and the Americans thought they had emblazoned it with the word “reset” in Cyrillic. “We worked hard to get the right Russian word,” said the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, as she presented the gift to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. “Do you think we got it?”

Mr Lavrov smiled. “You got it wrong,” he said, as the two of them pushed the button together. The word was in fact “overload”.

That was in 2009, when the administration of Barack Obama was new. Twelve years on, the formidable Mr Lavrov remains in the role he has held since 2004. But now, as he faces yet another American administration, he is contending with diplomats who have had some time to learn on the job as well, many of them during the eight years Mr Obama was in office. Whereas Donald Trump, during his presidency, pursued his own peculiar version of a reset with President Vladimir Putin—joking with him about Russian election interference and saying the two liked one another—President Joe Biden has called Mr Putin a killer without a soul. And yet Mr Biden also says he wants to work with him.

As Mr Biden nears the 100-day mark of his administration, the moment at which the American establishment likes to take the measure of a new president, the pattern emerging in his foreign policy differentiates it not only from that of his immediate predecessor, Mr Trump, but also from that of Mr Obama, whom he served as vice-president. As often as his aides stress they are working with “allies and partners”, an implicit elbow thrown at Mr Trump, they also emphasise they are being “clear-eyed” about their adversaries. That is a subtle step away from Mr Obama, who in retrospect has often been judged naive in seeking a reset with Russia, negotiating an imperfect nuclear deal with Iran and welcoming the rise of China.

In each of these areas, as in his decision to abandon the 20-year war in Afghanistan, Mr Biden is trying to temper his long-held ideals about America’s role with realism about the world as it is. His overall goal, as one of his advisers put it, is to pursue a “strengthening of the multilateral, rules-based order, in which the United States takes a role to make sure authoritarian states don’t undermine those rules”. Mr Biden is attempting a two-track policy, trying at once to resist and relate to such regimes: to constrain their territorial ambitions and discourage their human-rights abuses and transnational meddling, while working with them where their interests might overlap with America’s.

Mr Biden has yet to get key members of his foreign-policy team in place, including, in the case of Russia, a Russia director at the National Security Council or his number-three official at the State Department, Victoria Nuland, who is expected to take a strong hand in Russia policy. She has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. But in a rare instance of continuity, Mr Biden has held over the Trump-appointed ambassador to Moscow, John Sullivan. Further, Bill Burns, the director of the CIA, is a former ambassador to Moscow, and the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was deputy national security adviser and then deputy secretary of state under Mr Obama. Mr Biden himself is drawing on experience in the Obama administration and, before that, on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. America has not had a president so steeped in foreign affairs in 30 years.

In the view of Mr Biden’s advisers, an American failure to stand up to Mr Putin over the past 12 years—what Ms Nuland has called America’s “ambivalence and neglect”—has enabled his adventurism, an assessment that may exaggerate the influence anyone can hope to have over Mr Putin. This administration’s approach to Russia, as to China and Iran, is a matter of wary calibration and diplomatic choreography.

Mr Biden went out of his way to surprise no one except the press with the sanctions he imposed last week on Russia for interfering in the 2020 American election, conducting the vast SolarWinds cyber-hack, and other nasty acts. He called Mr Putin and warned him of forthcoming penalties two days before he announced them. The European Union, Britain and others were ready with statements of support once he did.

Mr Biden called this “measured and proportionate”. Yet the Americans also made clear they had included a ratchet, to allow them to tighten sanctions if Russia continued to misbehave: for example, blocking American financial institutions from buying rouble-denominated bonds in the primary market. Mr Biden’s executive order provided the authority to expand those debt sanctions.

But in his telephone call to Mr Putin, Mr Biden mixed his message of rebuke by proposing a summit meeting to be held in Europe this summer, framed around arms control. Daniel Fried of the Atlantic Council, a foreign-policy think-tank, who served as assistant secretary of European and Eurasian Affairs under George W. Bush and at the beginning of Mr Obama’s administration, said the mixed message was unusual, and welcome. “American administrations have had a tendency to fall into two traps in dealing with Russia,” said Mr Fried, who was with Mrs Clinton when she presented the button. “It’s either ‘reset’ or a hard line across the board.” By contrast, he added, “The Biden team has given themselves room to work with Putin, without pulling their punches.”

The American exchange with Russia had a businesslike, even ritualised air. After levelling the penalties, which also included sanctions on 32 Russian companies and individuals and the expulsion of ten officials attached to the Russian mission in Washington, Mr Biden said that he had urged Mr Putin to “respond appropriately” rather than exceed the American blow. Mr Putin seems to have got the message. A day later Russia said it would expel ten American diplomats and banned eight current and former American officials from entering Russia. Mr Lavrov said that, for now, Russia would not impose “painful measures” on American companies. The Russians and Americans moved on to discussing Mr Biden’s proposed summit.

The same mix of firmness and solicitation has characterised Mr Biden’s approach to Iran and China. He pledged during the campaign to swiftly revive the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by Mr Obama and abrogated by Mr Trump. But although Mr Biden pressed for direct negotiations with Iran, he disappointed the Iranians, and some Democratic allies, by not immediately lifting sanctions imposed by Mr Trump as “maximum pressure”.

The Iranians “had different expectations of the Biden administration”, one administration official said. “They thought President Biden would immediately come in and take unilateral steps.” Negotiations are continuing in Vienna but, regardless of the outcome, the administration plans to retain some Trump sanctions over matters unrelated to Iran’s nuclear programme.

Mr Biden has accused the Chinese government of genocide, and he is rallying international opposition to China’s hegemonic ambitions in Asia. That was why his first foreign visitor to the White House was Japan’s prime minister, Suga Yoshihide. After their meeting, on April 16th they issued a statement stressing among other things “the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait”. The Chinese government snarled back, calling the statement an attempt to divide the region.

Here’s the deal

At the same time, Mr Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, was meeting his Chinese counterpart in Shanghai. In a sign that at least one adversary is prepared to accept some dissonance in American policy—or perhaps that the enemy of your enemy can be your shared enemy—the two men emerged on Saturday with a joint statement committing their nations to working together against climate change.

But issuing joint statements, like talking about summit meetings, is pale progress compared with closing coal plants, withdrawing troops, decommissioning nuclear weapons or halting genocide. Almost 100 days in, President Biden has shown that he can make a hard decision, as he did on Afghanistan. He has many more ahead of him as he seeks to strike not just a theoretical balance but actual compromises between an idealist’s hopes and a realist’s expectations.■

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A version of this article was published online on April 20th, 2021