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**SEPTEMBER 24, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

Biden's Bungled Execution of Brave Foreign Policies

It would be most unfortunate if this became the administration's
trademark. Here are three:

Exhibit A: Biden's Australia policy, in the main, makes great sense.
It is part of his China reset, which is long overdue. Bringing in India
is even smarter.

As our friend Clyde Prestowitz points out, China has been striving to
make Australia a de facto economic colony that is so dependent on
Beijing that Australia dare not cross China geopolitically. When the
Aussies balk, China does things to squeeze Canberra, like boycotting
Australian wine, coal, and other exports.

As Prestowitz writes
,

Chinese companies came to control a large portion of Australia's major
pipelines and a large segment of its telecommunications infrastructure.
Chinese firms also manage most of Australia's big ports. Chinese
billionaires began migrating to Australia and making large political
donations, as well as large donations to universities. All of the
formerly independent Chinese language newspapers published by
Australia's Chinese community came to be owned from mainland China and
to publish news that follows the Beijing line.

So Australia was at the very outer limits of the time when it could make
a closer alliance with the U.S. as a counterweight to Beijing, and it
was shrewd of Biden to oblige. But surely there were a dozen other ways
to do this without humiliating France, America's oldest ally. So a
smart policy looked like a stumble.

Exhibit B: Afghanistan. It was brave of Biden to end the interminable
and fruitless U.S. military presence. But as generals and Kabul-based
diplomats had warned Biden well before the fact, the time to negotiate
an understanding with the Taliban on safe-conduct exits and some
semblance of human rights was before setting a date certain for a final
pullout, not after.

And then, Exhibit C: Vaccines for the world. Biden bravely changed the
U.S. position on intellectual property protections, known as TRIPs, a
deal sponsored by the WTO. The U.S. supports a TRIPS waiver, so that
vaccines using Pfizer and Moderna processes can be manufactured and
distributed cheaply all over the world with compulsory
licensing.  Except there has been no follow up.

So it now appears, to Biden's chagrin, that the choice is getting
booster shots to Americans or allowing vaccine makers to sell
elsewhere-at sticker prices and obscene profits. This is a totally
needless framing of the alternatives. Why isn't the TRIPS waiver
getting done?

Somebody is screwing up, and the fallout harms Biden. His policy changes
are courageous and directionally overdue, but the devil is in the
details. His foreign-policy team needs to clean up its act-or he
should get a new one.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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