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.
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.
