President Joe Biden opened the first overseas trip of his term
Wednesday with a declaration that “the United States is back” as he seeks to
reassert the nation on the world stage and steady European allies deeply shaken
by his predecessor.
Biden has set the stakes for his eight-day trip in sweeping
terms, believing the West must publicly demonstrate it can compete economically
with China as the world emerges from
the coronavirus pandemic. It is an open
repudiation of his predecessor, Donald Trump, who scorned alliances and
withdrew from a global climate change agreement that Biden has since rejoined.
The president’s first stop was a visit with U.S. troops and
their families at Royal Air Force Mildenhall, where he laid out his mission for
the trip.
“We’re going to make it clear that the United States is back and
democracies are standing together to tackle the toughest challenges and issues
that matter the most to our future,” he said. “That we’re committed to leading
with strength, defending our values, and delivering for our people.”
The challenges awaiting Biden overseas were clear as the
president and the audience wore masks — a reminder of the pandemic that is
still raging around much of the world even as its threat recedes within the
United States.
“We have to end COVID-19 not just at home -- which we’re doing
-- but everywhere,” Biden said.
Shortly before the president spoke, people briefed on the matter
said the Biden administration had brokered an agreement with Pfizer to purchase
500 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to be donated to 92 lower-income countries
and the African Union over the next year.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that
Biden was committed to sharing vaccines because it was in the public health and
strategic interests of the U.S. He added that Biden is aiming to show “that
democracies are the countries that can best deliver solutions for people
everywhere.”
“As he said in his joint session (address), we were the ‘arsenal
of democracy’ in World War II,” Sullivan said. “We’re going to be the ‘arsenal
of vaccines’ over this next period to help end the pandemic.”
Building toward his trip-ending
summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin,
Biden will aim to reassure European capitals that the United States can once
again be counted on as a dependable partner to thwart Moscow’s aggression both
on their eastern front and their internet battlefields.
The trip will be far more about messaging than specific actions
or deals. And the paramount priority for Biden is to convince the world that
his Democratic administration is not just a fleeting deviation in the
trajectory of an American foreign policy that many allies fear irrevocably
drifted toward a more transactional outlook under Trump.
“The trip, at its core, will advance the fundamental thrust of
Joe Biden’s foreign policy,” Sullivan said, “to rally the world’s democracies
to tackle the great challenges of our time.”
Biden’s to-do list is ambitious.
Biden is also looking to rally allies on their COVID-19 response
and to urge them to coalesce around a strategy to check emerging economic and
national security
competitor China even as the U.S.
expresses concern about Europe’s economic links to Moscow. Biden also wants to
nudge outlying allies, including Australia, to make more aggressive commitments
to the worldwide effort to curb
global warming.
The week-plus journey is a big moment for Biden, who traveled
the world for decades as vice president and as chair of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee and has now stepped off Air Force One onto international
soil as commander in chief. He will face world leaders still grappling with the
virus and rattled by four years of
Trump’s inward-looking foreign policy and
moves that strained longtime alliances as the Republican former president made
overtures to strongmen.
The president first attends
a summit of the Group of Seven leaders in
the U.K., and then visits Brussels for a NATO summit and a meeting with the
heads of the European Union. The trip comes at a moment when Europeans have
diminished expectations for what they can expect of U.S. leadership on the
foreign stage.
Central and Eastern Europeans are desperately hoping to bind the
U.S. more tightly to their security. Germany is looking to see the U.S. troop presence
maintained there so it doesn’t need to build up its own. France, meanwhile, has
taken the tack that the U.S. can’t be trusted as it once was and that the
European Union must pursue greater strategic autonomy going forward.
“I think the concern is real that the Trumpian tendencies in the
U.S. could return full bore in the midterms or in the next presidential
election,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. diplomat and once deputy
secretary general of NATO.
The sequencing of the trip is deliberate: Biden consulting with
Western European allies for much of a week as a show of unity before his summit
with Putin.
He holds a sitdown Thursday with British Prime Minster Boris
Johnson a day ahead of the G-7 summit to be held above the craggy cliffs of
Cornwall overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
The most tactile of politicians, Biden has grown frustrated by
the diplomacy-via-Zoom dynamics of the pandemic and has relished the ability to
again have face-to-face meetings that allow him to size up and connect with world
leaders. While Biden himself is a veteran statesman, many of the world leaders
he will see in England, including Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron,
took office after Biden left the vice presidency. Another, Germany’s Angela
Merkel, will leave office later this year.
There are several potential areas of tension. On climate change,
the U.S. is aiming to regain its credibility after Trump pulled the country
back from the fight against global warming. Biden could also feel pressure on
trade, an issue to which he’s yet to give much attention. And with the United
States well supplied with COVID-19 vaccines yet struggling to persuade some of
its own citizens to use it, leaders whose inoculation campaigns have been
slower have been pressuring Biden to share more surplus around the globe.
Another central focus will be China. Biden and the other G-7
leaders will announce an infrastructure financing program for developing
countries that is meant to compete directly with Beijing’s Belt-and-Road
Initiative. But not every European power has viewed China in as harsh a light
as Biden, who has painted the rivalry with the techno-security state as the
defining competition for the 21st century.
The European Union has avoided taking as strong a stance on
Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy movement or treatment of Uyghur
Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province as the
Biden administration may like. But there are signs that Europe is willing to
put greater scrutiny on Beijing.
Biden is also scheduled to meet with Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan while in Brussels, a face-to-face meeting between two leaders
who have had many fraught moments in their relationship over the years.
The trip finale will be Biden’s meeting with Putin.
Biden has
taken a very different approach to Russia than Trump’s friendly outreach. Their
sole summit, held in July 2018 in Helsinki, was marked by Trump’s refusal to
side with U.S. intelligence agencies over Putin’s denials of Russian
interference in the election two years earlier
By Jonathan Lemire and Aamer Madhani,
Associated Press.