The AUKUS agreement certainly shouldn't have been held up over French objections. "This brutal, unilateral, unpredictable decision looks very much like what Mr. The result is a surprisingly acrimonious outburst accusing Australia of a "stab in the back" and the United States of an even more exasperating betrayal. France feels overlooked and bypassed, its own ambitions in East Asia scuttled.Īnd if that weren't enough, the French foreign affairs minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, also claims he was frozen out of discussions over the AUKUS agreement and not warned about its announcement ahead of time.
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Then there are geopolitical considerations. That country had a 50 billion euro deal with Australia to supply its navy with diesel-powered submarines that it now has to scrap. Yet the defense pact has also been badly received by another imporant ally: France. The result is potentially a significant shift in the balance of power in the region. Instead of relying primarily on NATO to check China's ambitions in the Asia-Pacific, as he indicated he might just a few months ago, Biden decided to build on longstanding bilateral ties to London and Canberra to devise a more aggressive approach based on greatly enhancing Australia's naval strength and capacity. The new trilateral "AUKUS" partnership does indeed demonstrate the advantage of cultivating allies - and shows how useful it can be to think outside the boxes that often constrain strategic and tactical planning among members of the foreign policy establishment. and Australia, "our greatest source of strength." Trump, a thoroughgoing unilateralist, frequently expressed contempt for allies and even appeared to relish attempting to extort protection money (or collect tribute) from countries to which we had extended defense guarantees.īiden takes a very different approach, describing our alliances as "sacred" and even, as he put it in his remarks on Wednesday announcing the defense agreement with the U.K. The two presidents are furthest apart on the value of allies. Which isn't to say that Biden is just a more knowledgeable and less crude version of Trump. And of course, Trump and Biden agreed on the goal of withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan over the objections of key players in the national security establishment. That's a level of audacity to rival Trump's highly unorthodox overtures to North Korea early in his presidency and his administration's later role in helping to broker the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. to pull back from its role in keeping the unstable nation intact. Back during the Bush administration, Biden broke sharply from the national security consensus in proposing to partition Iraq (turning it into a federal state with three semi-autonomous regions) as a way of stemming the tide of violence there and allowing the U.S. In this respect, Biden more closely resembles the thoroughly unconventional Donald Trump. But in other areas, he deferred to rather than fought the conventional Washington wisdom. Neither did Barack Obama, at least when it came to Iran and Cuba. Joe Biden doesn't think and act like a member of the American foreign policy establishment.
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If Iran has been considered a mortal enemy since 1979, we should continue to view the country and its rulers as enemies. If NATO is our most important alliance, it should remain our most important alliance. If we have troops in Afghanistan, we should keep troops in Afghanistan.
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I mean, instead, that members of this establishment, whether they incline toward the left or the right, tend to favor consistency. I don't mean that it affirms the ideological conservatism that dominates the Republican Party, though there is some overlap there. That instinct is Biden's greatest strength in the making of foreign policy - but it's also intertwined with his greatest weakness in dealing with the wider world.Īmerica's foreign policy establishment is deeply conservative. With Wednesday's surprise announcement of a new defense pact between the United States, Great Britain, and Australia to counter China's aggressive moves in the South China Sea and throughout the Asia-Pacific region, Joe Biden has once again demonstrated an instinct for bold thinking and action in international affairs.