By Jide Osuntokun
President Joe Biden has been in power for less than three months and the time is too short to have a full picture of the direction of regime’s policies but morning shows the day as childhood shows manhood. His policy at home will of course be subject to robust Republican challenge and even filibustering in the senate. He will have to moderate his policies in order to have national consensus in an ideologically and culturally fractured society. The areas of contention at home are immigration, health, civil rights, racism, housing, culture, infrastructure, energy, the environment, education and police reforms. These are subjects which American administrations since Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s have battled with sometimes with a national consensus but in most cases with sharp divisions between the Democrats on the Left and the Republicans on the Right.
While foreign policy cannot be completely divorced from domestic policies but in some cases the linkage between the two may not be obvious. The foreign policy of a country like that of the USA remains fixed on the protection of its national interest. What appears to be different between the Democratic and Republican parties is at best tenuous and a difference in emphasis and in the dramatis personae. American foreign policy in the Middle East tries to protect American Oil Majors which had invested heavily in the development of the Middle East oil. Protecting them was couched in the defence of democracy and free navigation of international waters. This policy has been defended by Republican Administrations from David Dwight Eisenhower to Democratic administration of Joe Biden. While oil may no longer be important as a factor in American Middle East policy, America’s investment in the area and the strategic importance of the Middle East in global shipping and aviation will always make control and influence in the Middle East important to policy makers in Washington DC and now of course in Beijing and Moscow.
America wants to reduce the power and nuclear ambitions of Iran while tolerating Israel’s excesses and those of Arab monarchies favorable to American interest. Surprisingly Biden has moved strongly against the Saudi Crown prince which a quieter policy could well have achieved. But America is not the only player there.
The Russian federation needs neutrality if not acquiescence of the Muslim world in the way it tackles the serious Islamic fundamentalist problems of the Russian Caucasus and its relation with the now sovereign Muslim majority republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan where fundamentalism has remained a worrying political problem.
China also needs friendship with the keepers of the holiest places of Islam to mollify its restive Muslim population in Northwest China particularly in Xinjiang, Gansu and Ningxia and significant Muslim population in Yunnan province in the South West and Henan province in Central China. In the past, Western policy makers used to feel that China and Russia did not have abiding interest in the Middle East but the situation has changed. The Soviet Union maintained presence in the Middle East ideologically and militarily in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt after Colonel Abdel Nasser came to power in 1956. China, until recently, did not count for much in global politics but since the Korean War of 1953, China has demonstrated muscle in protecting its interest in the Pacific and I remember a statement credited to Zhou En Lai, China’s prime minister in 1956 that in the event of war with the USA, China would be prepared to sacrifice 100 million Chinese and it would still have over a billion Chinese left. This came as a sobering moment to people in the Pentagon who were used to threatening China with nuclear weapons following Chinese troops pouring into North Korea to defend it against western allies fighting under the flag of the United Nations.
What used to be a bipolar world of the United States and the USSR has now metamorphosed into a Tripolar world of a dominant USA, a much weaker Russia which President Obama dismissed as a medium power and resurgent China with a GDP of USD14.34 trillion (2019) compared with the USA USD20.9 trillion (2020) and Russia’s GDP of USD1.7 trillion (2019) which is about half of Germany’s.
World peace is guaranteed by the fear of universal nuclear holocaust which John F Kennedy captured in his remarks during the Cuban crisis of 1963 by saying if war broke out between America and the Soviet Union, the “living will envy the dead” meaning those who survive will wither away through the painful death caused by radioactive fallout. Robert Oppenheimer the father of the atomic bomb was said to have regretted letting the genie out of the bottle and one of the earliest nuclear scientists, Albert Einstein was sad at the coming of the bomb and said if a Third World War was fought, the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones because civilization will not survive a thermonuclear exchange by the then two super powers. The situation is now more complex because of the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of Britain, France, India, Pakistan and now Israel, North Korea and in spite of the nuclear weapons’ non-proliferation treaty, some countries like Iran are determined to have atomic weapons ostensibly for defensive purposes. If this pandora box is not closed tightly, the technology and the money is available in countries like Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea even Brazil.
The antagonism of the Biden administration to Russia and China is therefore wrong-headed. Calling the Russian President a “killer” is totally undiplomatic. Putin in return, says he wishes the American president good health meaning he thinks the old man is unhinged. Trying to reset American-Russian relations to pre- Trump level doesn’t mean President Biden calling another president a killer even if there is incontrovertible and public evidence. What does America gain from it?
American-Russian relation is too serious to be based on some nebulous civil rights consideration no matter how popular it is with the Democratic Left. Saying Putin will be punished and every American would see it is a “misspeak” because apart from economic pressures, what can America that has been wearied and weakened by two decades of wars in Asia and the Middle East do to Russia? Does Biden want to liberate the Crimean Peninsula annexed by Russia since 2014? Of course, Biden can make Russia pay in places like Syria and block the gas pipeline bringing gas from Russia to Germany. Before this brouhaha died down, Biden’s foreign minister Anthony J. Blinken publicity lashed out at China in a public meeting in Alaska telling the Chinese, America would no longer tolerate China’s stealing of American technology by violating copyright of American companies as well as violation of democratic rights of people in Hong Kong and the rights of Muslims in Zinjiang and that America would resist China’s meddling in Taiwan affairs and obstruction of international waterways in South China Sea. The whole world knows this is standard American policy but what benefit did America derive from this public spat which elicited appropriate insulting response from China.
Biden in this careless way of undoing Trump’s policy has unwittingly driven his two potential enemies into each other’s warm embrace. Yet, he needs China’s help in dealing with the recalcitrant Kim Jong-un of North Korea on denuclearization.
Western Europe must be worrying about Biden’s wobbly foreign policy because if war were to break out and fought with conventional and tactical nuclear weapons, it will probably be fought first in the European theatre before it spreads to the whole world. Of course, if any disastrous policies emanate from lack of professionalism in the USA, they should not expect their European and Canadian allies to follow them sheepishly.
One area of domestic policy that will explode in the face of Biden is the impression he has given to people in South and Central America that the American southern border is open to welcome gate-crashing immigrants into America where anti-immigrant racism and white supremacist tendencies are getting out of hands. The Biden administration is now soliciting for Mexico’s assistance by offering it two million Astra-Seneca vaccines which America doesn’t need.
Lest I am misunderstood on the issue of immigration, I believe that the success of the Biden Democratic administration is so important to the welfare of the rest of the world that everything should be done to prevent the return of Trumpian racist white supremacist republicanism.
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