WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden on Friday used his first speech in front of a global audience to declare ‘America is back, the trans-Atlantic alliance is back’, after four years of a Trump administration pursuing its foreign policy showing off an ‘America First’. lens.
Speaking at the annual security conference in Munich, Biden crossed a daunting task list – rescuing the Iran nuclear deal, tackling the economic and security challenges of China and Russia, and repairing the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. requires close cooperation between the US and its Western allies.
Without mentioning Donald Trump’s name once in his speech, Biden spoke of a new democratic alliance with a rebuke to the approach of his predecessor, a message that Western allies warmly received.
“I know the past few years have strained and tested the trans-Atlantic relationship,” Biden said. “The United States is determined to reconnect with Europe, to consult with you, to regain our position of trusted leadership.”
The president also attended a virtual meeting of the Group of Seven Industrialized Countries on Friday, where leaders succeeded in incorporating Biden’s campaign theme into their concluding joint statement, promising to ‘work together to defeat COVID-19 and better to rebuild ‘.
“Welcome back, America,” said European Council President Charles Michel, effectively summing up the mood of the Munich conference.
But while such happy talk has conveyed the tangible sense of relief among allies over Biden’s full commitment to restoring weakened relations between America and Europe, much has changed in new ways over the past four years to create new challenges.
China has reaffirmed its position as a fierce economic competitor on the continent as the US reconsiders the long-standing national security and economic priorities embedded in the trans-Atlantic alliance. Populism has grown in much of Europe. And other Western countries at one point tried to fill the vacuum left as America withdrew from the world scene.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted that some differences between the US and Europe remain ‘complicated’. Europe views China’s economic ambitions as an existential threat as the US does, and has its own strategic and economic concerns that also do not always agree with Biden on Russia.
Still, Merkel, who had a strained relationship with Trump, did not hide her preference for a U.S. foreign policy informed by Biden’s worldview.
“Things look much better for multilateralism this year than they did two years ago, and it has a lot to do with Joe Biden becoming the president of the United States of America,” Merkel said. “His speech, but also the first announcements of his administration, convinced us that it is not only talk, but also action.”
Biden delivered his speech to a worldwide audience when his government took steps this week to reverse the Trump administration’s most important policy.
He said the US was ready to rejoin the talks on acceding to the 2015 multilateral nuclear deal in Iran left by the Trump administration. The Biden government announced on Thursday that it wants to involve Iran again, and has acted with the United Nations to restore policy to what it was before Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018..
Biden also spoke out about the two-decade war in Afghanistan, where he faces a May 1 deadline to remove the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops under a Trump administration negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban. He also called for cooperation to address economic and national security challenges by Russia and China, and identified cyberspace, artificial intelligence and biotechnology as areas of increasing competition.
“We need to prepare together for long-term strategic competition with China,” Biden stated.
His message is surrounded by an underlying argument that democracies – not autocracies – are models of government that can best meet the challenges of the moment. The president urged fellow world leaders to show together that “democracies can still satisfy.”
At the G-7, administrative officials said, Biden focused on what lies ahead for the international community while trying to eradicate the public health and economic crises caused by the coronavirus pandemic.. He announced that the US would soon release $ 4 billion for an international effort to boost the purchase and distribution of vaccine to poor countries, a program that Trump has refused to support.
Biden’s turn on the world stage came when the US officially rejoined the Paris climate agreement, the largest international effort to curb global warming. Trump announced in June 2017 that he was removing the US from the characteristic agreement, arguing that the treaty would undermine the US economy.
Biden announces US intention to rejoin on the first day of his presidency, but he had to wait 30 days for the move to take effect. He said he would summarize considerations on climate change in every major domestic and foreign policy decision his government faces.
“This is a global existential crisis,” Biden said.
Biden also encouraged G-7 partners to implement their promises to COVAX, a World Health Organization initiative to improve access to vaccines, even if it reopens the U.S. spigot.
Trump withdrew the US from the WHO and refused to join more than 190 countries in the COVAX program. The former Republican president accused the WHO of covering up China’s mistakes in dealing with the virus at the start of the public health crisis that unraveled a strong US economy.
Biden has called for greater international collaboration on the distribution of vaccines amid growing calls for its administration to distribute some US-made vaccines overseas.
French President Emmanuel Macron has called on US and European countries to allocate up to 5% of the current vaccine supply to developing countries – the kind of vaccine diplomacy already used by China and Russia.
Biden, which announced last week that the U.S. would have enough vaccine to vaccinate 300 million people by the end of July, remains focused on making sure every American is vaccinated, administration officials say. Macron on Friday again pushed the US and Europe to do more.
“It is up to the Europeans and Americans to give all the poor and emerging countries in the world access to vaccines as quickly as possible,” he said.
Allies listened intently to what Biden had to say about an impending crisis with Iran.
Iran has notified the International Atomic Energy Agency this week that it will suspend the voluntary implementation of a provision in the 2015 agreement next week that will allow UN nuclear monitors to conduct inspections of unexplained sites in Iran at short notice, unless the US sanctions reversed by 23 February. .
“We must now make sure that there is no problem about who takes the first step,” Merkel told reporters. “If everyone is convinced that we need to give this agreement another chance, ways must be found to get this agreement back on track.”
—-
Associated Press authors Darlene Superville in Washington, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.