Joe Biden’s “first love,” the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, mused this week, “is foreign policy.” His lifelong interest showed on Thursday when the President, just two weeks in office, addressed the world from the State Department, on his first foray to a federal agency. President Trump only ventured the five blocks to the State Department once, in 2018, sixteen months after taking office, and only for the ceremonial swearing-in of Mike Pompeo, his second Secretary of State. Biden’s speech marked the beginning of his long schlep to repair America’s place in the world after Trump. “America is back,” Biden vowed. “We are a country that does big things. American diplomacy makes it happen. And our Administration is ready to take up the mantle and lead once again.”
But for such a vast subject—which goes to the heart of American power and global reach in the twenty-first century—Biden’s speech was more of a first dip than a big dive. There were lofty demands intertwined with principles for U.S. engagement. Biden, in stark contrast to Trump, had tough words for Russia, calling for an end to the suppression of protesters and for the release of Alexey Navalny, the poisoned dissident who was sentenced to jail this week. On China, the President pledged to “confront” Beijing’s regional aggression, economic abuses, and attacks on human rights. “American leadership must meet this new moment of advancing authoritarianism, including the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States and the determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our democracy,” he said.
Biden also insisted that the military leaders of a coup this week in Myanmar (which the United States still calls Burma) relinquish power immediately. “Force should never seek to overrule the will of the people or attempt to erase the outcome of a credible election,” he said. He vowed to work with allies to help restore democracy there and free government officials and activists detained by the junta. One of the most striking aspects of Biden’s address was that it included little about the Middle East or South Asia, which have diverted the attention of many previous Presidents. He never mentioned Israel, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, or the Iran nuclear deal. After the speech, the leader of a Middle Eastern country called me to express his astonishment. The one regional step that Biden did take was to halt U.S. support for the Saudi-led military offensive in Yemen, including “relevant” arms sales. He appointed a special envoy to help end Yemen’s six-year war, which has produced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with rampant starvation and disease, and left roughly two-thirds of the country’s thirty million people without access to clean water.
As part of a Pentagon review of America’s military footprint worldwide, the President announced a freeze on the withdrawal of twelve thousand U.S. troops in Germany, which Trump had mandated to the alarm of many in Europe and both parties in Congress. Biden also dramatically increased the number of refugees that will be allowed to enter the U.S. annually, from fifteen thousand during Trump’s last year to a hundred and twenty-five thousand this year. And to “repair our moral leadership,” Biden signed a new executive order making the rights of L.G.B.T.Q.I. people part of a reinvigorated global campaign on human rights.
Every action in U.S. foreign policy, the President said, will be taken “with American working families in mind.” At an earlier White House briefing, Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, signalled a basic shift from the Trump Administration. “We’re not about trying to make the world safe for multinational investment,” he told reporters. “Our priority is not to get access for Goldman Sachs in China. Our priority is to make sure that we are dealing with China’s trade abuses that are harming American jobs and American workers in the United States.”
Yet noble goals and principled intentions won’t solve the problem of America’s depleted international standing—or help the new President successfully implement his foreign policy. “America cannot afford to be absent any longer on the world stage,” Biden said. But the unanswered question after each pronouncement, by country or issue, was “How is he going to do that?” America’s forty-sixth President knows that the nation does not want new military deployments or entanglements to pressure adversaries, and economic sanctions take years, if not decades, to have much impact—if they do at all. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have successfully survived years of punitive U.S. sanctions.
“Biden is right to criticize Russia and China for violating the rule of law, but he cannot force their hand,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former diplomat, told me. “Putin and Xi are prepared to pay the price of sanctions to maintain control, and we cannot hold the entire relationship with either country hostage to human rights, as we have other vital interests to consider.” More broadly, the United States faces difficulty reaching its goals because there “is no consensus and no international community, and the U.S. cannot compel others to act as it wishes,” Haass said. “And it cannot succeed on its own.”
In Europe, Biden faces the core problem of convincing the United States’ chief diplomatic, economic, and military allies to believe in America again. Some wonder if the U.S.—which was, for decades, the world’s most powerful democracy—has lost its groove for good. “It will be hard to convince allies that Washington is capable of coming back as a global leader,” Mark Leonard, the co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “Our polling shows that, while most people in Europe were happy to see Biden elected, they also feel that America’s political system is broken, that they can’t rely on the U.S.A. to defend them, and that China will overtake the U.S.A. as a great power.” Europeans like what Biden stands for, “but they are not convinced that he can deliver, and they are worried about who will follow in his wake.”
America’s global reputation has plummeted to the point that it will even be difficult to persuade key Western allies to make common cause against China. “A majority of the public would prefer to stay neutral than to take America’s side,” Leonard said of European views. To regain the confidence of allies, the Biden Administration would have to think differently about alliances—and not assume “that other nations will automatically follow American leadership,” he added. Most of all, Biden has to prove that America has “the staying power to follow through.”
Biden’s speech may, however, boost efforts to rebuild the State Department, where morale has been flagging. A year ago, the agency’s inspector general, Steve Linick, reported that the department was plagued by “staff shortages, frequent turnover, poor leadership, and inexperienced and undertrained staff.” In May, Pompeo fired Linick, who was investigating him for using staff to do personal errands. In July, a forty-six-page report by Democratic staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee cited unfit staff, political reprisals, lack of accountability and budgets slashed by a third at the department. “The result is a State Department left feeling ‘besieged,’ ‘demoralized,’ ‘battered,’ ‘beaten,’ ‘mistreated,’ ‘paralyzed,’ and ‘at a new low,’ ” the report warned. Several career experts who were frustrated, disillusioned, or exhausted by the Trump Administration—and their exclusion from major foreign-policy decisions—simply quit. In a separate address to staffers, Biden pledged to listen to them—and to visit again. “Diplomacy is back,” he said. “You are the center of all that I intend to do.”
But the “harsh reality” for Biden, Haass said, is that he became President “at a time when what happens in the world matters enormously to America’s domestic well-being, but also at a time when U.S. influence in the world is much diminished . . . and when the lion’s share of the Administration’s efforts will have to go toward putting our domestic house in order.” Foreign policy may be Biden’s first love. But he will need a lot more than lofty speeches to change the world he inherited.
