When a drunken relative of yours that has been causing heartburn to the neighbors for some time now, outdoes himself one day, causing a major disturbance in the neighborhood, and requiring several of your neighbors to help you restrain him, you take that relative indoor and remain quiet for a while.
That is, you pause to give
yourself and the neighbors time to catch your breaths. Before you inflict your
sight on the neighbors again, you want to reflect on what just happened, and
you want to give the neighbors time to do likewise; maybe even say a prayer to
thank whatever God you or they worship for the fact that the incident did not
cause more damage than it did.
This kind of response to a
traumatic collective event, is so fundamental to human culture, it applies not
only among individuals and families but also tribes and nations. Thus, having
recognized that for the last four years, Donald Trump has acted like a drunken
member of the American tribe, greatly disturbing the global village, you decide
this is not the time for his successor to tell the world how America plans to
lead it to a better place. And yet, this is what many pundits have been doing
lately. Each has urged Joe Biden, the newly elected President of the United
States, to adopt their agenda, and force it on the world.
The exception has been Richard
Haass who recognized that Joe Biden has taken the correct approach. He
explained how this was done in an article he wrote under the title: “Wither the
US Foreign Policy?” and had the article published on February 8, 2021 in the
online magazine, Project Syndicate.
Quoting from a speech that Joe
Biden gave on February 4, 2021, Richard Haass detected the President's
inclination to preoccupy himself more with what America needs to do to clean up
its own house, than run around the world looking for someone else's dirt to
clean or someone's mess to fix.
Declaring that “America was
back,” Joe Biden had signaled that a new chapter in American behavior has
started. To say that America intends to pause for a while, he promised that the
withdrawal of American troops from Germany will be halted, and that America's
involvement in Yemen will be curtailed.
To explain his own view as to
what Biden will face when he decides to turn his attention to the world,
Richard Haass began that part of the discussion with this cautionary note:
“Biden's ability to succeed in the world will be limited by several factors.” He cited as culprits the January 6, 2021
insurrection at the US Capitol, the polarization of the country, its endemic
racism, and Trump's inept handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
When all is said and done,
what comes out the Richard Haass article is that Joe Biden is facing a global
situation in which the circle begs to be squared. It is that on the one hand,
Joe Biden wants to return to the status quo ante that has served America well
throughout the decades, but the world has changed for one thing, and has
stopped seeing America the way it used to, for another thing. This combination
will require herculean efforts and a ton of luck to untangle and resolve.
That means America will have
to adapt to the new situation more than it tries to change it. And for this to
succeed, America will have to transform itself some, while expecting less
adaptation from the rest of the world. For example, Haass is happy with Biden's
pledge to open the country's doors to a large number of refugees. And he
suggested that Joe Biden can do even better by making available a large number
of vaccines to the developing world.
This said, there are difficult
situations America must navigate because it cannot avoid them, according to
Richard Haass. They are China, Russia and North Korea, each of which represents
a unique kind of problem. And then, there is Iran which poses an altogether
different kind of problem. As far as the first three are concerned, it is that
each nation habitually violates one set of international laws or another.
But Haass admits there is very
little that Biden can do because the only weapon he has, is to criticize them
for their human rights record, something he will not do because it could hold
as hostage the entire relationship between the countries. This prompted Richard
Haass to conclude that perhaps the time has come for America to stop making
human rights central to US foreign policy. Hallelujah!
As to Iran, there is
recognition that this topic has been debated to exhaustion. All that Haass will
say about it this time, is that Joe Biden will have to choose between
re-entering the nuclear deal that was ditched by Donald Trump, or stay out of
it regardless of the nefarious consequences such decision may entail.
Finally, Richard Haass makes the point that no matter how the foreign policy of Joe Biden shapes up, what has unfolded during the past four years in America, caused the allies and the rest of the world to suspect that what they witnessed was not an aberration, but the reality of what America has become and will so remain in the future.