Honeymoon period’s over for Biden with real test to begin

The Biden administration has been busy over the past 30 days, signing a flurry of executive orders, largely aimed at reversing the Trump administration’s hallmark policies.

President Biden has also reached out to world leaders to lay down his foreign policy strategy, which in many ways, signals a return to the Obama-era approach.

But according to Michael Shoebridge, director of the defence, strategy and national security program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), these planned “set pieces” will be short-lived.

“[As] always with any plan, others get a say in what happens and, as former UK prime minister Harold MacMillan observed, plans change because of something simple and inevitable: ‘Events, dear boy, events’,” Shoebridge writes.

Shoebridge claims that President Biden has “had it easy so far”, acknowledging that while there will be more pre-planned moves in his first 100 days in office, “it gets harder from here”, with the Biden team to transition from a “set-piece” strategy to the “broken play” of governing the US and navigating the global environment.

“That’s no doubt well understood by folks like Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell and others in the foreign policy and national security team,” he adds.

Shoebridge notes that the administration has already had to respond to sudden developments in the geopolitical landscape, including the coup in Myanmar and Iran’s nuclear program.

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“Myanmar is providing an early test of how the new administration’s rhetoric about the centrality of human rights and freedoms at home and abroad will feature in the use of US power and influence,” he states.

But the ASPI analyst states that President Biden’s “core challenge” is Xi Jinping’s China, adding that if Biden pre-planned his opening moves, so did President Xi.

“Xi didn’t wait to let Biden settle into the Oval Office. As head of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, he sent some dozen Chinese military aircraft to breach Taiwanese airspace four days before the 20 January inauguration,” Shoebridge continues.

“On the same day, the CCP passed an aggressive new law authorising China’s coastguard to use force, including lethal force, not just in areas owned by China, but in areas subject to disputed claims — like the South and East China Seas, and around Taiwan.

“Xi also pushed the fast-forward button in Hong Kong, arresting 55 pro-democracy activists and subjecting pro-democracy voice Jimmy Lai to new charges under Beijing’s punitive and vindictive national security law, apparently including for speaking with foreign media organisations. Xi is likely to purge Hong Kong’s judiciary to end that unhelpful rule-of-law independence that might complicate Beijing’s use of power there.”

According to Shoebridge, President Xi’s most telling move thus far was his first phone call with President Biden, in which Chinese state media reported that he urged the US president to “respect China’s core interests and act prudently”.

“Xi gave up nothing as he urged Biden to follow a path of compromise and caution in order to avoid conflict and confrontation,” Shoebridge observes.

However, the analyst notes that the White House told a different story, “showing evidence of carefully prepared set-piece diplomacy”.

He continues: “Biden ‘underscored his fundamental concerns about Beijing’s coercive and unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan’.

“He also talked up the potential for the US and China to cooperate on shared challenges, including global health, climate change and preventing weapons proliferation.”

Biden also reportedly committed to pursuing “practical, results-oriented engagements” when it advances the interests of the United States and its allies.

“What’s going on here is interesting for what happens next,” Shoebridge writes.

The ASPI analyst contends that throughout 2020 and in the first two months of 2021, President Xi has shown he is a “high-stakes risk-taker and gambler”, who has been “deeply opportunistic and in a hurry to cement his place in CCP history”.

As such, he warns that President Biden should not do President Xi’s bidding and avoid confrontation and friction, which he claims would “empower Xi to take more and bigger risks”.

“[Not] just in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, but on Taiwan — and with continuing economic aggression and more of the rolling disinformation we’ve seen from China around the pandemic and his government’s awful mismanagement right at the start,” he adds.

“Over the next two months, we’ll begin to see if team Biden is as good at broken play as it is at pre-planned steps. And we’ll see if Biden resists Xi’s siren calls to settle world affairs just between Beijing and Washington, and instead brings in the power and voices of America’s allies and partners, with a core of unity despite discordant notes.”

Shoebridge calls on the Biden administration to “show capacity for positive risk-taking” through “big new moves” with allies, including Australia.

“His term for US-China relations — ‘extreme competition’ — is a hopeful sign that Biden gets this,” he writes.

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