New Delhi: When the Joe Biden administration is sworn in later this week in Washington, a China critic seen as a strong interlocutor for India will take charge as US Secretary of State.
However, in looking at China with suspicion, Antony J. Blinken will not be alone. Biden’s foreign policy and national security team — which includes men and women from diverse backgrounds — is packed with Beijing sceptics, going by their articles, speeches and interviews over the four years of Donald Trump’s tenure.
The team includes Kurt Campbell, who will serve as Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific and has batted for the UK’s proposal to create a multilateral grouping for democratic countries that includes the G-7 alongside India, Australia and South Korea.
Another member, Cara Abercombie, the Senior Director for Defense in the National Security Council — the US President’s “principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy matters” — has done exhaustive research on the India-US defence partnership and the factors holding it back from achieving its full potential.
Most members of Team Biden seem eager to restore the relationships — especially with Europe — that Trump is seen to have damaged since he became President in 2017.
Much censure has also been reserved for Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran peace deal, and his overtures towards North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Among other things, Biden has promised to put the US back in the global campaign against climate change, with the new administration creating a cabinet-level post of special envoy for climate to undo the damage done under Trump, a vocal warming sceptic.
Last week, Dhruva Jaishankar, the Executive Director at think tank Observer Research Foundation America, compiled a Twitter thread of speeches, articles and interviews by Team Biden that offer a peek at what his presidency is likely to bring to the table over the next four years. Excerpts:
5. Here is Sullivan and Kurt Campbell (reported to be named Indo-Pacific coordinator at the White House) on competition with China: https://t.co/dz1fw4Gf5a
— Dhruva Jaishankar (@d_jaishankar) January 14, 2021
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Antony J. Blinken, US Secretary of State
Blinken, popularly known as Tony Blinken, said in July last year that there is now a common understanding and consensus in the US that China “poses a series of new challenges and that the status quo was really not sustainable particularly when it comes to China’s commercial and economic practices, the lack of reciprocity in the relationships or something that couldn’t be sustained and needed to be, and continue to need to be, dealt with”.
Speaking at the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank, he said the Donald Trump administration had “helped” China advance its strategic interests.
“When it comes to values, our abdication of standing up for our own values and in Asia and with regard to China’s actions, has, I think, given the government in Beijing, a sense of greater impunity when it comes to cracking down on democracy in Hong Kong or for that matter, dealing and abusing the human rights of Uyghurs in China,” he added.
In India, Blinken is seen as a strong interlocutor for Delhi.
At the July 2020 Hudson Institute event, Blinken said “strengthening and deepening the relationship with India is going to be a very high priority” for Biden.
Wendy Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State
In July 2020, Sherman penned an article — The Total Destruction of U.S. Foreign Policy Under Trump — for the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.
She called Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear Deal a “painful and costly example” of Trump’s foreign policy.
“Over three years after the Trump administration withdrew from the nuclear deal, Iran has more highly enriched uranium available for a nuclear weapon, more operating nuclear facilities, more sophisticated technology, and a shorter breakout time to build a nuclear weapon,” she wrote.
She also criticised Trump for his overtures to the North Korean leader and called it nothing but “a series of photo opportunities with dictator Kim Jong-un”.
“As Trump has done with European allies on Iran, Washington has left allies in Seoul and Tokyo blindsided and out of the loop, dangerously exposed both to North Korea and to the erratic policies of the United States, and with no hope of any de-escalation of tensions with Pyongyang,” she said.
Janet Yellen, US Treasury Secretary
Economist Yellen, who became the first woman to head the US central bank aka the Federal Reserve in 2014, has broken another glass ceiling with her nomination as US Treasury Secretary.
Speaking at the Asian Financial Forum last January, she said the next phase of the US-China trade war is going to be in the field of hi-tech — from artificial intelligence and super-fast 5G mobile networks to other tech tools key to national security.
“These issues are going to be quite difficult to deal with and will have very significant consequences for the global economy,” she said, as quoted by CNN.
Victoria Nuland, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs
Nuland is a votary of “healing the NATO alliance”, or the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, an over-70-year-old political and military partnership between 30 countries, two from North America and 28 from Europe.
In October 2019, she explained her concerns on the “And Now the Hard Part” podcast series of Foreign Policy magazine and research group Brookings.
“My concern is simply that if we ever had a catastrophic moment or a security crisis, do the rest of the members of NATO feel secure enough in the way the United States supports them that they would support us if we needed them?” said the Brookings Institution scholar who is also a former assistant secretary of state.
Nuland, who has served as US Ambassador to NATO, also said, “It depends on how long this seeding of doubt about our own reliability continues.”
Trump referred to NATO as “obsolete, old, fat and sloppy” over and over again, upsetting some of America’s traditional alliances.
A “fierce critic” of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Nuland is “despised by the Kremlin, and her confirmation is sure to anger the Russian President as Mr Biden plans to both firmly confront and seek to find common ground with Moscow”, according to a report in The New York Times.
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Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser
Sullivan has formerly served as National Security Adviser (NSA) to Joe Biden during the latter’s stint as Vice-President to Barack Obama.
In an interview with journalist Fareed Zakaria for CNN earlier this month, Sullivan said Biden will “first and foremost consult US’ allies in Europe and Asia in dealing with China”, be it on trade or on strategic issues, and not go into it alone.
In January-February 2019, he said the “core purpose of American foreign policy must be to protect and defend the American way of life”.
“No vision of American exceptionalism can succeed if the United States does not defeat the emerging vision that emphasizes ethnic and cultural identity and restore a more hopeful and inclusive definition: a healthy democracy, shared economic prosperity, and security and freedom for all citizens to follow the paths they choose,” he added.
Sullivan believes it is due to “American statecraft” that the major powers of the world “have not returned to war with one another since 1945”, when the Second World War ended.
Kurt Campbell, Coordinator for Indo-Pacific
Last week, US President-elect Joe Biden appointed top American diplomat Kurt M. Campbell as the coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs, putting to rest doubts about the future of a major strategic policy that aims to balance China’s rise.
Campbell and Sullivan co-authored an article in 2019 for Foreign Affairs where they noted that, despite deep divisions in Washington over a plethora of issues, “there is a growing consensus that the era of engagement with China has come to an unceremonious close”.
Campbell, whose appointment came to light around the same time that the White House declassified new documents on the US’ Indo-Pacific policy, emphasised in another Foreign Affairs article this month, co-authored with Rush Doshi of Brookings, that it will be a challenge for the US to build bridges with European leaders in its stand against China.
In the article, Campbell also batted for a D-10 (a coalition of 10 democracies that has been proposed by the UK), which will include the G-7 countries plus Australia, India and South Korea.
Jon Finer, Deputy NSA
Finer, who has earlier served as chief of staff to John Kerry during his tenure as Secretary of State, and as director of policy planning at the State Department, wrote in 2017 in Foreign Policy that the “first foreign policy crisis” of the Trump administration had been its war in Yemen, which “most Americans could not find on a map”.
“While Iran and the Houthis have historically maintained an arms-length relationship, the long conflict has brought them closer and led to the introduction of more advanced weapons, such as missiles capable of striking deep into Saudi territory or of threatening the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a critical channel for maritime traffic,” he wrote.
Tarun Chhabra, Senior Director for Technology and National Security, National Security Council
In a piece for Brookings, Chhabra, an Indian-American, noted that China’s rise has created “tremendous headwinds” for democracy and liberal values globally, while “threatening US alliances, liberal economic order, and even the political identity of the United States and its democratic partners and allies”.
Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence
In a speech at Brookings in October 2017, Haines had torn into Trump’s policy towards North Korea, which the US has traditionally considered a pariah state.
Prior to the Trump administration, she said, both the Republicans as well as the Democrats kept up the “diplomatic and economic pressure” on North Korea in order to bring them to the negotiating table over nuclear bombs.
She called for developing a “contingency plan” with not just the traditional allies of the US but also with China to mitigate the challenges posed by North Korea.
In March 2017, she had spoken of partnering with countries around the world to confront terrorism.
William Burns, Chief of Central Intelligence Agency
A former career diplomat, Burns has been named chief of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
In his over three-decade-long diplomatic career, Burns has served five US presidents, both Democrats as well as Republicans. Burns played an instrumental role in leading the US’ secret talks with Iran that culminated in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the Iran Nuclear Deal. Trump withdrew the US from the JCPOA in 2018.
In July last year, he wrote in The Atlantic that the “US Needs a New Foreign Policy”.
“The global order is crumbling, domestic renewal is urgent, and America must reinvent its role in the world,” he stated.
In another piece — ‘The Transformation of Diplomacy’ in Foreign Affairs — he and co-author Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who has been nominated to the post of US Ambassador to the UN, spoke of the “need to treat the lack of diversity in the diplomatic corps as a national security crisis”.
“It not only undermines the power of the United States’ example; it also suffocates the potential of the country’s diplomacy. Study after study has shown that more diverse organizations are more effective and innovative organizations,” the authors wrote.
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Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense
Biden called Austin, a retired four-star Army general, a “statesman” and a “seasoned soldier” in an article published in The Atlantic in December.
Austin will be the first African-American to become the US Secretary of Defense.
In an interview published on the US Army website in January 2018, he said, “The end of the Cold War, the nuclear weapons drawdown, and the subsequent proliferation of conventional arms have shaped how we view the operational environment.”
Speaking about a Multi-Domain Battle (MDB), Austin had stated, “Trust is the essential ingredient to forming, norming, and holding together coalitions. Coalition management has to be at the core of future MDBs,” he added.
Kathleen Hicks, Deputy Defense Secretary
Hicks, a former Pentagon official, is all set to become the first woman Deputy Defense Secretary.
In a March 2018 report to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a US-based think tank where she is a senior adviser, Hicks wrote about three challenges posed by Russia with respect to maritime domain awareness (MDA) efforts in northern Europe.
“In order to provide security in northern Europe, NATO and its allies must use MDA frameworks to understand and respond to the challenges above, on, and underneath the sea, as well as the surrounding land environment. While some constructive work has been done to address the evolving Russian threat, NATO and its partners must make changes to their current MDA capabilities to evolve alongside with it,” she wrote.
Colin Kahl, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
Colin Kahl, who served as Biden’s National Security Adviser when he was Vice-President, has been nominated as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.
In a January 2020 article for Foreign Policy, Kahl said the killing of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani by a US drone days before had pushed the strained ties between Washington and Tehran to a “much more dangerous phase”.
Katherine Tai, US Trade Representative
Tai, who has been appointed US Trade Representative (USTR), played a key role in the recently signed US-Mexico-Canada agreement that replaced NAFTA.
At a webinar in August 2020, Tai, who was then the chief trade counsel, House Ways & Means Committee, the House of Representatives’ chief tax-writing panel, had spoken about US-China trade tensions.
According to her, there should be a “robust political support” in making trade with China competitive for the US to effectively address the challenges.
“I think that there will be and we are seeing a robust political support for taking aggressive and bold steps with respect to how we can compete with China,” she said.
John Kerry, Special Envoy for Climate
Kerry, who served as the US Secretary of State from 2013-2017, wrote in The New York Times last October that climate change is such a challenge that it “won’t wait for the resolution of our (US and China) differences”.
“Today, the world is watching our two countries again on this issue — with some skepticism. We now have an opportunity to go further and join together in a new groundbreaking initiative that would dispel doubt about the global commitment to oceans-based climate solutions,” he said.
Cara Abercombie, Senior Director for Defense, National Security Council
Abercombie had written an exhaustive article on US-India defence ties in January 2019 for the National Bureau of Asian Research, US-based research institution.
While both Washington and New Delhi have vowed and worked towards creating a robust defence relationship, she said, the “overall output resulting from numerous dialogues, military exercises, and engagements and the tangible impact on Indian and US security objectives are less than one would expect given the level of input and the number of years spent working toward these goals”.
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