Biden has made clear that he intends to end the Trump policy of “America first” and return to a more traditional international approach of collaborating with longtime U.S. allies.
“ ‘America First’ has made America alone,” Biden said in October.
The Biden administration plans to renew U.S. commitments to NATO, the 30-country alliance that helped keep the peace during the Cold War. It also intends to work closely with nations such as France, Germany, and Canada, resetting relations that were strained under Trump.
Biden intends to treat America’s adversaries very differently than his predecessor did as well. He hopes to resurrect the 2015 Iran nuclear deal* that Trump pulled the U.S. out of in 2018, as long as Iran agrees to once again comply with its terms.
The U.S. relationship with China is more tense now than it’s been in a long time. Biden will need to find a way to work with China, which has the world’s second-largest economy, on trade and issues such as addressing the nuclear threat from North Korea, which remains despite President Trump’s efforts to broker a deal with North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un.
Many foreign policy experts worry that America’s withdrawal in the past few years from its traditional global leadership role has left a power vacuum and raised concerns among other nations about America’s reliability.
“You’ll see a style of foreign policy that is more cooperative and less go-it-alone,” Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, predicts about the Biden administration.
Haass adds that one of the biggest changes we can expect is the attitude of the U.S. toward the rest of the world. That’s especially important as nations confront a global pandemic and an economic crisis.
Leadership is about persuasion, Haass says: “So tone matters, because we want to persuade others to work with us.”