By CHRIS MEGERIAN, FATIMA HUSSEIN and ELLEN KNICKMEYER, Associated Press
Published: July 25, 2022, 8:18 am
WASHINGTON (AP) — Shortly after taking office, President Joe Biden went to State Department headquarters to tell the rest of the world that the United States could be counted again after four years of Donald Trump’s foreign negotiations. policy.
“America is back,” Biden said, in what has become a mantra.
But keeping his promises on the international stage proved to be far more difficult than Biden could have expected. Domestic politics have routinely been a stumbling block when it comes to taking action on climate change, taxes and pandemic relief, undermining hopes that Biden can quickly restore the US to its unquestioned role as a global leader.
The result is a government struggling to maintain its credibility abroad as Biden struggles with rearguard action on Capitol Hill. It is simply harder to pressure other countries to do more to address challenges that cross borders when he is struggling to solve those same problems at home.
“Each new addition takes away a little bit of the shine and adds to the feeling of a struggling president,” said Michael O’Hanlon, director of foreign policy research at the Brookings Institution.
Biden has gained respect for organizing an international response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the US has shipped more coronavirus vaccines around the world than any other country.
Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said Biden had “restored our alliances, including our essential partnership with Europe, built new platforms and institutions in some of the most relevant regions of the world,” including the Indo-Pacific, and showed leadership on “the issues that matter most”.
But his foreign policy record is much more muddled when he has to secure support in Congress.
While he has secured some $54 billion in military and financial assistance to Ukraine — something Watson described as a historic amount delivered with “unprecedented speed” — Republicans remain uniformly opposed to many of his initiatives, and Biden has been crippled. because of disagreements among Democrats. .
The most recent problem has been the breakdown of intermittent talks with Senator Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who withdrew his support for a possible compromise in legislation to address climate change and create a global minimum tax.
On both issues, Biden had already made promises or reached an international agreement, but the US commitment is now in doubt.
The global minimum tax is intended to make it harder for companies to evade taxes by moving from country to country in search of lower rates. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen played a leading role in negotiating the agreement between 130 countries.
“Reaching that consensus wasn’t easy,” Biden said when the deal was announced just over a year ago. “It took the American vision, as well as a commitment to cooperating closely with our partners around the world. It is testament to how leadership rooted in our values can deliver important progress for families everywhere.”
He acknowledged that “building this deal will also require us to take action here at home” – and now it looks like that action might not happen.
Biden wanted Congress to pass a proposal that would allow the US to impose extra taxes on companies that don’t pay at least 15%, at home or abroad.
But Manchin has opposed tax changes to the legislation currently under consideration,
Administration officials said they are not giving up on a plan that they say would “balance the playing field for US companies, lessen incentives to move jobs abroad and close the loopholes corporations used to shift profits abroad.” ”.
“It is very important to our economic strength and competitiveness not to finalize this deal, and we will continue to look at all possible avenues to do so,” said Michael Kikukawa, a spokesman for the Treasury Department.
But moving forward with the original agreement is likely to be difficult at this point, said Chye-Ching Huang, executive director of the Center for Tax Law at New York University School of Law.
“There’s no doubt that it reduces the momentum,” she said.
She added: “There is a strong possibility that major trading partners will do this without the US, but the way forward is more difficult.”
Manchin has also been a drag on Biden’s climate change plans, a reflection of his enormous influence at a time when Democrats have the narrowest margins in the Senate.
A few months after taking office, Biden hosted a virtual conference with other world leaders and announced that he would raise the country’s goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The decision was welcomed by scientists and politicians who worry that not enough was being done to prevent the planet from heating to dangerous levels, and Biden spoke of fighting climate change with “the power of our example”.
Biden’s ability to deliver on his promise, however, has been undermined twice recently. First, the Conservative majority on the Supreme Court limited the government’s powers to regulate emissions, and then Manchin said he would not support new spending to support clean energy projects.
John Kerry, Biden’s global climate envoy, said earlier this month that the government’s struggles could “slow the pace” of other countries’ emissions cuts.
“They will do their own analysis that will likely have an impact on what they decide to do or not do,” he said.
Biden is trying to demonstrate that he will go ahead on his own, without legislation, and is considering declaring a state of emergency that would allow him to shift more resources to climate initiatives.
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But its powers are limited, and hitting the target can be difficult, if not impossible.
Nathaniel Keohane, chairman of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said the clock is ticking until the next United Nations summit on climate change, which is scheduled for Egypt in November.
Unless the administration is able to demonstrate progress before then, “it will undermine the US’s ability to continue to put more pressure on other countries,” Keohane said. “It would profoundly damage US credibility on the climate.”
He added: “More rhetoric will not satisfy the need at this point.”
Biden also struggled to convince Congress to provide more funding to deal with the pandemic.
When Dr. Ashish Jha, who leads the administration’s coronavirus task force, appeared in the White House meeting room for the first time in April, he stressed that vaccines were needed around the world to stop new variants from emerging.
“If we’re going to fight a global pandemic, we have to take a global approach,” he said. “That means we need funding to make sure we’re getting shots around the world.”
Biden originally wanted $22.5 billion. Lawmakers slashed the proposal to $15.6 billion, but even that was dropped from a $1.5 trillion government spending plan the president signed off on in March.
Efforts to revive the proposal have not been successful.
“The debacle of getting new money in the pipeline has really set us back,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Center for Global Health Policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There is paralysis and uncertainty.”
Morrison emphasized that the United States has played “a very serious and honorable leadership role” with its vaccine donations and its work with the World Bank to create a new fund to prepare for future pandemics.
But without new legislation, Morrison said, more robust plans to support vaccination campaigns in other countries are on hold.
