Time will judge Biden’s global leadership goals

Donald Trump was always unlikely to be gracious in defeat. But his grudging willingness to allow the machinery of government to begin the transition process in Washington is recognition at last of reality. US president-elect Joe Biden has wasted no time in naming key members of his administration. Doing so is imperative, despite Mr Trump’s insistence on Twitter (where else?) that “I concede NOTHING!!!”. But with Mr Trump’s dozens of chaotic legal challenges going nowhere, it is time to get on with the normal processes involved in the democratic handover of power to an incoming president.

“America is back” and “ready to lead”, Mr Biden said in announcing the major appointments. As Cameron Stewart reported, they show how much the new administration plans to distance itself from Mr Trump’s more isolationist “America first” approach to foreign policy. Many, including major US allies such as Germany that have had an unhappy relationship with Mr Trump, will cheer the appointment of mainstream internationalists Antony Blinken as secretary of state and Jake Sullivan as Mr Biden’s national security adviser. Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, Mr Trump’s former defence secretary, Jim Mattis, likened his one-time boss’s neglect of US allies to allowing a long-tended garden to become choked with weeds: “In practice, America first (has) meant America alone.”

Like other appointments announced by Mr Biden, including the widely admired Janet Yellen as Treasury secretary, Mr Blinken and Mr Sullivan are alumni of the Obama administration. Committed centrists, they were on the more hawkish side of Obama-era policy debates. Mr Blinken, whose stepfather, a Holocaust survivor, was brought up in Melbourne, is a strong supporter of Israel and favoured the 2002 Iraq war and US intervention in Libya. Mr Sullivan supported sending US missiles to Ukraine, a policy Barack Obama opposed.

Together with the expected appointment of the vastly experienced Michele Flournoy as defence secretary, they are expected to form a team that should stand up to adversaries better than Mr Obama did. Such optimism must be tempered, however, by Mr Biden’s appointment of his close friend, former Obama secretary of state John Kerry, as climate tsar with responsibility to reverse Mr Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.

Mr Kerry’s role in negotiating the deeply flawed Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Agreement showed his inability to nail a hard bargain. In his new role he will be a member of the National Security Council, the new president’s principal national security and foreign policy forum. Mr Biden regards climate change as a critical national security issue. The president-elect may be hoping to appease the Democratic Party’s far left, which underpinned the disparate coalition that backed his nomination. But given Mr Kerry’s record, Mr Biden should be cautious. His administration will get off to a bad start if it pursues the same policies that helped Mr Trump win in 2016 and poll well on November 3. The fracking-led boom in US oil and gas production has enhanced US security. It is no longer dependent on foreign producers and its economy is less a hostage to world oil markets.

Mr Biden’s team will want to return the US to the Iran nuclear deal. But it must not do so in the form negotiated by Mr Kerry. European signatories have stuck with the deal, but Mr Biden must not repeat the mistakes Mr Kerry made in giving away far too much to the ayatollahs. Mr Trump leaves a legacy of strength and solid achievement in the Middle East that will be at risk if Mr Biden tries to cosy up to Tehran again.

But it is with China that Mr Biden’s team will face its hardest immediate challenge. Despite the strength Mr Trump showed Beijing over trade, his difficult relations with some US allies, especially in Europe, meant he was unable to forge an effective alliance of nations to dissuade China from its aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea and Indo-Pacific. Mr Kerry will have a crucial role dealing with China over the Paris Agreement, which allows Beijing not to reduce carbon emissions at all until 2030. Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead fears that sending Mr Kerry to negotiate with Chinese President Xi Jinping on climate “is a recipe for (him) returning home dressed in a barrel”. At least, however, US foreign policy under Mr Biden appears likely to continue shifting towards the Indo-Pacific.