WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden used his first speech to a global audience on Friday to declare that “America is back, the transatlantic alliance is back” after four years of a Trump administration showing off its foreign policy through a ” America First “lens.
Speaking virtually at Munich’s annual security conference, Biden ticked through a daunting to-do list – rescuing the Iran nuclear deal, facing economic and security challenges from China and Russia, and repairing the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic – which he said would happen. require close cooperation between the US and its Western allies.
Without mentioning Donald Trump’s name once in his speech, Biden blended a revived democratic alliance with a punishment for his predecessor’s approach, a message warmly received by Western allies.
“I know the transatlantic relationship has been strained and tested in recent years,” Biden said. “The United States is committed to reconnecting with Europe, to consult with you, to reclaim our position of trusted leadership.”
The president also took part in a virtual gathering of the group of seven industrialized nations on Friday, where leaders managed to incorporate Biden’s campaign theme into their joint closing statement, pledging to “work together to defeat COVID-19 and better rebuild. ”
“Welcome back, America,” said Charles Michel, President of the European Council, effectively summing up the atmosphere of the Munich conference.
Yet while such happy talks conveyed a palpable sense of relief among allies over Biden’s full-fledged commitment to mending the frayed US-Europe relations, much has changed in the past four years in ways that create new challenges.
China has cemented its place as a fierce economic competitor on the continent as the US rethinks long-held national security and economic priorities embedded in the transatlantic alliance. Populism has grown in much of Europe. And other Western countries have at times tried to fill the vacuum that was left when America stepped back from the world stage.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted that some of the differences between the US and Europe remain “complicated”. Europe sees China’s economic ambitions as less of an existential threat than the US and has its own strategic and economic concerns that are also not always consistent with Biden about Russia.
Still, Merkel, who had a tense relationship with Trump, hid her preference for a US foreign policy based on Biden’s worldview.
“It looks a lot better for multilateralism this year than it did two years ago, and that has a lot to do with Joe Biden becoming president of the United States of America,” Merkel said. “His speech just now, as well as the initial announcements from his administration, have convinced us that this is not just talk but action.”
Biden delivered his speech to a global audience as his administration took steps this week to reverse Trump’s key policies.
He said the US is ready to rejoin talks about re-joining the 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear deal abandoned by the Trump administration. The Biden administration announced on Thursday that it wanted to bring Iran back in and took action with the United Nations to restore policy to what it was before Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018.
Biden also spoke about the two-decade war in Afghanistan, where he sees a May 1 deadline to remove the remaining 2,500 US troops under a peace deal with the Taliban agreed by the Trump administration.He also called for cooperation in addressing economic and national security challenges facing Russia and China and identified cyberspace, artificial intelligence and biotechnology as areas of increasing competition.
“We need to prepare together for the long-term strategic competition with China,” said Biden.
His message was surrounded by an underlying argument that democracies – not autocracies – are models of governance that best meet the challenges of the moment. The president urged fellow world leaders to show together that “democracies can still perform”.
At the G-7, government officials said, Biden focused on what lies ahead for the international community as it seeks to extinguish the public health and economic crises caused by the coronavirus pandemic.He announced that the US will soon release $ 4 billion for an international effort to boost the purchase and distribution of vaccines to poor countries, a program Trump declined to support.
Biden’s turn came on the world stage when the US officially rejoined the Paris climate agreement, the largest international effort to combat global warming. Trump announced in June 2017 that he was pulling the US out of the historic accord, arguing that the pact would undermine the US economy.
Biden announced the US intention to re-enter on the first day of his presidency, but he had to wait 30 days for the move to take effect. He has said he will include climate change considerations in every major domestic and foreign policy decision facing his government.
“This is a global existential crisis,” said Biden.
Biden also encouraged G-7 partners to honor their commitments to COVAX, a World Health Organization initiative to improve access to vaccines, even as he reopens the US tap.
Trump had withdrawn the US from the WHO and refused to join the COVAX program in more than 190 countries. The Republican former president accused the WHO of covering up China’s missteps in dealing with the virus at the start of the public health crisis that unraveled a strong US economy.
Biden pushed for more international cooperation in vaccine distribution amid growing calls to his government to distribute some US-manufactured vaccine supplies overseas.
French President Emmanuel Macron has called on the US and European countries to allocate up to 5% of current vaccine supplies to developing countries – the kind of vaccine diplomacy that China and Russia already employ.
Biden, who announced last week that the US will have enough vaccine to inoculate 300 million people by the end of July, remains focused for now on getting every American vaccinated, government officials say. Macron again pressed the US and Europe on Friday to do more.
“It is up to Europeans and Americans to provide all poor and emerging countries in the world with access to vaccines as soon as possible,” he said.
Allies listened carefully to what Biden had to say about an impending crisis with Iran.
Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency this week that next week it would suspend voluntary implementation of a provision in the 2015 deal that would allow UN nuclear observers to conduct short-term inspections of undeclared locations in Iran, unless the US imposes sanctions. by February 23. .
“We now have to make sure that there is no problem of who takes the first step,” Merkel told reporters. “If everyone is convinced that we should give this agreement another chance, then ways must be found to get this agreement going again.”
The Associated Press authors Darlene Superville in Washington, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.