What’s Next For Biden’s Foreign Policy Dilemmas?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: In this election, President Biden’s record in the last two years is being examined under the microscope, his foreign policy record that is. Our next guest, award-winning journalist Robin Wright looks closely at the wins and losses of that policy. And she’s joining Walter Isaacson to discuss how the midterm election results could affect America’s interest abroad.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And, Robin Wright, welcome to the show.

ROBIN WRIGHT, WRITER AND COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK CONTRIBUTING: Thank, you Walter. Always a treat.

ISAACSON: Biden declared, right, when he became president, that America is back. Are we back? And what grant vision is he articulating to put America back in the center of foreign policy?

WRIGHT: I think there was widespread belief when Biden was elected, particularly among our allies. There was a sense that we were going back to traditional diplomacy, not the kind of moody, temperamental outbursts, and threats from his predecessor. Biden has re-engaged with the European Union and with NATO, walked back into the Climate Accord, wants to be part of the International Community. The question is, because America has flip flopped so much, from Bush, to Obama, to Trump, to Biden, and now, who knows what’s next if Trump the sort of — you know, Trump should run again, whether the United States is our ally — is still the reliable stalwart, centerpiece of the western alliance. I think that is going to be one of the big questions going forward in this election, and as well as particularly 2024.

ISAACSON: In a week, he’s going to Bali. It’s going to be a pretty uncomfortable meeting. He’s going to meet President Putin. He’s going to meet President Xi of China. Let’s start with Putin. What could he say to Putin that might get us to a cease-fire in Ukraine or that possible?

WRIGHT: I’m not sure there’s anything Biden can say to Putin that would entice Putin to sit down at the table short of, oh, yes, we will walk away from Ukraine. We won’t harm it anymore. He can — I think the interesting thing is what can Biden and others at the G20, the major powers, the world economic powers, do together to make it clear to Putin that the economic squeeze will only tighten, that his country and countrymen will feel more and more difficulties, existential challenges in day-to-day life, that more Russians will die. I mean, that’s — Biden can’t do much alone. So, I’m not optimistic that much will happen. I don’t think that, for Putin, the war has gotten to the point that he has to do something. He staked his career. He thinks he’s Peter the Great and he’s going to, you know, reestablish what was the Soviet Empire or the earlier Russian empire. And I’m — there’s no sense that he’s willing to give up yet.

ISAACSON: At the G20 meeting this coming Tuesday, do you think Xi and Putin are going to meet and perhaps even strengthen their alliance when it comes to Ukraine and other issues?

WRIGHT: This is a really interesting question because remember, just on the eve of the Russian invasion, on the eve of the Olympics in Beijing, Putin and Xi met and signed this document, 5,300 words, the longest moderate agreement between Russia and China, in which they supported each other’s foreign policies. China’s claims on Taiwan, Putin’s position on NATO is destructive and provocative and dangerous. And so, there were a lot of questions in Washington about what exactly Xi might do once Russia invaded Ukraine. And the reality is that China has not done very much. It has not provided the kind of arms that Putin needs. So, Putin is going to North Korea and Iran. Xi has not given him the kind of verbal trust or support that might — make Putin seem as if he’s not doing this alone, or at least rhetorically. So, I think they will meet, whether they’ll come up with any deep agreement, who knows? Let’s hope not, because those are the two biggest threats to the United States, the two biggest challenges, one immediate, one is long-term.

ISAACSON: Why is China such a challenge? What is our problem with China? Couldn’t we have better relations with China if we wanted?

WRIGHT: Well, I think the United States would like better relations with China, but I think Xi Jinping also sees the United States as the main reason that he can’t absorb Taiwan. Xi Jinping, a little bit like Vladimir Putin, has broader territorial ambitions. He wants to be the power in Asia and Indo-Pacific. And one of Biden’s aims is, of course, to get the United States back from the Indo-Pacific. The last — four of the last five presidents have said the United States was going to pivot to Asia and then, got distracted over and over again by crisis in the Middle East or other problems, and hasn’t been able to do that. Now, it wants to, and has taken a lot of, you know, tangible steps building, you know, a relationship and a new grouping with Australia and India and Japan. That — so, China sees the United States as kind of trying to contain it. And so, I think tensions are only likely to escalate.

ISAACSON: Jake Sullivan has been talking to his Russian counterpart. Is there some way that Russia and the United States could come to any resolution, maybe just a cease fire in place, indefinitely, that would stop what is happening in Ukraine?

WRIGHT: Well, this, again, is not up to just the United States and Russia. The United States is technically not a party to this war. This is a

negotiation that will have to play out between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

ISAACSON: Oh, wait, wait. Let me push back on that. I mean, if we decide we need to have a cease-fire, we certainly have influence with the

Zelenskyy government.

WRIGHT: Yes, and I think the United States has made clear that Zelenskyy should keep that door open, encourage negotiations and talk about it. The problem is, what — you know, what would negotiations involve and what territory might Zelenskyy have to give up? Is it the Crimea that go back to kind — and, you know, some of the eastern areas in the Donetsk? I think, you know, after all the fighting that the Ukrainians have done that it’s — I think, it’s a tough negotiation. How do you convince the Ukrainians that they are back to square one after losing thousands of lives and infrastructure? And the reality that Vladimir Putin has consistently shown, since 2008, that he’s going to move against neighbors. Against Georgia in 2008. Crimea and Ukraine in 2014. And this year, now, against the heart of Ukraine. This — you know, he — Vladimir Putin is not going to give up war. He may engage in a cease-fire now, but I think the Ukrainians are going to say, he’ll just come back. And I think one of the Eastern European members of NATO feel — would feel the same way.

ISAACSON: You are my go-to expert on Iran. Tell me why Iran is supporting Russia in this.

WRIGHT: It’s an interesting question. I think in part because the enemy of the enemy is my friend. And both of them face sanctions by the United States. This is a way for Iran to gain some clout or some, you know, deepen a relationship at a time that it’s feeling unprecedented pressure because of the United States sanctions, because of its own recent problems with the pandemic. And now, because of protests, deepest protests across Iran in over a decade.

ISAACSON: President Biden said that Iran would overthrow its clerical leadership. What can President Biden, and what is President Biden, either publicly or secretly, doing to encourage this counter-revolution?

WRIGHT: Well, we don’t know what he’s doing secretly, but I think that they are working with the Europeans to try and provide some kind of access through the internet so that the young can communicate with each other, and also communicate with the outside world. So, we know how bad it is, what tactics the regime is using. The challenge for U.S. foreign policy, as you know better than anybody, Walter, there’s — you know, there are two sets of tools. One is sanctions and the other is war. And the United States coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and its failures there, does not want to — another Middle Eastern war. And, again, it wants to go back and — to the — you know, focus on Indo-Pacific. And sanctions on the government like Iran are difficult because there are not a lot of people in the Morality Police or at Evin Prison or in the supreme leader’s office who have portfolios on Wall Street. So, sanctions are often a symbolic action that take decades to have impact when you look at sanctions on North Korea and Venezuela and Cuba and elsewhere. They don’t — they’re not a miracle cure, it’s — and they don’t — you know, they’re not — they don’t enable a light switch to go from off to on. So, that’s, I think, the problem for Biden Also, remember, the United States is kind of loathed in Iran because of its 1953 involvement in a coup that ousted a democratically elected government and put the monarch back in — on the peacock throne. So, there are a lot of suspicions about what the United States intends and what — why might it do something. So, I think this is one where they are not a lot of great or tangible options for United States.

ISAACSON: Iran is only maybe a few weeks or months away from really being able to make a nuclear weapon. And the nuclear deal we’ve had with Iran that Trump pulled out of, that is dead as a doornail. That seems to be going nowhere. So, what happens when Iran gets the bomb? Do we go after them militarily?

WRIGHT: OK. Well, one thing to understand is that its most advanced element is enriching uranium. And that is the fuel for a bomb. And Iran is estimated to be anywhere from eight days to a few weeks away from having enough to fuel one bomb. But that doesn’t mean it has a bomb. It also has to marry a bomb, may has to make a warhead. It has to then marry the warhead to a missile. And that’s —

ISAACSON: But wait, if we’re going to do something about it, we have to do it before all of those things happen right?

WRIGHT: Not necessarily. And remember, the United States and Israel have been quite effective in using cyber and disrupting Iran’s programs. So, I think there are a number of options. It will be very interesting if Benjamin Netanyahu does form a government in Israel, what he intends to do, because he has been the loudest voice in saying, we must stop Iran and we must do it militarily.

ISAACSON: Well, another big mess we are facing is North Korea. Is there — what could Biden do after these midterms to say, all right, I’ve got to at least diffuse, no pun intended, this one?

WRIGHT: Yes. I’ve actually been to North Korea and it’s a very strange place. This is a difficult challenge for President Biden because President Trump had such a buddy-buddy romance with Kim Jong-un. And they had this rather vacuous agreement, a couple of pages, that they would denuclearize, and Kim has not delivered on anything. And the United States and North Korea never got to the point to even define what denuclearization means. Does that mean he has to destroy all of his weaponry? Dismantle all of his equipment? Give up his ballistic missiles? These are — there are huge questions, because the reality is North Korea is nothing, literally nothing. It’s a poor third world country without its weaponry. Who —

ISAACSON: Do you think that Trump could’ve actually gotten something done had he stayed in power?

WRIGHT: No. No, there’s no way. Again, Kim is very — wants to be more like his grandfather than his father. And again, he — the Intelligence Community suspects that any day he is going to unleash a nuclear test. It would be the first one in five years. It would be the seventh. I mean, he could well do it during the G20 meeting to say, look, I’m here. You’ve got to deal with me. He wants something in return, and I think he now wants to be recognized as a nuclear power officially. And that is something that, you know — what do we do about that?

ISAACSON: The world that President Biden now faces is one in which the great divide, it seems to me, is between democracies, western style democracies, and these new populist authoritarian nationalist regimes, whether it be in Russia or in Hungary or many other places around the world. And that seems the struggle of the 21st century right now. 60 years or so ago, 80 years ago, we were engaged in another great struggle like that, which was against communism. And we built all sorts of institutions, whether it was NATO and the Marshall Plan and the World Bank and the IMF, in order to contain the spread of communism. Is there something Biden can do that would be bigger and grander as a theory of the case, which is to say, we are now going to rally to protect democracy, that’s going to be the goal of our foreign policy?

WRIGHT: I couldn’t agree more, that this is the moment in the early 21st century we’re coming out of a series of crises, we really need the kind of leadership that we will look at, how do you reform the United Nations? How do you make sure that, you know, the European Union, which we’ve created after World War II, helped create, both economically through Marshall Plan, but also, politically and diplomatically with our engaging and trying to get them to engage so there was not another war in Europe, that we are not seeing the ideas or leadership emerge from any corner? And this, I think, in an era of globalization is where you need, you know, not just one leader or one country, but you need many of them getting together. And there is not the sense of community or urgency in addressing some of these problems. And that is what worries me, that the frame of democracy, the growing appeal of strong men who solve local problems, you know, build railways and, you know, get things going, even if they are deeply corrupt, that we are headed for a period of more fraying. Joe Biden, at this point, you know, he may run again, but, you know, American leadership, by and large, is pretty old. Really, many of them witnessed, you know, World War II or grew up in the immediate aftermath of World War II. And so, the — I think one of the big questions is, how do we deal with globalization, which emerged in the 20th century, but there were no rules? And we began to see, with supply chain issues and our reliance on microchips, that we weren’t very thoughtful about how we did it and we became reliant on countries that either didn’t want to engage or would blackmail us effectively in one way or another, because they were making our goods. And I think that is what gave birth to the America first movement. And has led to a lot of questions about, you know, globalization at all. We need to figure out what globalization is because, Walter, as you know, that is the issue of the 21st century. And how we do it, and I think nobody has figured that out yet.

ISAACSON: Robin Wright, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

WRIGHT: Thank you, Walter.