Declaring “America is back,” President-elect Joe Biden has introduced his key national security and foreign policy officers and said the incoming administration is ready to guide the planet and once again sit at the pinnacle of the table.
Signaling a sharp shift from outgoing Republican President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy over the past four years, Biden said America is “prepared to confront our adversaries, not reject our allies. And ready to square up for our values.”
His words were an indication that the “America 1st” policy of incumbent Donald Trump can be set aside for one that is a lot centered on operating with the country’s allies.
In his 1st interview since being confirmed as the subsequent president, Mr. Biden told NBC: “America is back – we are at the pinnacle of the table once more.
“I’ve spoken with over twenty world leaders and they are pleased and somewhat excited that America is going to reassert its role in the world and be a coalition builder.”
Mr. Biden will take the workplace on twenty January however he can notice the planet very different from how it was four years ago when his term as Barack Obama’s vice president ended.
On world issues from climate change, to non-proliferation and human rights, the US beneath the Trump administration had literally gathered up its papers and pens and left the meeting area. Biden’s election victory and alternative of committed internationalists to guide the foreign policy team means that there will actually be someone sitting in what has been an empty chair.
“There’s a heap of relief that we are going to possess a lot of traditional US to accommodate,” said Richard Gowan, the UN director at the International Crisis Group. “It has been symptomatic of US diplomacy in the last couple of years that different countries have extremely struggled to induce a clear picture of what US policies are sometimes on issues like Libya or Yemen.”
Gowan said one among the many clear winners on the world stage from Biden’s win is the UN Secretary-general, António Guterres, who has spent four years straining to form nice with Donald Trump to forestall the outgoing president from pulling the plug altogether on US involvement in, and funding for, UN agencies.
Biden’s nominees and appointees, as well as Antony Blinken for secretary of state and former secretary of state John Kerry to a new position as special presidential envoy for climate, spoke for the primary time since being announced on Monday by the transition team, and several of them offered implicit rebukes of President Trump and his isolationist and “America 1st” worldview.
“The team meets this moment, this team behind me,” Biden said.
“They embody my core belief that America is strongest when it works with its allies,” he said. “That’s how we truly keep America safe without participating in needless military conflicts, and our adversaries in check and terrorists at bay,” he said.
“And it is a team that reflects the very fact that America is back, ready to lead the world, not retreat from it. Once once more, sit at the pinnacle of the table,” the seventy-eight-year-old, who is scheduled to be inaugurated on January 20 because the 46th US President despite incumbent Trump not conceding, said.
Biden said, “America leads not only by the example of our power but by the power of our example.”
He said the officials he has picked “will not only repair, but they can also reimagine American foreign policy and national security for the subsequent generation. And they can tell me what I would like to know, not what I need to understand.”
When asked regarding his early priorities, Mr. Biden said he would send an immigration bill to the Senate with a “pathway to citizenship for over eleven million undocumented folks in America”.
He voiced his intention to “put off a number of the very damaging government orders that have had a vital impact on making the climate worse and creating us less healthy”.
He conjointly promised to not interfere with, or place pressure on the Department of Justice over any investigations into President Trump, saying: “I will not do what this president does and use the Justice Department as my vehicle to insist that something happen.
“There are a number of investigations that I even have scan regarding at a state level and there’s nothing the least bit I can or cannot do regarding that however I’m centered on obtaining the American public back to an area where they need some certainty, some surety, some knowledge that they can make it.”
Mr. Biden also said that, although his team is experienced, it will be his own government, rather than a “third Obama term”.
