- President Joe Biden has dealt with US foes much in the way President Donald Trump did.
- That aggressive, uncompromising approach harms US economic standing and puts useful diplomacy out of reach.
- Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
There was a "strong smell of gunpowder and drama" at US-China talks in Alaska last week, said Chinese Foreign Ministry representative Zhao Lijian in Beijing last week.
"It was not the original intention of the Chinese side" to have a contentious meeting, Zhao told reporters, but US diplomats, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, "provoked" conflict with "groundless attacks."
The State Department's review of the affair was equally bleak: "The Chinese delegation," an unnamed US official told Reuters, "seems to have arrived intent on grandstanding, focused on public theatrics and dramatics over substance."
The hostility in Alaska is not the Biden administration's only diplomatic worry. President Joe Biden campaigned promising to "elevate diplomacy as the premier tool of our global engagement," but his initial months in office have significantly maintained the dysfunctional diplomacy of recent years: reckless and loudmouthed, less interested in true negotiation — with concessions from both sides — than imperious insistence that the rest of the world conform to Washington's wishes.
It's myopic and counterproductive. It doesn't make our country more secure.
This pernicious pattern is visible in recent administration interactions with Washington's four chief antagonists: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Instead of reverting to a traditional diplomatic style, the Biden team has followed the Trump administration in a habit of public insult and maximal demands.
At the Alaska summit, Blinken began scheduled remarks with a broad denunciation of Beijing's actions "in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber-attacks on the United States, and economic coercion toward our allies," all of which he declared threats to "the rules-based order that maintains global stability."
When his turn came to speak, Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi did not confine himself to the expected two-minute response. He launched a scathing critique of US foreign policy, castigating Blinken for describing China as a detriment to stability when Washington has spent 20 years "invading through the use of force," "toppl[ing] other regimes," and attempting to replicate "its own democracy in the rest of the world."
Biden himself has been spatting with Russia, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a "killer" and promising consequences (then unspecified, but since revealed to be sanctions and cyberattacks) for Russian election meddling and other "mischievous things."
Moscow recalled its ambassador to the United States the same day, saying the "current situation is a result of the deliberate policy of Washington that during the past years was making steps to bring — in essence, intentionally — our bilateral interaction into a deadlock."
Meanwhile, US-North Korea relations continue to stagnate. The Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, continues to insist on complete denuclearization by Pyongyang before any US concessions — even sanctions relief that would improve ordinary North Koreans' quality of life — are granted.
Instead of pursuing smaller, achievable goals with North Korea, like nuclear freeze or a peace treaty for the Korean War, Biden has recommitted Washington to its denuclearization dead end.
The picture is little different with Iran, where despite the fact that the United States was the first to breach the nuclear deal, the Biden administration has demanded a complete Iranian return to compliance before Washington will reverse course. Predictably, Tehran has denounced Washington as an untrustworthy diplomatic partner.
"We trusted America at the time of [former President Barack] Obama and fulfilled our commitments," Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on state television Sunday. "Their promises have no credibility for us."
The problem here isn't the Biden administration's use of "tough" language toward what are undeniably oppressive regimes whose interests sometimes conflict with our own.
Rather, it's how each interaction reveals a superpower unaware of its own limitations, delusional about its ability to police the world and coerce cooperation from rivalrous and resentful states.
And while the Biden team builds on its predecessors' wild overuse of mostly ineffective sanctions, self-isolating in the global economy, Beijing is stepping in.
China and Russia are working together to reduce their use of the US dollar and other Western financial systems. China and North Korea issued a new statement of cooperation Monday, and China's foreign minister will visit Iran on Friday to discuss bolstering strategic ties. (Beijing is already defying US sanctions, introduced by former President Donald Trump and retained by Biden, by buying Iranian oil.)
The aggressive, uncompromising posture the Biden administration has adopted is harming US economic standing and putting useful diplomacy out of reach.
Diplomacy is not friendliness or niceness, but neither is it one-sided clamor for unrewarded obedience to Washington's every whim. Productive diplomacy means patient, working-level talks for realistic goals with mutual concessions, slowly building to bigger accomplishments that serve the interests of all participating countries.
That's the path to making diplomacy the "premier tool of our global engagement," not the foolhardiness the Biden administration has displayed.
Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, contributing editor at The Week, and columnist at Christianity Today. Her writing has also appeared at CNN, NBC, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and Defense One, among other outlets.
