Biden Wants America to Lead the World. It Shouldn’t.

Peter Beinart, The New York Times, Dec 2 2020

U.S. “leadership” is a favorite trope of the foreign policy establishment. It’s outdated and dangerous.

There is a lot we still do not know about how President-elect Joe Biden and his foreign policy
team will approach the world. But this much is clear: they believe in American “leadership.”
In a 2015 speech, Antony Blinken, Mr. Biden’s choice to be secretary of state, employed
some version of the word 21 times. This spring, Mr. Biden wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs
titled “Why America Must Lead Again.” Last week, when he introduced his national
security nominees, he said that “America is back, ready to lead the world.”

Let’s hope not. In the post-Trump age, “leadership” is a misguided, and even dangerous,
vision for America’s relationship with the rest of the globe.

For the past four years, foreign policy elites have trumpeted American “leadership” as the
safe, bipartisan and benign alternative to the Trump administration’s belligerent America
First nationalism. But look up the word “lead” in a dictionary and you’ll find definitions like
“the first or foremost place,” being “at the head of” and “to control a group of people.”
Leadership doesn’t mean motherhood and apple pie. It means being in charge.

Mr. Biden has offered two justifications for why America deserves this privileged role. The
first is hereditary: “For 70 years,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs, “the United States, under
Democratic and Republican presidents, played a leading role in writing the rules” that
“advance collective security and prosperity.” In other words, America should lead the world
now because it has done so effectively in the past.

Between 1945 and 1989, according to Dov H. Levin’s book “Meddling in the Ballot Box,”
the United States interfered in foreign elections 63 times. So Mr. Biden’s cheery history of
American Cold War leadership leaves a lot out. But even if you romanticize the post-World
War II era, it is long gone.

Seventy years ago, as James Goldgeier and Bruce W. Jentleson recently noted, the United
States accounted for roughly half of the world’s gross domestic product. It now accounts for
just over one-seventh. Collectively, the European Union’s G.D.P., adjusted for purchasing
power parity, is almost as large as the United States’. China’s is already larger, and the
coronavirus pandemic is likely to only widen the gap. The phrase “leadership” assumes a
power hierarchy that, at least economically, no longer exists.

Mr. Biden’s second justification is moral. As he wrote in 2017, “other nations follow our
lead because they know that America does not simply protect its own interests, but tries to
advance the aspirations of all.” But it’s hard to survey America’s behavior in recent decades
and glean some special commitment to global welfare. According to a study by the Watson
Institute for International and Public Affairs, America’s post-9/11 wars have displaced 37
million people. And even before Donald Trump entered the White House, the United States
had refused to ratify international treaties that ban land mines, cluster bombs and nuclear
tests, regulate the global sale of arms, protect the oceans, enable prosecution of genocide and
war crimes, and safeguard the rights of women, children and people with disabilities. Most
countries on earth have ratified all or nearly all of these agreements. No other nation has
spurned every single one.
Mr. Trump has added to this litany of noncompliance by withdrawing the United States
from the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, the World Health Organization, the
Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and the Intermediate-
Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. This isn’t the record of a country that has earned the right to
global leadership. It’s the record of a country that should work on global membership first.

Unfortunately, even Mr. Biden’s advisers — who are multilateralists by American standards
— have trouble imagining cooperation without dominance. “Whether we like it or not, the
world simply does not organize itself,” Mr. Blinken has said. But the United States has
discovered what happens “when some other country tries to take our place or, maybe even
worse, no one does, and you end up with a vacuum that is filled by bad events.”

But it’s not true that international cooperation collapses without America calling the shots.
After the United States announced that it was leaving the Paris climate agreement, not
a single other signatory followed it out the door. To the contrary, the European Union,
China, Japan and South Korea have recently pledged to make their economies carbon-
neutral by at least 2060. This summer, after the Trump administration threatened to leave
the World Health Organization, France and Germany promised to increase their
contributions.
The point isn’t that American participation in common global efforts is unnecessary. To the
contrary — it’s vital. But most of the time, America best serves these efforts less by dictating
the rules than by agreeing to them.

Choosing partnership over leadership may strike some as un-American. But it’s what most
Americans want. For 20 years, Gallup has been asking Americans whether the United States
should play “the leading role,” a “major role,” a “minor role” or “no role at all” in world
affairs. By large margins, “major role” always comes in first. This September, when the
Chicago Council on Global Affairs asked Americans whether they preferred the United
States to play a “dominant” or a “shared” leadership role, “shared” prevailed by almost
three to one.
It’s not ordinary Americans who believe the United States must “sit at the head of the table,”
as Mr. Biden said last week. It is foreign-policy elites, who often slander public opposition
to American primacy as isolationism. But there is a dissident foreign-policy tradition, often
championed by those at the forefront of America’s domestic struggles for justice. In his 1967
speech opposing the Vietnam War, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the United
States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Such a
government, he insisted, should not pretend “it has everything to teach others and nothing
to learn from them.” Rather than seeking to dominate the world, Dr. King argued, the
United States should show “solidarity” with it: first, by curbing its own contributions to
global misery and second, by joining with others to battle “poverty, insecurity and injustice.”
The Biden team should make solidarity — not leadership — its watchword for approaching
the world. In so doing, it would acknowledge that while the United States can do much to
help other nations, its first obligation — especially after the horrors of the Trump era — is
to stop doing harm.
I - Answer the following questions in your own words. (8 points)

1 - How does Peter Beinart see Biden’s future foreign policy, as heralded by the phrase
“America is back, ready to lead the world”? (1 pt)

2 – Explain “Leadership doesn’t mean motherhood and apple pie.” (1pt)

3 – According to the editorialist, why is America ’s ‘leadership’ role not deserved? (3 pts)

4 – How does the editorialist illustrate that the world can do without American dominance?
(1pt)

5 – What do recent opinion polls show? (1pt)

6 - What kind of foreign policy does the editorialist advocate for? (1pt)

II – Essay (12 points). 300 WORDS (± 10%)

A US president’s role is to “fix America, not the world”. Discuss.

Please indicate the exact number of words used.