On Day 1 of his administration, US President Joe Biden moved to undo the most damaging aspects of Donald Trump’s legacy and started to reverse many of the previous president’s policies, particularly on the environment, immigration and restoring federal efforts to promote diversity.
As of January 29, Biden had made almost 40 executive orders, some reversing Trump’s executive orders and some Trump-era policy. Even before his inauguration, Biden sent a clear message of embracing multilateralism again.
Multilateralism is an important element of foreign policy of small or middle powers; however, it is caught up in the competition between the United States and China. Will multilateralism shift the trajectory of US-China relations?
During the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly, President Xi Jinping highlighted the importance of multilateralism and called for upholding the international system with the UN at its core.
China’s campaign to increase its influence on the global stage comes at a time when the Trump administration retreated from multilateral diplomacy, including leaving the Paris climate accord and shredding multilateral trade pacts. Trump also pulled the United States out of Unesco and the UN-supported Human Rights Council.
China is scoring political points abroad through its efforts to fight climate change while Trump’s policies on the environment drew widespread scorn. Multilateralism is seen by many as a benchmark to evaluate the influence of the US and China on many global affairs.
Biden is poised to reverse the course of Trump and his “America First” platform.
Will the US returning to multilateralism challenge China’s strategic goal of increasing its global influence? Will it create an opportunity for the two to shift bilateral relations from rivalry to cooperation in areas such as climate change, public health, trade, nuclear non-proliferation, human rights and a rules-based international order?
US-China cooperation on the climate issue during the Obama administration was central to the global progress that culminated in the Paris climate agreement. The deterioration of the bilateral relationship has complicated the capacity of both sides to address the issue. Reviving climate cooperation and engagement is vitally important.
Starting with the US-China Climate Change Working Group will be a solid foundation to expanded cooperation and provide a key venue for sharing information on decarbonisation plans and collaborating on low- or zero-carbon technologies and policies.
Fighting the pandemic is surely an area where the US and China can work together. On January 20, China called on the international community to work together to contribute to the equitable distribution and use of Covid-19 vaccines around the world and help defeat the pandemic. China’s move to promote international cooperation on vaccines has been welcomed by the international community.
On January 21, the second day of the Biden administration, the US announced it would resume funding for the World Health Organization and join its consortium aimed at fairly sharing coronavirus vaccines around the globe. It marks a dramatic shift towards a more cooperative approach to fighting the pandemic.
China and the US also have increasing engagement on maritime issues, particularly at the two poles. Trump’s Arctic policy, which saw the region through the lens of security and economic competition with Russia and China, was a dramatic shift. The Obama administration saw climate change as the clear and present danger to Arctic security and viewed the Arctic as a venue for cooperation and research.
The Biden administration has every chance to build on the Obama-Biden legacy and craft a sound, effective and globally respected US Arctic policy. Motivation and prospects for US-China Arctic cooperation include climate change, sustainable development and energy trade.
In addition to bilateral cooperation, there are also areas where China and the US share common interests and goals. For example, both have signed an agreement to prevent unregulated commercial fishing in the Central Arctic Ocean – the first to use a legally binding, precautionary approach to protect an area from commercial fishing before it has begun.
Compared to the Arctic, US-China competition in Antarctica is in its early stages. That is a credit to the existing Antarctica Treaty System, which prohibits all drilling and exploitation. Antarctica offers an opportunity to deepen US-China cooperation with minimal strategic risk to the US.
The Biden administration ought to explore possibilities to promote mutually beneficial cooperation. Joint scientific cooperation in the Antarctic, for example, could provide a political signal of warming relations between the two states and offer more equality in the relationship for limited costs.
Trump’s antipathy towards the World Trade Organization and multilateralism in general outstrips any of his recent predecessors. Biden, who believes in multilateral cooperation and international institutions, serves American interests.
However, hopes for immediate cooperation on trade between China and the US seem faint compared with other areas such as climate change. Preventing trade wars is a key function of the WTO rules-based system, but it failed to stop the US and China waging a massively destructive trade war.
Improving multilateral control over unilateral retaliation should be a top priority in WTO reform, given the importance of preventing future large-scale trade wars. While the WTO will not fulfil its original vision of governing global trade as desired, the Biden administration should still pursue restoring its dispute settlement system.
Multilateralism and international cooperation have faded as vehicles for global action in the public interest in recent years. It is time to encourage effective multilateralism as a vital tool in meeting our many global challenges.
Biden’s return to multilateralism and China’s upholding multilateralism are key to addressing the challenges of global governance and advancing views on how the world can act together to propel collaboration. It also creates an opportunity for China and the US to shift bilateral relations from rivalry to cooperation.
Nong Hong, PhD, is executive director and senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies (US). This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post.
The Institute for China-America Studies is an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to strengthening the understanding of U.S.-China relations through expert analysis and practical policy solutions.
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Trade wars are neither good nor easy to win