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WASHINGTON: Traditional foreign policy marked by globalism and routine international engagement between Washington and other world capitals is poised to return with the nomination of Democratic veterans of the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton era to key cabinet positions in a Biden administration.
The President-elect is expected this week to name Antony Blinken, one of his closest and longest-serving foreign policy advisers, as Secretary of State, and Jake Sullivan, who also worked with him, as the National Security Advisor.
Both have worked extensively on the India portfolio with visits to New Delhi and engagement with South Block in the decade before the Trump presidency when they served with the Obama-Biden-Hillary Clinton troika. Most recently, they led the Biden-Harris foreign policy team’s outreach to Indian-Americans at an August 2020 event where they underscored the high priority Biden placed on ties with New Delhi.
“If you go back 15 years, Joe Biden had a vision for the future of US.-India relations. In 2006 he said, ‘my dream is that in 2020, the two closest nations in the world will be India and the United States.’ We’re not quite there, but it’s a terrific vision. And one that I know he will act to realize as President of the United States,” Blinken said at the event. In July, he told a Hudson Institute seminar that “strengthening and deepening the relationship with India is going to be a very high priority” under the Biden administration.
Two women are also in the mix for cabinet positions in keeping with the Democratic pledge to better represent the country’s diversity: Michele Flournoy is in the running for Defense Secretary, making her the first female to hold the post; and Linda Thomas-Greenfield, an African-American, is expected to be named US ambassador to the United Nations.
All four have worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations in which Biden himself was an influential figure, both as a Senator specializing in foreign policy and as a vice-president for eight years.
Blinken was in fact staff director for Biden when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and later became the deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration, in which positions he engaged with his S. Jaishankar, now India’s external affairs minister. Sullivan succeeded Blinken as vice president Biden’s national security adviser when Blinken moved to the Obama White House.
A Biden administration is expected to bring about an almost complete reversal of the Trump White House junking of global accords, including rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, stopping the US exit from the World Health Organization, and restoring the Iran nuclear deal. But one policy that will remain largely unaffected is ties with New Delhi, which both sides acknowledge transcends change in administrations in Washington and governments in New Delhi.
Although the hard right wing in India and among Indian-Americans dredged up past utterances by Biden’s putative foreign policy team to suggest they were inimical to New Delhi, mainly on account of greater emphasis on human rights and civil liberties, all three are realists who’ve pressed for better ties with India, including vis-à-vis its nettlesome neighbors China and Pakistan.
In fact, Sullivan was once asked explicitly about the Obama administration’s reversal of the ban on Narendra Modi visiting the US after he became the Prime Minister. His response: In my view, the way the United States should talk about these issues is to say not that we perfectly live up to our values in every circumstance but that we always work to take them into account in our decision-making…As long as that is baked into the serious, sober reflection of how best to manage our interests and values, then I think American foreign policy is on the right track. It’s when we just say we’re setting that aside because it doesn’t even matter that I think we start to head down a dark path, and that’s the path that I think the Trump Administration has put us on.
Source From : Times Of India
