US Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden views international efforts under US leadership to contain Covid-19 as his top foreign policy priority, an adviser to the former vice-president said today.
"The pandemic is a national security crisis," said former deputy secretary of state Tony Blinken, who serves as Biden's senior foreign policy adviser. "Getting out of it requires asserting US leadership," Blinken said at a virtual event hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce.
The Biden campaign has accused President Donald Trump's administration of exacerbating the pandemic by terminating the US' relationship with the World Health Organization and ignoring the G7, G20 and other international fora that previous US presidents have used to rally a response to global crises. "The G20 in the absence of US leadership has been ineffectual," Blinken said. International cooperation led by the US has been instrumental for containing the Ebola virus and the global financial crisis of 2008-09, and a Biden administration will adhere to this approach, Blinken said.
Trump, in his virtual address to the UN General Assembly today, again blamed China for "unleashing this plague on to the world" and called on the UN to hold China accountable for allegedly not doing enough to prevent the spread of Covid-19. The pandemic has resulted in over 200,000 US fatalities and the biggest contraction of the US economy since the Great Depression — in a US election year.
Containing the pandemic and the future of US relations with China are among key issues in the election campaign. Trump is touting US efforts to quickly develop a vaccine — "three vaccines are in the final stage of clinical trials and we are mass-producing them in advance," he said today. And Trump is casting Biden as insufficiently tough on China. "If Biden wins, China wins. It is very simple," Trump said at a political rally yesterday.
Both Democrats and Republicans agree in their view of China as the principal foreign policy challenge to the US. But the Biden campaign argues that Trump's undermining of US alliances has allowed China to gain an advantage. "We have to put ourselves in a position of strength so the relation moves on our terms, and not theirs," Blinken said.
Blinken called the interim trade deal Trump's administration negotiated with China earlier this year a "debacle," but would not say if a Biden administration would terminate it. The trade deal came as a result of "a trade war that has been a disaster for our farmers and manufacturers" and does not address the so-called "systemic" issues that a Biden administration will raise, Blinken said, referring to Chinese regulations and trade practices that the US says are giving an unfair advantage to China's exporters. But trying to decouple from the Chinese economy is "unrealistic and damaging," Blinken said.
China has more than doubled its crude imports from the US this year, but they still fall short of a total energy imports target for China of around $27bn in 2020 and another $42bn in 2021, under the terms of the trade deal.
China's president Xi Jinping in his virtual General Assembly address called for international cooperation in addressing the pandemic and said that the Paris climate accord "represents the general direction of green and low-carbon transition." The latter is an issue the Biden campaign has also vowed to prioritize.
A Biden administration will tackle the Covid-19 pandemic at the same time as addressing other international issues, Blinken said. "We have a series of other commitments that we have to start with on day one, first of all getting back into the Paris climate accord."
