Newsman: President Joe Biden will “take a virtual trip to Europe” with a pair of high-profile engagements aimed at restoring the United States’ place on the global stage, after what he views as its absence during President Donald Trump‘s years in office, according to a senior Biden administration official Thursday evening. President Biden has announced to suspend the offensive arms deal with Saudi Arabia. However, President Biden had mentioned before taking the office that he will reaffirm the US leadership on the international stage. He also said, he will rebuild the refugee policy.
Speaking first to a virtual meeting of the leaders of the Group of Seven nations, Biden will commit to addressing three “immediate” global crises, according to the official: the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic crisis and climate change.
Biden, part of that recommitment to the world will include an announcement that the U.S. will donate $4 billion to a global initiative to distribute vaccine doses to poor countries, the White House said Thursday. That money had been allocated by Congress in December but had not yet been donated.
Later Friday morning, he plans to argue via video teleconference to attendees of the annual Munich Security Conference “that democracy is the model that can best meet the challenges of our time,” the official said. He plans to make clear his markedly different approach to Russia, China and Iran, the official told reporters.
“He will get the opportunity as president of the United States, early in his term, to declare that America is back and the transatlantic alliance is back,” the official said.
In his remarks to an international security conference and to the leaders of the world’s major industrialized nations on Friday, Biden planned to make a case for multilateralism, the official said — in stark contrast to Trump’s nationalist approach to the world, which the former president termed “America First.”
And in a nod to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and the policies of the president’s predecessor, Biden would “acknowledge that democracy is under stress, democratic institutions are under stress, under challenge in the United States” as they are elsewhere, the official also told reporters.
“We have learned actually over the course of the past four years, that democracy, as he will put it, doesn’t happen by accident — that we have to work at it, that we need to fight for it,” the official said.
After Trump approached Russia gingerly, Biden “will specifically talk to what he believe is a concerted effort by the Kremlin to to carry out a strategy to discredit, undermine and destabilize democracies,” the official said.
And while Trump launched a combative, bilateral trade war with China, Biden will pursue a multilateral approach to trying to put an end to China’s “non-market-oriented policies and practices,” according to the official.
On Thursday, the State Department said it was open to talks with Iran about its nuclear program and the official said Biden planned to echo that message Friday.
“We are keen to sit down and hear what the Iranians have to say,” the official said. “We want to come up with a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear program. And let’s get to work.”
Biden also planned to “touch on Afghanistan,” as he faces questions about whether he will abide by an agreement with the Taliban and withdraw U.S. troops in the coming months, according to the official, who did not provide more details of what the president would say.
