President Biden, fighting mounting doubts among America’s allies about his commitment to working with them, used his debut address to the United Nations on Tuesday to call for “relentless diplomacy” on climate change, the pandemic and efforts to blunt the expanding influence of autocratic nations like China and Russia.
In a 30-minute speech, Mr. Biden called on the General Assembly to a new era in global action. He argued that the summer of wildfires and excessive heat, as well as the reemergence of the coronavirus, required a new era for unity.
“Our security, our prosperity and our very freedoms are interconnected, in my view as never before,” Biden reiterated that the United States of America and its Western allies will remain crucial partners.
He did not mention the discord caused by his actions, such as the chaos in Afghanistan when the Taliban retook power 20 years later. And he made no mention of his administration’s blowup with one of America’s closest allies, France, which was cast aside in a secret submarine deal with Australia to confront China’s influence in the Pacific.
Those two foreign policy crises, while sharply different in nature, have led some American partners to question Mr. Biden’s commitment to empowering traditional alliances, with some publicly accusing him of perpetuating elements of former President Donald J. Trump’s “America First” approach, though wrapped in far more inclusive language.
Throughout his speech, Mr. Biden never uttered the word “China,” though his efforts to redirect American competitiveness and national security policy have been built around countering Beijing’s growing influence. He clung to his discussion with a number of choices, which essentially boiled down into supporting democracy over autocracy. This was a sharp critique of President Xi Jinping in China and Vladimir V. Putin in Russia.
“We’re not seeking — say it again, we are not seeking — a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs,” He stated. Yet in describing what he called an “inflection point in history,” he talked about the need to choose whether new technologies would be used as “a force to empower people or deepen repression.” At one point he explicitly referred to the targeting of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region of western China.
The president’s senior aides, at least publicly, have been dismissing the idea that China and the United States, with the world’s largest economies, were dividing the world into opposing camps, seeking allies to counter each other’s influence, as America and the Soviet Union once did. The relationship with Beijing, they have argued, unlike the Cold War rivalry with Moscow, is marked by deep economic interdependence and some areas of common interests, from the climate to containing North Korea’s nuclear program.
In private, however, officials acknowledge growing similarities. As China expands its territorial claims, and threatens Taiwan, the American-British agreement to equip Australia with nuclear powered submarines is clearly an attempt to reset the naval balance of the Pacific. The United States has been trying to block Chinese access technology and Western communication systems.
“The future belongs to those who give their people the ability to breathe free, not those who seek to suffocate their people with an iron-hand authoritarianism,” It was clear who Mr. Biden meant by what he said. “The authoritarians of the world, they seek to proclaim the end of the age of democracy, but they’re wrong.”
Several hours later, Mr. Biden was gone from the podium. Mr. Xi addressed the General Assembly in a prerecorded audio. He rejected American portrayals that his government is repressive or expansionist and stated that he supports peaceful growth for all peoples.
Mr. Xi’s language was restrained, and like Mr. Biden he did not name his country’s chief rival, but he made a clear allusion to China’s anger over the Australian submarine pact. The world must “reject the practice of forming small circles or zero-sum games,” he said, adding that international disputes “need to be handled through dialogue and cooperation on the basis of quality and mutual respect.”
He also announced that his country would stop building “new coal-fired power projects abroad,” ending one of the dirtiest fossil-fuel programs. China is the world’s largest investor in coal-fired power stations.
Mr. Biden’s debut at the annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York was muted by the pandemic. The pandemic prevented many national leaders from attending, as well as the usual large receptions and traffic jams that characterize the September ritual.
He only stayed for a short time and met one ally: Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister. Later in the day, Mr. Biden met Prime Minster Boris Johnson of Britain who was the other party to the submarine deal.
The nuclear submarine agreement that they had secretly negotiated was revealed by the three countries last week. Australia stated that it would not sign a previous agreement for France to build conventionally powered submarines. This upset French leaders who felt they had been betrayed. The surprise announcements tied Australian defense more closely to the United States — a huge shift for a country that, just a few years ago, aimed to avoid taking sides in the American-Chinese rivalry.
Up until Tuesday, Mr. Biden hadn’t seen Mr. Johnson or Mr. Morrison since June when they were deep into negotiations that were kept from President Emmanuel Macron of France.
On Tuesday, there was no conversation between Mr. Biden or Mr. Macron. Mr. Biden was so angry about the submarine deals and the silence from his closest partners that he summoned the French ambassador to Washington. This move was unprecedented in over 240 years of relations as well as that of the envoy of Australia. It was not clear if the scheduling issues prevented the men from speaking on the phone or if Mr. Macron was deliberately being difficult to reach.
The speech Mr. Biden gave sounded very much like what he would say before the Taliban took Kabul without resistance and before Europe’s pivot towards Asia.
The president has bristled, aides say, when the French have compared him to his predecessor, as Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister, did on Tuesday, telling reporters that the “spirit” of Mr. Trump’s approach to dealing with allies “is still the same” under Mr. Biden.
Other allies have objected to how Mr. Biden set an Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawal from Afghanistan — with minimal consultation, they contend. The White House argues that NATO allies were fully informed.
If the Taliban’s rapid fall had been predicted, the Afghanistan deadline would likely have caused only back-room grumbling. Instead, the scramble to fly foreigners in August and the Afghans who supported them created a picture of American negligence.
The Taliban nominated an ambassador, Suhail Shaheen, the movement’s spokesman based in Doha, Qatar, to represent Afghanistan at the United Nations and requested that he be allowed to address this year’s General Assembly, U.N. officials said Tuesday. The Taliban’s request, which must be evaluated by the General Assembly’s Credentials Committee, sets up a showdown with the current envoy, appointed by Afghanistan’s toppled government.
On Afghanistan, Mr. Biden tried on Tuesday to turn to the larger picture — “We’ve ended 20 years of conflict,” he said — making the case that the United States was now freer to pursue challenges like the climate crisis, cyberattacks and pandemics. He delivered a more consciliatory message than his predecessor who disregarded alliances, insulted adversaries and threatened military action against North Korea or Iran at different times.
“U.S. military power must be our tool of last resort, not our first,” Mr. Biden said, “and it should not be used as an answer to every problem we see around the world.”
He ran through a litany of international arrangements and institutions he has rejoined over the last eight months, including the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization. He spoke of the United States seeking a seat in the U.N. Human Rights Council and reestablishing the Iran Nuclear Deal, which Trump left.
Iran was actually the center of a lot back-room diplomacy as Iran’s new foreign minister, Hossein Abdollahian met with European leaders who called for a resumption of the nuclear talks in Vienna, which ended in June. Iranian officials stated that talks would resume in the next few weeks.
But American and European officials expect the government of Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, to seek a high price for returning to the accord, pressuring the West by moving closer to bomb-grade uranium production than ever before.
Although Mr. Raisi was not able to make it to New York, he gave a passionate speech via video. “Today, the world doesn’t care about ‘America First’ or ‘America is Back,’” He stated. He added, “Sanctions are the U.S.’s new way of war with the nations of the world.” But he did not rule out returning to the accord — in return for sanctions relief.
Mr. Biden cast the coronavirus pandemic as a prime example of the need for peaceful international cooperation, saying, “bombs and bullets cannot defend against Covid-19 or its future variants.” And he pushed back against arguments that the United States, which is moving toward giving booster shots to some vaccinated people, is doing too little for poorer countries where vaccination has barely begun.
The United States has “shipped more than 160 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine to other countries,” he said.
“We need a collective act of science and political will,” He added. “We need to act now to get shots in arms as fast as possible, and expand access to oxygen, tests, treatments, to save lives around the world.”
Reporting was contributed by Rick Gladstone, Michael D. Shear and Farnaz Fassihi.