The debt ceiling crisis is distracting Biden from his geopolitical agenda

This is not the first time the White House axis has fallen victim to events in Asia. Barack Obama sought to end US presidents’ habit of spending all their foreign policy energy on the Middle East, but has been hit by the spread of the Islamic militant group ISIS and the civil war in Syria. This week, Joe Biden has been distracted by events closer to home, particularly the troubled enclave of partisan strife known as Capitol Hill. He canceled his trip to Australia after this weekend’s G7 summit in Japan.

Biden’s return to Washington is clearly needed to fix the debt-ceiling impasse in Congress, a piece of routine fractious performance by congressional Republicans to cripple a Democratic president’s room for maneuver under the guise of fiscal responsibility. aims to do.

It is particularly embarrassing for the US that Biden will be unable to keep his appointment in Australia for the summit of the four-nation Asia-Pacific security quad, which also includes India and Japan. Through its membership of the Quad, the OCUS military alliance (including the UK) and its defiance of Chinese business pressure on its calls to investigate the origins of Covid, Australia – which will also join the G7 – is very much a model of the Asia-Pacific geospatial Associate.

US domestic dysfunction similarly forced Obama to cancel an Asia-Pacific trip, including a key negotiating summit for trade, in 2013, as Republicans forced a similarly pointless shutdown of the federal government. But deteriorating relations between the US and China and China’s growing dominance of Asia-Pacific regional supply chains have made the vulnerability more apparent.

Biden’s aim to build a strategic trade alliance counter to China has been in constant conflict with his domestic imperatives. He has felt the need to favor US-owned businesses in his green spending, in order to appease the labor union wing of the Democrats and garner support from West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, the swing vote in the Senate.

But it severely undermines his suggestion that the US version of green change is part of a unified international campaign to advance safer trade and technology that other countries could sign on to. The US economic pitch for the Asia-Pacific has been hit by his administration’s opposition to formal trade agreements meant to replace any mild Indo-Pacific Economic Framework deals involving actual access to the US market.

When Biden swept to power, there was hope among trading partners that his foreign policy giants’ innate propensity toward alliances would be needed to play to, or at least counterbalance, his Democratic base. In reality, it only partially worked.

Biden is certainly trying to build a coalition on issues related to trade. But they more closely resemble the traditional US military approach – for example the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – of designing one campaign and then building others into it from scratch, rather than negotiating a joint approach or working through multilateral fora. pressure to join. During the preparation for the G7 summit, the US put forward two hardline ideas, a US-led common approach against Chinese economic pressure and a complete embargo on exports to Russia, which its G7 partners rejected as anything like Washington’s hypothesis. Gave.

His allies must always have the realization that in less than two years, the White House could be occupied by a President – ​​most likely Donald Trump – from a dysfunctional Republican Party with a highly unrelenting commitment to international alliances. Republican support is also waning on Ukraine, an issue on which nearly all wealthy democracies agree.

You can forgive America’s G7 partners for refusing to join forces to confront China or Russia, whose next president may very well go rogue and take extraordinary unilateral actions against Beijing – or give up the defense of Ukraine for whatever expedient deal with Moscow. throw together

Biden’s coalition-building instincts are genuine, as is his commitment to slowing climate change. But his allies have now had more than two years to see that those objectives have been compromised by the domestic imperatives of both his electoral base and the Republican opposition. A divided home front is not how the Cold War against the Soviet Union was waged. America’s limitations as a geo-economic power mean that its relations with its perceived allies will always be more transactional than those of the White House.

alan.beatty@ft.com