Biden on Foreign Policy (1 of 3): Nuclear arms proliferation and climate change

Joe Biden has an article on foreign policy published in the Mar/Apr Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), whose membership has long been largely been almost the definition of the US foreign policy establishment. The CFR has also been a stock bogeyman for far-right conspiracy theories, so the America First types that gravitate to Trump aren't particularly fond of them. (Fun fact: Foreign Affairs began publication in 1910 as The Journal of Race Development.)

It's a long-standing ritual for Presidential candidates to publish an article about foreign policy in this journal. Biden's is called Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump. It's a reminder of how a conservative Democratic Administration under Joe Bide can be expected to have a superior foreign policy to Trump's is pretty much all ways, or maybe literally in all. But it won't be the kind of transformative policy that is needed in many areas of US international affairs.

On the basics, we can reasonably assume that Biden would staff the State Department with competent professionals who would conduct normal diplomacy. That alone would be a significant improvement over the present. As we would expect from Biden, who is running on a Make American Boring Again program, the article is largely Democratic Party foreign policy boilerplate. But from his long career in politics and the Vice Presidency, he actually does know what the words mean. He wouldn't have to rely on FOX News blowhards for foreign policy advice.

Biden writes on nuclear arms control:

On nonproliferation and nuclear security, the United States cannot be a credible voice while it is abandoning the deals it negotiated. From Iran to North Korea, Russia to Saudi Arabia, Trump has made the prospect of nuclear proliferation, a new nuclear arms race, and even the use of nuclear weapons more likely. As president, I will renew our commitment to arms control for a new era. The historic Iran nuclear deal that the Obama-Biden administration negotiated blocked Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Yet Trump rashly cast the deal aside, prompting Iran to restart its nuclear program and become more provocative, raising the risk of another disastrous war in the region. I'm under no illusions about the Iranian regime, which has engaged in destabilizing behavior across the Middle East, brutally cracked down on protesters at home, and unjustly detained Americans. But there is a smart way to counter the threat that Iran poses to our interests and a self-defeating way - and Trump has chosen the latter. [my emphasis]

The danger of nuclear war is arguably the single most important issue the world faces. Climate change gets more public attention. But the damage done by climate change is more long-term. A nuclear war, even a "small" one like between India and Pakistan, would have catastrophic effects on the world: deaths directly related to the blasts, wide distribution of radiative fallout, and injecting massive dust clouds into the atmosphere. The latter could be seen as making nuclear war yet another climate change risk. The fact that the effect is known as a "nuclear winter" phenomenon shouldn't lead anyone to expect it would have a salutary impact in cooling off the planet. Such a change would be drastic and very sudden. I haven't seen a recent analysis of how a "nuclear winter" event would play out in the current state of climate change. But we can safely assume those implications would be very bad.

Biden does include this paragraph on climate change, which is okay so far as it goes, being safely reflective of the general approach of the Obama Administration:

The United States must lead the world to take on the existential threat we face-climate change. If we don't get this right, nothing else will matter. I will make massive, urgent investments at home that put the United States on track to have a clean energy economy with net-zero emissions by 2050. Equally important, because the United States creates only 15 percent of global emissions, I will leverage our economic and moral authority to push the world to determined action. I will rejoin the Paris climate agreement on day one of a Biden administration and then convene a summit of the world's major carbon emitters, rallying nations to raise their ambitions and push progress further and faster. We will lock in enforceable commitments that will reduce emissions in global shipping and aviation, and we will pursue strong measures to make sure other nations can't undercut the United States economically as we meet our own commitments. That includes insisting that China - the world's largest emitter of carbon - stop subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing pollution to other countries by financing billions of dollars' worth of dirty fossil fuel energy projects through its Belt and Road Initiative. [my emphasis]

It's not entirely encouraging that he winds up there framing climate change as a issue on which we need to push China around. But he does include the ritual reference in the essay to how we should "seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge, such as climate change, nonproliferation, and global health security." (my emphasis)

But there is every reason to believe that on climate change that a Biden Administration will be significantly better than Trump's. Trump has been accelerating in the wrong direction on both issues. These are major problems that endanger the whole world. Just the fact that Biden would listen to experts and experienced diplomats that have a realistic understand of the relevant issues would be huge progress compared to Trump.