What kind of post-Trump, post America-Alone foreign policy might we expect from Biden-Harris

John Feffer attempts some pre-Inauguration tea-leaf-reading on the Biden-Harris foreign policy in Biden Won’t Reset U.S. Foreign Policy On His Own Foreign Policy in Focus 12/03/2020.

[T]he world has moved on from 2016. The Trump team has left messes pretty much everywhere it camped around the world. A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian stand-off has become ever more remote. The Iranians are understandably wary of U.S. promises of reengagement, and the reformists might only be in power for another half year in any case, pending an early summer election. Europeans are increasingly skeptical of relying on the United States for anything. China is hedging its bets after several years of more hostile U.S. policy.

Biden’s foreign policy team will have to navigate this new world. Their intentions — good, bad, indifferent — may end up mattering very little as they come up against the new geopolitical realities. [my emphasis]

Feffer notes several areas in which Biden will have the ability to make substantial policy changes without Congressional approval. This is important, because we have no reason to expect Tea-Party-on-steroids level of obstruction from QAnon-ized Republican Party of today.

As long as the Biden administration doesn’t need to push a treaty through the Senate, it will have a relatively free hand on foreign policy. It can rejoin the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord. It can lift restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba. It can negotiate its way back into the Iran nuclear deal. It can extend the New START treaty with Russia. Republicans can squawk all they want. It will be their turn once again to feel helpless in the face of executive power. [my emphasis]

Feffer also has these messaging suggestions for advocates of a progressive peace policy:

• Our efforts to reduce carbon emissions have to be framed as a massive jobs bill connected to the creation of clean energy infrastructure.
• Our desire to avoid a Cold War with China begins with the removal of tariffs that ultimately hurt U.S. farmers and manufacturers and continues with cooperation in clean energy that grows that sector in both countries.
• A détente with Cuba and a nuclear deal with Iran both give U.S. businesses a leg up in both countries and thus also can have job-creation potential domestically. [my emphasis]

One hopeful policy item is the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA). As Trita Parsi writes in House Dems unite to support the Iran nuclear deal Responsible Statecraft 12/11/2020, there are strong signs that House Democrats will be supportive of a return to the agreement.

And Iran is initially making positive diplomatic signals on the deal, as Juan Cole discusses in Iran’s Pres. Rouhani to Biden: We will Fulfill our Nuclear Obligations on Day One if you Return to 2015 Deal Informed Comment 12/15/2020. This is a real opportunity, though obviously one with complications:

What [Iranian president Hassan] Rouhani is signalling to Biden and to Europe is that if they want Iran to go back to observing the stringent stipulations of the JCPOA, they can have that, but they have to turn on the money spigots.

A lot of Washington interests want to squeeze Iran, over issues like its presence in Syria, or its ballistic missile program, or human rights, by tying them to a resumption of the nuclear deal. These are very bad ideas, since denuclearizing the Middle East should come first. Biden is said to agree, and this is the most promising news on the horizon. Iran can be more successfully pressed on those other issues if it depends on income from a Renault car factory and exports to the US, etc. Isolated states find it easier to be rogue states. [my emphasis]