Ian Bremmer: No, America Is Not Back. It Will Take Time | Quick Take | GZERO Media

The US is not "back" while many Americans believe US foreign policy serves only the top 1%.

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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:

Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here, kicking off the week as we head into spring. And I thought I'd talk a little bit about where US foreign policy is and is not heading.
We keep hearing from President Biden and the Biden administration that the United States is back. And certainly when you talk about the fact that the United States is rejoining and recommitting to a lot of institutions like the nuclear agreement on START, five-year extension, trying to get back into the Iranian nuclear deal, Paris Climate Accord, World Health Organization, where there's been a lot of criticism of late from Secretary of State Blinken saying the Chinese are all over that, and were writing basically the report that came out from the WHO, my God, that's a hit, but they're still engaging with WHO as they should. Internationally, that means that the level of diplomacy looks a little bit more normal than it did under the Trump administration, but that's not the United States is back.

I'll give you an example, under Obama and Biden by far the most important piece of strategic foreign policy initiative was the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If it had been signed by the US it would have been by far the most important, largest, highest standard multilateral trade deal in history. And the United States failed to get it done. Trump left. So if the United States is back, then obviously that means we're re-engaging with the TPP, right? All of our allies want us to do it. No, no we're not. Why aren't we? Well, because there's no support for it among the American population. And so, as a consequence, you can't say the United States is back. When you look at global trade, you look at the EU-China investment deal. You look at RCEP, which is not as high standard as TPP, not as deeply integrated as TPP, but massive and multilateral. You would look at the EU-Mercosur deal, that probably happens next year, well in train. All of the multilateral work on trade happening, absent the United States. So the United States is not back.

Look at the ceasefires going on in Syria, in Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, these are largely being driven with the United States at the margins. The US wants to leave Afghanistan. Biden is not going to announce a May 1 full withdrawal, he'll kick the can a bit, but the intention is get the Americans out. That's not the United States is back. Now, by the way, I personally am glad that we're finally going to end the war in Afghanistan, but I also want to be clear, the reason the United States is not back is because foreign policy of the United States for decades from the Democrats and Republicans was largely in service of the top 1% of Americans. And as long as the average American believes that to be true, it's very hard for a political leader in the United States to go back to those sorts of policy. Whether you're talking about free trade or foreign wars or open immigration, the average American working class, middle class, feels like none of these things benefited them.

And so the most important thing that the Biden administration can do in order for the Americans to be back, first, is make sure you're coordinating well with allies, which is increasingly challenging. And the reason you need to do that is because the Americans aren't going to do, don't want to do, the same kind of lifting they've done historically. But secondly, and most importantly, you need to work on the underpinnings of that foreign policy to get buy-in from the average American. In other words, the American foreign policy needs to be seen as increasingly in service of the middle class. And I don't think that means ending free trade forever, I think it means investing in these people.

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