Biden Administration Faces Unprecedented Challenges

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Perhaps no president other than Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt comes into office facing greater problems than does Joe Biden, who becomes the 46^th president of the United States today. But few have had more experience in federal politics.

This alone makes the contrast between him and outgoing president Donald Trump, who never held any elected office until 2016, all the more stark. Biden served as a U.S. Senator from Delaware for six terms from 1973 to 2009 and was vice-president under Barack Obama.

The new president faces a somber domestic political situation. The election results were razor thin. The country is fiercely divided, geographically, culturally, and politically. A mob stormed the U.S. capital Jan. 6, creating mayhem to make their point.

Biden, at 78 years of age, is by far the oldest man to move into the White House. Not surprisingly, then, health care remains a top priority for him, and he supports adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act, a centrepiece of Obama’s presidency.

First and foremost, though, Biden must deal with the worst public health crisis in 100 years. He must quickly scale up the manufacture and administration of hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines, in the most complex logistical operation in generations.

Millions of Americans are now unemployed and tens of thousands of businesses have been destroyed. There will have to be a massive stimulus plan, on the scale of Roosevelt’s New Deal, to bring the economy back from the abyss.

Biden has announced plans for a “American Rescue Plan” that will include a new benefit for children in poor and middle-class households, plus $2,000 in stimulus payments, unemployment benefits and other assistance for the ailing economy.

He has also promised that he will push to raise taxes on the richest households and partially reverse tax cuts granted to companies during the Trump administration.

Biden’s ambitious plans on climate change may face hostile Republican lawmakers in Congress. To do an end-run around them, he may seek to use sweeping executive power, but this invites pushback, perhaps even by the Supreme Court.

Though the Democrats will now control both houses of Congress, Biden will face pressure from his party’s own progressive wing. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who both opposed him in the party’s primaries, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among many others in the House of Representatives, have their own domestic agendas.

They will try to push him hard on various radical measures they support, such as the Green New Deal, debt forgiveness for college graduates, and “Medicare for all,” the single-payer measure they advocate.

On the foreign policy front, Biden has picked Antony Blinken, his closest foreign policy adviser, for secretary of state, a job which will entail dealing with China, Iran and Russia, all countries with which Washington has perennial problems.

Blinken will have as his new deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman, a lead negotiator during the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement talks. Renewing the agreement, which was abrogated by Trump, is something Biden hopes to revisit. But it may not be possible to reconstitute the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in its original form.

Biden is choosing Victoria Nuland as under secretary of state for political affairs. A fierce critic of Russia, she is sure to anger President Vladimir Putin.

Washington also needs to confront China on its human rights violations and aggressive behaviour in Asia. As well, Biden will have to tell Central American states to take on the corruption, violence, and endemic poverty that is driving people to leave their homes there.

What about the Middle East? In an interview last year, Biden called Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan an “autocrat” and has described Saudi Arabia as with a government that has “very little social redeeming value.”  

There is one problem that the Biden administration will lose less sleep over: after the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Bahrain, and the Moroccan-Israeli peace deal, the Arab-Israeli conflict has become less critical.

But symbolic gestures to reassure the Palestinians that they have not been forgotten are in the pipeline, such as reopening U.S. consulates in East Jerusalem and the PLO mission in Washington.