After Trump: what prospects for peace?

The defeat of President Donald Trump at the hands of the US electorate brings an end to four years of threats, bombast and potentially deadly unpredictability. END Info, The Spokesman and other publications have covered the horrible realities of the Trump regime in detail and there is no need to repeat them again.

It is important to note that despite his defeat, Trump’s ‘popular vote’ actually increased: he secured more support on the ground in 2020 than in the previous election. The magnificent mobilisation of voters, who lent their support to President-elect Biden, was the decisive factor. We must hope that the aspirations and demands of these voters are fulfilled by the incoming administration. If not, then a return to ‘Trump-style’ rule is not out of the question. Maintaining a broad political mobilisation will be key to ensuring that the hopes of a ‘better America’ are maintained, if not fully realised, over the next four years.

What hope can we identify in the sphere of global affairs - prospects for peace in particular - with respect to the incoming Biden administration? What avenues of hope have opened up?

There are a number of immediate steps that the Biden administration can and must take in order to restore some semblance of regularity and stability to the global arms control and disarmament structures that Trump did so much to damage.

First amongst these must be an immediate agreement to extend New START, not just for a further year but for the full five years allowed under the treaty. There should be no attempts to re-negotiate certain aspects or to vary the treaty before the extension is firmly agreed.

Next, the Biden administration must re-join the JCPOA (Iran Deal) as a matter of urgency. There needs to be a significant lowering of tensions between the US and Iran and so the additional sanctions imposed following Trump’s withdrawal must be lifted. The Iranian people need urgent access to medical supplies and food-stuffs and the Iranian government needs to hear clear messages from the US government that the JCPOA, the inspections regime and further negotiations will be conducted in good faith. This means no more assassinations, no more sanctions and an end to war-like rhetoric from the halls of Washington.

As with New START, there should be no preconditions to resuming US participation in the JCPOA and any attempts to curb Iran’s ballistic missile system should be addressed in separate negotiations and other measures of reassurance.

Of all the dangerous threats made by the Trump administration, the threat to resume explosive nuclear testing was perhaps the most deadly. Thankfully, no such testing was carried out but if the US had decided to go ahead then there is no international agreement to stop them. The US has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) but has, in effect, abided by the international consensus not to engage in such tests. The US should now ratify the CTBT and encourage all other states not yet on board to do likewise.

Trump’s sabotage of the INF Treaty has pitched Europe into heightened nuclear tensions. Can Biden resurrect the treaty or reach agreement with the Russians to replace it with something similar? Such a course of action will be more difficult than with the other treaties and agreements already mentioned, but it is an important course of action. It will be a test for the incoming Biden administration: can they constructively engage with a ‘strategic competitor’ for the good of humanity, or is such an approach beyond them?

Biden must immediately halt US efforts to undermine the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and seriously engage with the unstoppable processes already underway. Likewise, the US must live up to the rhetoric about the importance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, fully uphold its provisions and act on the already agreed action points from successive review conferences.

The President-elect will be fully aware that the European states - including the UK - will be looking to the new administration to ‘take a lead’, particularly with regards to NATO, which Trump threw into some measure of chaos, and with respect to ‘handling’ both Russia and China. What Biden chooses to do, what course of action he decides to embark upon, presents some fundamental challenges for us all. Whereas Biden can fairly straightforwardly choose to resurrect or shore-up aspects of the nuclear treaty framework and positively engage in ‘multilateralism’ with ‘strategic rivals’ on this score, will his other policy choices be as reassuring?

The evidence seems thin on the ground. Take, for example, his Secretary of State appointment. Antony Blinken may be a very different character to Mike Pompeo, but he comes with his own political baggage. Blinken was characterised in the pages of the London Guardian as a ‘born internationalist’, which seems promising enough until you consider what he might understand ‘internationalism’ to be.

For instance he supported the US invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, has voiced support for the Saudi intervention in Yemen and such like. It should be taken for granted that President-elect Biden is on the same page on these issues.

What is fundamentally at stake here is whether Biden can manage a global shift in power, a shift from US dominance to multipolarity, or whether he and his administration will attempt to stop the unstoppable. Will Biden’s ‘internationalism’ and commitment to ‘multilateralism’ mean positive engagement with the world or building a US-dominated coalition to divide the world between nuclear-armed blocs?

The world is watching.