News Desk :
As Global Recorded cases of Covid-19 reach the highest levels of the pandemic so far, President Joe Biden is pursuing a vaccination policy that might well be branded with a favourite tagline of his predecessor, Donald Trump: America First.
Wealthy European countries are following a similar course, reserving the vaccine they have preordered almost entirely for their own people. But America has made more progress vaccinating its population than any of these nations save Britain, and, experts say, it is on track to have hundreds of millions of excess doses this year.
Mr Biden has said he wants America to return to a leadership role in the world. The fact that he is hesitating to show such leadership on vaccination-and has come under almost no domestic pressure to change course-is partly a result of America’s devastating experience of the pandemic. But that shock has only intensified a shift that was already underway: America is once again turning inward. Mr Trump may be gone from the White House, but the impulse to put America first has if anything become stronger, because now the left is exhibiting it as well as the right.
Beset by domestic questions of racial equity; fearful about the future of jobs, education and infrastructure; depleted by wars in the Middle East; and divided from one another on all these matters, Americans are paying little attention to troubles abroad.
“Everybody is thinking, how do you develop a new constituency for foreign policy?” says Anne-Marie Slaughter, the chief executive officer of New America, a think
tank, and a top State Department official under President Barack Obama. Ms Slaughter, who co-authored an essay in the journal Foreign Affairs last month calling on the administration to “vaccinate the world”, said that for some analysts, America today is like “postwar Britain, realising the limits of its power-an analogy I don’t like” because it implies long-term decline.
Internationalists in both parties are in retreat. It was not lost on those who still argue for greater engagement with the world that Mr Biden, a student of foreign policy, devoted only half a dozen sentences to it in his inaugural address. On trade as on other matters, Mr Biden and his top aides stress that they are thinking first about how to make America stronger. Jake Sullivan, Mr Biden’s national security adviser, likes to repeat that “foreign policy is domestic policy, and domestic policy is foreign policy”.
Protected by two oceans, America has always been drawn to isolationism. It may have had a messianic view of its role, but through most of its history it saw itself showing the way forward by example, rather than by enmeshing itself in what Thomas Jefferson disparaged as “entangling alliances”. Mr Biden has invoked that tradition to build support for his domestic agenda. As he put it in his inaugural speech, “We will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.”
The administration has taken some steps toward helping the rest of the world protect itself against covid-19. Earlier this month Mr Biden appointed Gayle Smith, a former Obama administration official who led America’s response to Ebola, to co-ordinate its global response to the virus. America has pledged $4bn, more than any other country, to COVAX, the scheme meant to ensure that all countries have access to at least some doses of vaccine. And America has also loaned 4m doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico and Canada.
That said, America is believed to be sitting on another 26m doses of that vaccine, which is not yet cleared for use in the United States. That is more than half the 43m doses of vaccine that COVAX has distributed so far, to 119 countries. The Biden administration has also locked up hundreds of millions of doses of other vaccines. “It doesn’t matter how much money COVAX has if there’s nothing to buy,” said Andrea Taylor, assistant director of programmes at the Duke Global Health Innovation Centre. “Why isn’t there more pressure from Americans to actually push for global equity?”
Courtesy: The Economist
