Biden’s UN balancing act: Condemning war while advocating broad agenda

The intensifying global contest between democracy and autocracy – heralded by President Joe Biden as the defining battle of this century – took center stage at the United Nations Wednesday as the American leader used his speech to the General Assembly to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The war, he said, was a stab at the “core tenets of the United Nations Charter” and an attack on the principle of national sovereignty.

Invoking every U.N. member state’s reliance on the Charter to protect it from powerful neighbors, the president added, “This war is about extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state, plain and simple.”

Mr. Biden spoke just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a dramatic escalation: a partial mobilization of forces and assets and a repeated threat to use nuclear arms. That followed significant gains made by Ukrainian forces recently against invaders they have battled since Feb. 24.

The notable defeats suffered by Russian forces have prompted a public questioning of Mr. Putin’s war by powerful leaders in the “autocracy” camp – most notably China’s Xi Xinping – and by leaders like India’s Narendra Modi who have sought to maintain a neutral stance on the conflict.

Yet even though Mr. Biden vilified Mr. Putin for moving to escalate the war in the face of rising global condemnation, he used much of his address to signal his understanding that in a world of rising climate-related destabilization, food shortages, and persistent health challenges, the war is not everyone’s top preoccupation.

Since the war’s onset, both President Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have portrayed it as a fight for democracy and for the U.S.-led rules-based international order.

Yet the problem with reducing global affairs to a battle between two ideologies, some diplomatic and international relations experts say, is that it shrinks the space and environment of cooperation and mutual trust needed for addressing pressing and even existential global issues, from climate change to food security and health.

And as the house that multilateralism built over the ashes of World War II, the United Nations may very well be the wrong place to press a vision of a great global ideological confrontation.

Where global challenges hit hardest

With his vision of the democracy-autocracy struggle and specifically, the war in Ukraine, “Biden is speaking and acting with a high degree of moral certainty that we are on the side of the angels,” says Michael Desch, a professor of international relations at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and founding director of the university’s International Security Center.

“We may have the Europeans and other Western allies with us on this,” he adds, “but much of the world is trying to tell us that there are other problems that the continuing war in Ukraine is sucking the air from.”

It is especially the developing world, which is being hit hardest by global challenges like climate change, massive migration, and public health concerns, that resists joining a global ideological battle that would make addressing those threats more problematic, some say.

“We’re in the foothills of a new Cold War, with a world that is divided along lines of political systems and ideologies,” says Michael Doyle, a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a former U.N. assistant secretary-general. “But at the same time, we’re seeing the emergence of a new Third World that doesn’t want to be forced into the straitjacket of a binary autocracy-vs.-democracy world.”

A realization of this resistance may explain why much of Mr. Biden’s speech to the General Assembly Wednesday was dedicated to addressing the triple threat of climate change, food insecurity, and world health.

Mr. Biden did indeed refer to the “contest between democracy and autocracy” that he has made a hallmark of his presidency, and he reiterated his conviction that “democracy remains humanity’s greatest instrument to address the challenges of our time.”

But he also downplayed the confrontational aspects of this contest, noting that the U.N. Charter was “negotiated among dozens of countries with different ideologies.”

Moreover, he declared the principles upon which the U.N. was founded – from national sovereignty and member nations’ territorial integrity to universal human rights – to be “the common ground upon which we all must stand.”

In what was perhaps the most heartfelt and human line of his speech, Mr. Biden noted as he laid out the high costs that the entire world pays for rising food insecurity, “If parents cannot feed their children, nothing else matters.”

Other avenues for leadership

Even before the American president arrived in New York, U.S. officials were acknowledging many countries’ misgivings about seeing the biggest week in international diplomacy dominated by a war they see either as only tangentially connected to their interests or as further complicating domestic challenges – one example being how the war has deepened the food insecurity crisis.

“No, [the General Assembly week] will not be dominated by Ukraine,” said U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield at a briefing with journalists last week. “Certainly other countries have expressed a concern that ... as we focus on Ukraine, we are not paying attention to what is happening in other crises around the world.”

And indeed, U.S. diplomatic engagement at the U.N. this week seems in part designed to demonstrate that the United States is taking the lead on a number of global issues.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken joined the African Union, the European Union, Colombia, and Indonesia in hosting a ministerial-level meeting on global food insecurity. Citing World Food Program statistics, Mr. Blinken said the war in Ukraine and its effects on global food supplies have raised the world’s “food insecure” population – people already facing hunger and threatened with famine – to more than a quarter billion.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Biden was set to chair a meeting on replenishing the Global Fund that spearheads international efforts to tackle a number of health challenges largely affecting the developing world, including malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS.

President Biden also used his speech to energize long-discussed but largely dormant efforts to reform the U.N. to better address the challenges of the 21st century. The U.S. proposals include reform of the Security Council, whose five permanent and veto-wielding members reflect the power balance coming out of World War II, rather than an equitable assessment of global power distribution today.

Still, some experts say the U.S. and Western allies remain so focused on an ideological casting of the war in Ukraine that they risk prolonging a conflict that is costing not just Ukraine and Russia, but the entire world.

“When we recently saw both Xi and Modi indicating it’s time for Moscow to rethink what it’s up to in Ukraine, that suggested to me that [the Chinese and Indian leaders] may have been more diplomatic and realistic than what I expect the West to be in New York,” says Notre Dame’s Dr. Desch.

“The U.S. should have seized on that public distancing of two significant powers from Putin’s war as an opportunity to move forward diplomatically,” he says. “But [the U.S.] is so painted into a corner that it’s going to be hard to find a reasonable way out of this war.”

Welcome return to internationalism

Few diplomats or U.N. insiders give the U.S. effort to reform and update the U.N. much chance of success. But at the same time, some say the mere fact that the U.S. is including the reform agenda as part of a full-court diplomatic press is indicative of the U.S. return to a more active international engagement under President Biden.

“American leadership is back, and Biden has returned to a brand of internationalism that emerged after Pearl Harbor and that much of the world likes and is comfortable with,” says Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington who served as senior director for European affairs in the Obama National Security Council.

This is a “defining moment for democracy,” Mr. Kupchan says. But he adds that the test for Mr. Biden and other leaders of democracies is to move beyond rhetoric to demonstrating democracy’s value to populations and its superiority to the authoritarianism that others are advocating.

Noting the shaky global economy, an uneven emergence from the pandemic, and rising global hunger and migration, he says, “This is a moment in which democracy needs to get back up on its feet and prove to its citizens it can deliver.”

Yet while others agree that much of the world is relieved to see the U.S. return to a traditional leadership role, some caution that many countries remain wary of America’s staying power. At the same time, some say the U.S. shift under Mr. Biden so far has resonated most with Western allies.

“The world sees a sea change compared to the previous [U.S.] administration and a recommitment to world order,” says Columbia’s Dr. Doyle. “But from the standpoint of much of the developing world, they ask, ‘What’s that doing for me?’ They remain skeptical and need to be persuaded they won’t have to bear the cost of the new Cold War.”