Opinion
Biden: ‘We’re Going to Fight Like Hell by
Investing in America First’
My talk with Joe Biden on his first few months, and
his next four years.
Thomas L.
Friedman
By Thomas
L. Friedman
Opinion
Columnist
Dec. 2,
2020, 12:11 a.m. ET
President-elect
Joe Biden was in a good mood as we talked on the phone Tuesday evening for an
hour — he in Delaware and me in Bethesda, Md. He apologized, though, for being
late. He had been following the breaking news that Attorney General William
Barr had just announced that the Justice Department had not uncovered any
significant fraud that could have affected the results of the presidential
election. It’s all over.
Biden joked
that Barr had just called him, “asking if I can get him in the witness
protection program for endorsing me.”
Considering
the Trump team’s hurricane of dishonest claims about the election results, the
president-elect was entitled to a little laugh at their expense. Otherwise, he
was all business.
Biden had a
lot to say about how he intends to approach the current Senate majority leader,
Mitch McConnell, and his Republican colleagues in order to get his cabinet
nominees — and as much of his agenda as possible — through the Senate; how he
intends to reshape U.S.-China strategy; and why he is ready to return to the
Iran nuclear deal, if Iran does, and end President Trump’s sanctions on Iran.
Biden also
spoke in depth about his strategy to connect with rural Americans, who have
become estranged from the Democratic Party.
I did ask
one personal question: What has it been like to win the presidency under such
weird circumstances — with a deadly pandemic and an infodemic of Trump
propaganda falsely claiming that the election was rigged?
“I feel
like I’ve done something good for the country by making sure that Donald Trump
is not going to be president for four more years,” Biden said. “But there’s
been no moment of elation. It kind of reminds me of what’s going on with all my
grandkids. You know, here I got a granddaughter who graduates with honors from
Columbia. There’s no commencement. I’m the commencement speaker. It’s virtual.
These kids are graduating with no parties. It’s just one of those moments.
There’s a lot of work to do. I’m just focused on getting some things done as
quickly as I can.”
Exactly how
much he will get done will depend to a large degree on two things, Biden noted.
One is how Republicans in the Senate and the House behave once Trump is truly
gone from power. And the other is how McConnell behaves if he continues to
control the Senate.
Biden’s top
priority, he said, is getting a generous stimulus package through Congress,
even before he takes office.
We are
courting serious long-term economic harm if we don’t deal with the fact that
“you have over 10 million people out there who are worried [how] they can pay
their next mortgage payment,” and “you have a significantly higher number of
people who have no ability to pay their rent.”
When people
“are out of the work force too long, you know, that makes it a hell of a lot
harder for them to get back in the work force,” Biden said. “Many of them are
losing years and years of opportunity.”
The same is
true when kids miss significant time in school. “They don’t just lose that
semester,” he said. “They end up sometimes two and three years behind.”
A generous
stimulus will actually generate economic growth without long-term fiscal harm
if in the future “everybody pays their fair share, for God’s sake,” he insisted.
“And by that fair share, I mean there’s no reason why the top tax rate
shouldn’t be 39.6 percent, which it was in the beginning of the Bush
administration. There’s no reason why 91 Fortune 500 companies should be paying
zero in taxes.”
But the big
question is whether he can get it past McConnell today or tomorrow if the
Republicans continue to hold the Senate. A significant number of Republican
senators could decide that they want to become deficit hawks again under a
President Biden, after four years of uncontrolled spending under Trump that has
brought the national debt to record highs.
Biden was
careful about how he talked about McConnell, who has been careful not to call
Biden “president-elect.” Biden obviously wants to keep the prospects of
cooperation open — but also make clear that he may have more leverage with the
American people than the G.O.P. realizes if Senate Republicans opt for full-on
obstruction.
“Let me put
it this way,” he said, “There are a number of things that when McConnell
controlled the Senate that people said couldn’t get done, and I was able to get
them done with [him]. I was able to get them to, you know, raise taxes on the
wealthy.”
“I think
there are trade-offs, that not all compromise is walking away from principle,”
Biden added. “He knows me. I know him. I don’t ask him to embarrass himself to
make a deal.”
At the same
time, if Republicans clearly “let all this go down the drain” just so a Biden
administration will not get a win, that “may have an impact on the prospect of
Republicans running for re-election in 2022.”
“When you
have cops and firefighters and first responders across the board being laid
off, when you’re not getting the kind of distribution of vaccines out to rural
America,” he said, “it has to have some consequences.”
Having been
through a lot of political seasons, Biden added, the world could change a lot
for Republican lawmakers once Trump is gone, although he certainly will not be
forgotten.
“My
favorable rating is now 55 percent,” he said. “Trump is down to 42 percent.” A
significant number of independents and some Republicans could start to look at
the world very differently in the next few weeks, he said.
“I’m not
sure [they] can sustain the position that we’re not going to do anything to
help the circumstances of keeping businesses open, making sure we could open
our schools safely. It is kind of hard to go home” if you are a Republican
senator who says “let the states go bankrupt.” Republicans live in those
states, too.
On foreign
policy, Biden made two significant points. First, I asked him whether he stood
by his views on the Iran nuclear deal that he articulated in a Sept. 13 essay
on CNN.com. He answered, “It’s going to be hard, but yeah.”
He had
written that “if Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the
United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on
negotiations,” and lift the sanctions on Iran that Trump imposed.
The
Iranians are clearly hoping for that. The Iranian foreign minister, Javad
Zarif, said on Nov. 17 that a return to full implementation by the United
States and Iran can be “done automatically” and “needs no negotiations.”
The nuclear
deal — known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (J.C.P.O.A.) — was
signed in 2015. Trump unilaterally withdrew from it in May 2018, reimposing
crippling oil sanctions on Iran, claiming it was a bad deal to begin with and
that Iran was cheating — which was not the view of our European allies or
international inspectors.
The view of
Biden and his national security team is that once the deal is restored by both
sides, there will have to be, in very short order, a round of negotiations to
seek to lengthen the duration of the restrictions on Iran’s production of
fissile material that could be used to make a bomb — originally 15 years — as
well as to address Iran’s malign regional activities, through its proxies in
Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Ideally,
the Biden team would like to see that follow-on negotiation include not only
the original signatories to the deal — Iran, the United States, Russia, China,
Britain, France, Germany and the European Union — but also Iran’s Arab
neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Earlier
this week, I wrote a column arguing that it would be unwise for the United
States to give up the leverage of the Trump-imposed oil sanctions just to
resume the nuclear deal where it left off. We should use that leverage to also
get Iran to curb its exports of precision-guided missiles to its allies in
Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq, where they threaten Israel and several Arab
states. I still believe that.
Biden’s
team is aware of that argument, and does not think it is crazy — but for now
they insist that America’s overwhelming national interest is to get Iran’s
nuclear program back under control and fully inspected. In their view, Iran’s
development of a nuclear weapon poses a direct national security threat to the
United States and to the global nuclear weapons control regime, the Treaty on
the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
“Look,
there’s a lot of talk about precision missiles and all range of other things
that are destabilizing the region,” Biden said. But the fact is, “the best way
to achieve getting some stability in the region” is to deal “with the nuclear
program.”
If Iran
gets a nuclear bomb, he added, it puts enormous pressure on the Saudis, Turkey,
Egypt and others to get nuclear weapons themselves. “And the last goddamn thing
we need in that part of the world is a buildup of nuclear capability.”
Then, Biden
said, “in consultation with our allies and partners, we’re going to engage in
negotiations and follow-on agreements to tighten and lengthen Iran’s nuclear
constraints, as well as address the missile program.” The U.S. always has the
option to snap back sanctions if need be, and Iran knows that, he added.
There is
going to be a lot of debate about this in the coming months.
On China,
he said he would not act immediately to remove the 25 percent tariffs that
Trump imposed on about half of China’s exports to the United States — or the
Phase 1 agreement Trump inked with China that requires Beijing to purchase some
$200 billion in additional U.S. goods and services during the period 2020 and
2021 — which China has fallen significantly behind on.
“I’m not
going to make any immediate moves, and the same applies to the tariffs,” he
said. “I’m not going to prejudice my options.”
He first
wants to conduct a full review of the existing agreement with China and consult
with our traditional allies in Asia and Europe, he said, “so we can develop a
coherent strategy.”
“The best
China strategy, I think, is one which gets every one of our — or at least what
used to be our — allies on the same page. It’s going to be a major priority for
me in the opening weeks of my presidency to try to get us back on the same page
with our allies.”
China’s
leaders had their issues with Trump, but they knew that as long as he was
president, the United States could never galvanize a global coalition against
them. Biden’s strategy, if he can pull it off, will not be welcome news for
China.
While Trump
was focused on the trade deficit with China, with little success, despite his
trade war, Biden said his “goal would be to pursue trade policies that actually
produce progress on China’s abusive practices — that’s stealing intellectual
property, dumping products, illegal subsidies to corporations” and forcing
“tech transfers” from American companies to their Chinese counterparts.
When
dealing with China, Biden concluded, it is all about “leverage,” and “in my
view, we don’t have it yet.” Part of generating more leverage, though, is
developing a bipartisan consensus at home for some good old American industrial
policy — massive, government-led investments in American research and
development, infrastructure and education to better compete with China — and not
just complain about it. Both Democratic and Republican senators have draft
bills calling for such a strategy. The U.S. semiconductor industry in
particular has been lobbying for such an approach.
“I want to
make sure we’re going to fight like hell by investing in America first,” said
Biden. He ticked off energy, biotech, advanced materials and artificial
intelligence as areas ripe for large-scale government investment in research.
“I’m not going to enter any new trade agreement with anybody until we have made
major investments here at home and in our workers” and in education, he said.
And this
time, he insisted, rural America will not be left behind. There is no way
Democrats can go another four years and lose almost every rural county in
America. For their sake and the country’s, Democrats have to figure out what is
going on there and speak to rural voters more effectively.
“You know,
it really does go to the issue of dignity, how you treat people,” Biden said.
“I think they just feel forgotten. I think we forgot them.”
“I respect
them,” Bided added, and he plans to prove it by “tackling the virus” in “red
and blue areas alike.”
We have
“got to end the rural health care crisis right now by building on Obamacare,
assuming it survives at all, with a public option [and] automatically enroll
people eligible for Medicaid. There’s strong support for that — and
particularly [from] people in rural states, like Texas and North Carolina, that
reject expansion. We can boost funding. I visited 15 rural hospitals. And the
biggest problem is there’s not enough reimbursement for them to be able to keep
open.” And they are often the biggest employer in that town or city.
A lot of
these rural hospitals and clinics could benefit from telemedicine, but they
don’t have the broadband connectivity. “We should be spending $20 billion to
put broadband across the board,” Biden said. “We have got to rebuild the middle
class,” but “especially in rural America.”
Before we
signed off, I asked the president-elect just how he reacted to Republican
senators threatening not to confirm Neera Tanden as director of the Office of
Management and Budget, because of her trail of nasty tweets about Republicans.
Should nasty tweets be disqualifying in this day and age?
“That
disqualifies almost every Republican senator and 90 percent of the
administration,” Biden chuckled. “But by the way, she’s smart as hell. Yeah, I
think they’re going to pick a couple of people just to fight [over] no matter
what.”
Biden
closed by reflecting on the ugliness of the last four years — first seeing the
glass half empty but then deciding in the end, who knows, maybe it’s half full.
“Seventy-two
million people is a lot of people to vote for” Trump, he said. But maybe, just
maybe when he is gone from the immediate scene, “I’m not so sure that ugliness
stays. There may be 20 percent of it. Twenty five percent of it, I don’t know.”
But some
portion has to come back to a place where we can collaborate.
“We got to
figure out how to work together,” he said. Otherwise, “we’re in real trouble.”
Thomas L.
Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981,
and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including
“From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman
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