Why Has President Biden Not Followed-Through With His Campaign Statements About Cuba? No Politics Here And "Circumstances have changed," Shares Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor
/CNN
Atlanta, Georgia
7 November 2021
Fareed Zakaria, GPS (Excerpts Courtesy Of CNN)
FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you live from New York.
ZAKARIA: Is America back atop the world stage or are we in a post- American world? I will talk to the president's National Security adviser, Jake Sullivan.
JAKE SULLIVAN, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: American leadership has to have a different character.
ZAKARIA: On the show last week, Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of Britain, said America knew how to lead in the unipolar world but it's learning to lead in a multipolar world. Do you think that's an accurate characterization, and are you learning to lead?
SULLIVAN: Well, I definitely think that American leadership has to have a different character in the world we operate in today. And it has to be more collaborative. It has to listen more. It has to consult more. And ultimately it has to pull together collisions and countries to solve big problems. We did that with the European Union standing side by side to put forward a global methane pledge that 100 countries have signed on to. We've done that in the Quad countries in the Indo-Pacific, on n everything from vaccine deployment to technology. So I do believe that the style of American leadership in today's global landscape has to shift. We are showing in concrete ways how that can improve the lives of people in the United States and around the world and it's a method we will keep at. I think Joe Biden is uniquely suited to exercise this form of leadership because there's a personal dimension to it, there's a relationship dimension to it, and there's an element to it that is very much about allies and partners, and President Biden feels all of that in his bones.
ZAKARIA: When I talk to people in Europe and Asia, American allies, the one thing that they say that bothers them a great deal about the Biden foreign policy is that it still maintains a lot of the protectionism of the Trump foreign policy. Tariffs, quotas, the use of national security as a, frankly, bogus excuse to put tariffs on, to buy America provisions. And to them this seem like a concession to the Trump -- or what was meant to be a kind of sharp break with American foreign policy with Trump and America first. And they see Biden as simply continuing that core element of America first.
SULLIVAN: President Biden has departed in profound ways from President Trump's policies and has overtly rejected the idea of America first. In fact he has said that America first makes America last. He's taken two trips to Europe so far. On the first trip he resolved a 17-year long dispute between Boeing and Airbus and set a blueprint for how the United States and Europe could work together to take on China's non- market economic practices. On the second trip, he resolved President Trump's steel tariff dispute with Europe, not only creating a circumstance in which those tariffs get relaxed but also having the United States and Europe propose the first-ever carbon base sectoral agreement for steel and aluminum that itself will serve as a blueprint for protecting workers in both Europe and the United States against China's overcapacity and achieve climate goals that produce overall emissions in a sector that accounts for 10 percent of global emissions. So I actually think if you look at the president's trade and economic policy particularly as it relates to Europe, you see a study in contrast with President Trump.
ZAKARIA: There are some areas where President Biden campaigned and promised certain changes in policy again, reversing Trump-era policies. He said he'd get back in to the Iran deal. He said he would get back to essentially relations with Cuba as they were under President Obama. And he said they would get rid of the tariffs on China. He criticized them all. I'm sure there are individual explanations for each one, but one common theme they all have is they would draw a lot of Republican opposition. Is the administration hamstrung by its fears about domestic opposition, political opposition? And are you as a result playing defense on issues where the president made campaign promises?
SULLIVAN: So, first, the president has, over the last 10 months, followed through on an unbelievable number of the things he said he was going to do. On Cuba, things have changed quite a bit this year. We saw just in July substantial street protests, some of the most significant protests in a very long time, and a brutal crackdown by the government that continues to this day, as they hand down sentences to some of those protesters. So circumstances have changed, and that requires the president to consider what the best way forward to support the Cuban people is, as we move.
