Biden Believes ‘America Is Back,’ but US Allies Aren’t So Sure

In his meetings with G-7 and North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies in Europe last week, President Joe Biden missed no opportunity to repeat his assertion that “America is back” on the world stage and ready to take the lead in addressing big problems like climate change, rising authoritarianism, cybersecurity and the distribution of coronavirus vaccines to low- and moderate-income nations.

Among other things, Biden rallied the leaders of some of the world’s largest democracies behind a plan to create a global infrastructure fund, called the Build Back Better World Partnership, or B3W, in a specific bid to challenge China’s eight-year-old Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The name of the program is a very deliberate callback to Biden’s campaign motto that promised he would help the U.S. “build back better” from the devastation of the pandemic. In announcing the program, he described it as “more equitable” than China’s BRI, and said B3W “will not only be good for the countries, but ... good for the entire world and represent values that our democracies represent, and not autocratic lack of values.”