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2/21/21

USA: Three possible futures for the Biden presidency - by Mathew Burrows, Robert A. Manning

While it might seem like an academic exercise, imagining future scenarios is actually crucial to developing strategy. It offers foresight into how one’s plans might succeed or fail. And given the state of the world now arrayed before the new US president, Joe Biden has a whole lot of strategizing to do.

Biden’s successes or failures will be determined by how the paradoxes of his presidency play out. The president is pursuing an extraordinarily ambitious social, economic, and foreign-policy agenda amid an exceptionally dire pandemic and recession—and with a razor-thin congressional majority, no less. He hopes to restore comity and bipartisan compromise to Congress, but his legislative skills will be tested by an obstinate Republican Party and worsening political tribalism.

American presidents have more room for maneuver in international affairs, and many US allies are cheering for a stronger and more engaged United States. But Biden will have to dispel the distrust and perceptions of US unreliability that former President Donald Trump sowed in many foreign capitals—while navigating a more fragmented international system. These challenges will hamper Biden’s efforts to enhance global cooperation on mitigating the pandemic, confronting the ever more dangerous threat of climate change, keeping a fragile, debt-laden global economy from producing another global financial crisis, and managing intensifying strategic competition with China.

Read more at: Three possible futures for the Biden presidency - Atlantic Council

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