The New Commander in Chief

Democrat Joe Biden is the new president and latest White House occupant. The inauguration took place last Wednesday, Jan. 20 before Congress as Biden placed his hand on the family Bible and took the oath of office. It’s said that this Bible has been passed down in the Biden family for 127 years, and with the inauguration, Biden became the second Catholic president in U.S. history, the first being John F. Kennedy. Biden is an experienced U.S. politician who served as vice president for eight years under Barack Obama. He boasts 45 years of political experience and has now reached the presidency at 78.

A professor of international relations at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran described the start of the new Biden administration by writing, “Although the political reality of the Democratic Party has pushed Biden to the left on domestic issues, when it comes to foreign affairs, like most Democrats and Republicans, he is on the right. He has always believed in a policy of U.S. leadership and American supremacy and will act accordingly. He is neither Barack Obama nor Ronald Reagan, he’s no idealogue. He measures the waters and then makes his move. In choosing his policies, he will take into account the dynamic of the Democratic Party and aim to preserve U.S. supremacy.”

Most of what’s been written by experts in the U.S. and internationally has mentioned that Biden is ready to put an end to the chaos caused by four years of Trump’s presidency, both in domestic and foreign affairs. In addition to repairing and reinstating the policies that Trump abandoned, Biden hopes to open a new path for U.S. leadership in the world. For this reason, many are saying that Biden will begin his term by focusing on domestic concerns, and in particular, on solving the two pressing issues facing the U.S.: the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic issues it has caused, such as unemployment and the family income crisis. On his first day as president, Biden reversed several of Trump’s executive orders, including one which barred visas to citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries, including Iran. Among the first proposals put forward by the new White House are plans to vaccinate 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of the Biden presidency and create a centralized response to the pandemic based on the cooperation of both state and federal institutions. The return to the Paris climate agreement, which Trump withdrew from, and several other new executive orders illustrate the change in White House management.

However, in this writer’s opinion, one of the most immediate and important changes has been the shift in the language the president uses, especially when compared to the past four years of Trump’s presidency. In the words of Obama, Trump is a “rich New York mob capitalist” who talks first and thinks afterward when his advisers remind him to!* Whenever Trump gave a speech or interview, he was sure to insult someone in the U.S. or abroad or to humiliate American allies, and his behavior helped to normalize this destructive and negative language. With Biden’s arrival, such language has been put aside, and in his inaugural address, Biden referred to himself as the president of all Americans, not just the representative of a particular party or group. He appealed to national solidarity within the U.S. and the cooperation of all nations internationally to solve the health crisis. He announced to leaders across the world that he is ready to use dialogue to solve disagreements and achieve mutual understanding, and that the U.S. will hereby abide by its agreements and fulfill its obligations. Biden criticized the chaos of the current international situation and mentioned economic, political, and security concerns that many nations face, insisting that a solution to these problems is only available through international cooperation. With this, Biden has rejected the unilateralism that Trump practiced. Biden’s plan to reestablish a multilateral approach in international relations starts by repairing Washington’s relationship with the European Union, and specifically, with France, the U.K., and Germany, three of America’s allies. His foreign policy, as shown by the team he’s selected from secretary of state to his advisers, will focus on de-escalation, avoiding further crisis and peaceful dispute resolution based on understanding the circumstances that caused them. The EU, China, Russia and most of the world’s nations will surely welcome this shift. They all want to hear a new tone from Washington and see the aggressiveness of the Trump years cast aside.

From the beginning of the Trump presidency, the Islamic Republic of Iran recognized his character and announced that it would never negotiate with him. This policy was proven right when Trump openly revealed himself to be a terrorist. Many are saying that Biden is in no hurry to renegotiate the Iran nuclear agreement and restart talks with Iran. We see this opinion most often in those Persian-language media outlets that are produced outside of Iran with Saudi funding or which lean toward the Zionist Regime. They repeatedly say that Iran is not on the list of Biden’s foreign policy priorities. But even now, there is unspoken acknowledgement that the stinking corpse of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign has met an early grave, and everyone in the West, and particularly the U.S., wants to forget it. This is the same policy that most of these foreign-produced Persian outlets constantly used to rave about.

It is interesting to note that over the past few days, many of the countries that used Trump’s sanction policy as an excuse to avoid interaction with Iran are now apologizing and insisting that they don’t need to wait on permission from Washington. Already they’re asking to reassess their business ties with Tehran and pursue an opening of economic relations.

Although many are saying that Biden will refrain from acting on the Iran question until the Iranian presidential election in June and the Israeli parliamentary election in March, which will determine who the new prime minister of the Zionist Regime will be, Biden himself must know that many nations, particularly those in Asia, will not await around while he stalls for time. In addition to this, Iran is not a country that can be ignored or that can be attended to when the time is right. No plan for peace in the Middle East has any chance of success without Iran’s active participation, and confronting relations with Iran is urgent, necessary and unavoidable.

*Editor’s note: Although accurately translated, this quoted remark could not be independently verified.