JERUSALEM — This is what international diplomacy has come to in the era of President Biden, also known as POTUS.A couple months ago he traveled to Asi
JERUSALEM — This is what international diplomacy has come to in the era of President Biden, also known as POTUS.
A couple months ago he traveled to Asia, where, having abandoned the TPP, he tried to form the IPEF and also met with the Quad. After returning home, he traveled to Los Angeles to preside over the S.O.A. with the O.A.S. Then he went to Europe, where he met with the G7 and NATO.
Now on his first trip as president to the Middle East, he is trying to reassure Israel about the Iran talks with the P5+1 (also known as the EC+3) and discussing the formation of a MEAD to defend against U.A.V.s. Then he will hold a virtual meeting for the first time with the I2U2. And finally, he will head to Saudi Arabia to get together with the G.C.C.+3 while quietly trying to win a little more cooperation from OPEC Plus.
The alphabet soup of modern diplomacy has long required a menu to keep up with the ingredients. But even as Washington seeks to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world, it is doing nothing to stop the proliferation of new clusters of various countries and the acronyms that come with them. Indeed, while Mr. Biden did not invent the jargon of international relations, he is adding to it at a decent clip.
Take the IPEF. That stands for the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a new trade bloc with a dozen countries that he kicked off during his May trip to South Korea and Japan, an acknowledgment that it would be politically untenable to rejoin the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a more expansive but controversial trade agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama when Mr. Biden was vice president. Mr. Biden did not create the S.O.A., or Summit of the Americas, a gathering of nations from the O.A.S., or Organization of American States, but he was the first president to host it in nearly three decades.
In the Middle East, he is shepherding a new alignment between Israel and its Arab neighbors called the Middle East Air Defense Alliance, or MEAD, which would synchronize the various systems to defend against Iranian rockets, missiles and, yes, U.A.V.s, or unmanned aerial vehicles (read: drones).
And on Thursday, he hosts the opening meeting of a new alliance of sorts, the I2U2, which may sound like a “Star Wars” droid but is really Israel, India, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. (Two Is and two Us, get it?)
Mr. Biden then heads Friday to Saudi Arabia, the most politically volatile moment of the trip. It will be no T.G.I.F. for him.
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