 Good evening, everyone. This is the fourth foreign affairs capsule for the Shankar IAEA's Academy. The topic we have today is President Biden so far. It's not a long time since he became president, such tumultuous beginning. But at the same time, he was able to accomplish very much. His mandate was to repair and rebuild the United States. After the nightmare of four years plus the action, the insurrection of January 6th, he had a lot to do to repair and to rebuild. But probably because he had so much time since his election was clear, he had put his people to work. And as soon as he went into the White House in the afternoon of 20th January, he was able to sign about 17 executive orders. And since then, he has signed about 30 executive orders. Executive orders are decisions that can be announced by the president in an urgent basis to enact rules, laws, regulations, decisions and so on. Some of them may have to be cleared by the Congress later, but the president has the authority to issue these executive orders immediately. In some broad categories, if we say that, we can see what his priorities are. His first priority, as we all know, is to deal with the coronavirus and also to increase the production of the vaccines. So the first thing he did was to announce that he will enhance the capacity of production of vaccines as part of his fight against coronavirus. Related to that also is a decision and a proclamation that masks are necessary, particularly on government property because the United States makes a big distinction about individual freedom. So perhaps he could not say that everybody should wear masks everywhere. And therefore, he restricted it to government property or federal property assets. All these places, everybody must be masked. But the spirit of this order is, of course, to for every citizen of the United States to wear masks because the situation is very grave. Every day, the deaths are mounting, but it is raising towards about 500,000 deaths by the end of the month. This is a grave situation. So these two immediate things that he has done, the idea is to vaccinate as many people as possible. And if the vaccine effort had started earlier, if masking was done earlier, if medical advisers listened to earlier, perhaps such a tragedy would not have occurred. Related to this is the more dramatic decision to go back to the World Health Organization. You know the background of that. President Trump withdrew from the World Health Organization at a critical time when the United Nations was not able to have a program or to have an emergency action to combat COVID. And when the whole responsibility was given to the World Health Organization, for the United States to withdraw from it was very foolish, even though he had justification to do so. Because he was convinced that this is a Wuhan virus or China virus and WHO was not acknowledging it and they were actually covering up China. So the suspicion is that the President Director General who was elected with the support of the Chinese may have been protecting their interests. Even today, an investigation about the China virus or COVID-19 has not been completed because the team is in Wuhan, but it has taken a year for even to start the investigation. So WHO is very much at fault. But by withdrawing from the WHO at that time, he has made a WHO weaker because United States contribution was stopped. But China, knowing the sensitivity of the subject, quickly paid that money on behalf of US as it were, to WHO to keep it going. As you know, the United States pays about 22% of the budget of most of your organizations. So it's a huge amount and that was made up by China. But the biggest mistake that WHO did was on 14 January 2020, they made a declaration that there was no evidence that COVID-19 was passing from human to human. That was a wrong judgment they made, which also caused a lot of trouble and havoc. So going back to the WHO, take of course a few days for it to be formalized. WHO has retained its importance and the US will cooperate with them. And moreover, President Biden has also appointed Mr. Fauci, the most celebrated coronavirus expert in the United States, whom Trump has been treating very badly because he never believed in science. So Fauci is now going to the WHO in Geneva in order to strengthen the work of the WHO and also ask questions. And this would be a major improvement in the situation. And Fauci is now respected and heard not only in the United States but the whole of the world. So that is the first thing he did as well as international relations were concerned. Then the other categories would be international policy or foreign policy in which many things had to be set right. And there the first thing was the Paris Agreement. I'm sure you're all aware of the Paris Agreement on climate change signed in 2015 from which President Trump withdrew. His reason for that are very many. First of all, he did not think that climate change was real. You know, there are people in the United States who think even today that the world is flat. So there is a world is flat society. So like that, there are various societies, one of them saying climate, it is not global warming but global cool. So all these opinions are prevalent there. But there was a valid objection to the Paris Agreement is that the prescriptions of the Paris Agreement by which all countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions through voluntary cuts has not been affected. I think I've explained to you this earlier that is the global temperature should not rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius if the world has to be set. And the present situation is that if all the commitments given under Paris Agreement is honored, the temperature will still go up by more than 3 degrees Celsius. So he was right when he said that Paris Agreement is a hoax because it doesn't save humanity. But the important thing was to stay inside and improve it. Because there is a provision for voluntary cuts of greenhouse gas emissions to be reviewed by the member states. And now that we know that this is not adequate, a review will have to take place within five years and then they will all be compelled to increase their commitments. Of course, Paris Agreement, we are a signatory, but we also have our reservations with the Paris Agreement because Paris Agreement does not take into account the common but differentiated responsibilities of the developed countries and the developing countries, a principle that was established in Rio in 1992. In other words, everybody has been given equal opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And the principle accepted that greenhouse gas emissions should be counted on the basis of per capita emissions and that was not accepted there. So anyway, but all these we have to work on because Kyoto Protocol had all these elements which the western countries rejected and the Paris Agreement was gotten. So, but fortunately, US withdrawal had not become immediately effective. It became effective only the day of the elections because there is a cool off period before it comes into effect. So one problem we may have is that the new climate czar John Kerry has been a fundamentalist on this issue and we do not know what kind of proposals he will make and we don't yet know whether this will hurt us or help us. But in any case, everybody has accepted, welcomed the return, Biden's return to the Paris Agreement and everybody will have to work together and also make it reduce global warming. Another very important environmental step that President Biden has taken is to cancel what is called the Keystone XL Pipeline. This was very much discussed in the past, but Mr. Obama had cancelled it because of the great damage that this particular pipeline would do to the environment, not only in the United States or also a major part of Canada. So Keystone is a place where this is in the, in Alberta, in Western Canada, where there is a huge stock of a kind of crude oil. It is not really crude oil, it is a kind of jelly kind of stuff, which looks like the tar that we use on the roads. It has gas in it and oil in it, etc. But this particular raw material is so thick and it contains so many environment unfriendly elements in it. And if it was to be dug from Canada and transported about 5000 kilometers up to Keystone or any other place in the United States, would cause great harm to the environment. So even though this was planned between Canada and the US for the few years ago, it was decided that this would make, create great damage to the environment in both the countries. And therefore, President Obama had refused to continue it and he had stopped it. And President Trump, one of the early things he did was to start the Keystone project again because he did not bother about the environmental aspects of it. He thought this would help both Canada and the United States to make a lot of money. He was only thinking in terms of the economics of it, not the environmental aspects of it. So now a great danger has been avoided and the Keystone XL pipeline project has been abandoned by the United States. It is a kind of groovy tar which can be used, of course, for production of energy. But this is something which is of great importance. Of course, Trudeau, Canadian Prime Minister did not like it. We call it a cut punch by President Biden. So there is a huge amount of energy would have been possible, probably as much as your total oil production of Iraq was possible this. And it had changed the whole oil market and many sensitive regions would have been in danger. And to think of the length of this pipeline which is 4,324 kilometers is the same distance as the distance between Srinagar and Trivandrum. So you can imagine how long the pipeline is. Then there are some important regulations or important executive orders relating to immigration. Immigration is taking definitely a new and liberal line, but not of course as much as other developing countries would want, but certainly much more liberal than what the Trump administration was willing to do. First thing that he did was he said in future census of America, non-citizens will also be counted. This relates to some of the problems that we have in Assam. But not counting the non-citizens will mean that a huge portion of the American population will be excluded from many benefits, including how many congressmen should be elected from each state. So the senators and congressmen are elected on the basis of the population. And if non-citizens are not counted, those figures would not be correct. So that is a good thing for the non-citizens, illegal aliens, etc. And as far as illegal aliens are concerned, he has said that there will be a new pathway which would enable them to work first legally, then to get the green card and then get citizenship. Because the vast majority of the illegal aliens are not Indians, because Indians who go to America are more educated. They go under the law or they go by getting employment in companies, etc. But then they get delayed because immigration process had become very difficult. So in the process of giving illegal aliens the status and the possibility of becoming American citizens, it has been possible to help a lot of illegal people in the United States. And that is very helpful to them and also including a large number of Indians. Then there is another project which Barack Obama had started. This is about children who came into the United States when they were very small, parents and others, but who were not registered and who did not have the facility of becoming citizens, because early stage when they were small children, they were not registered or processed. Now those so-called children or the dreamers as they are called, they have become 30 years, 31 years, 32 years and these people have no documentation. And President Obama had said that in stages the so-called dreamers will also be given citizenship and that was blocked by President Trump. So President Biden has now declared that there will be concessions given to the dreamers. Then an important migration issue is that the Muslim countries, a number of Muslim majority nations were blocked from visiting the United States. This was one thing that Trump did in order to deal with terrorism as he called it, because he said this was Islamic fundamentalists, but no check was made. All these countries were prohibited from sending their people to the United States. This of course was a popular measure among the American Christian believers, because they thought all the problems were created by Muslims. And though there was legal problem in doing this, Trump did that as a major matter of policy. And Biden has removed it and the citizens of these countries are able to visit the United States. Another immigration measure he took was immigration policing. One of the things that Trump had done was to increase, enhance the capability of law enforcement authorities to monitor immigrants and to control them, policing them. And not only that, they were policed even more harsh ways than normally people are dealt with. So President Trump had enacted several laws which strengthened the immigration police and that has also been relaxed. Of course, they will be monitored and followed etc., but not in vast victory. And then he went on to the next major change. He made the notorious war between Mexico and the United States, which Trump wanted to build. He said that these amantititled migrants were coming in from Mexico and therefore he believed in this building a huge wall, something like the Great Wall of China. And the more importantly, this money was not available because it was not a popular project from the Congress. And therefore he made some emergency measures from money earmarked for defense purposes to be used under the discretion of the president to build the wall. And the wall was already being built, much of it is completed, but this has been given up. I do not know what will become of the wall, possibly they will become remnants or memorials of Trump's foolish policies and like the Berlin Wall, people may go for picnics there, children may run around on the wall and that kind of tourist attraction will become. But it is a tourist attraction at very high expenses, but that has been stopped also. Then market regulation of business by illegal aliens, many of them were engaged in small businesses, etc., which have been relaxed also. Then a very interesting commission was set up by President Trump. It is a complicated story, but what happened was a question arose as to which year should we take as the beginning of the United States. When did America come into being? There are several developments which can be characterized as the beginning of America. But the general feeling was that it should be 1776. So 1776 is when United States became independent after a war with England and that is normally treated as the period from which you would consider history to have started. But before that, there were large number of immigrants, black immigrants who had come to the United States and they had become legal citizens. That goes another 100 years back. So there was some feeling, particularly in the black community, but because US history should be traced to those days rather than 1776. President Trump didn't like it at all. He did not want the black immigration days to be considered as the beginning of the United States. So this commission which was working on it, a commission which was appointed by President Trump to start. This was supposed to start in 1619, American history because the first black slaves had arrived there. So the idea was not to go to 1619, but to go to 1776. So he set up a 1776 commission. That is all these stories should go only up to 1776 and not beyond. So American slavery should not be celebrated. That was the point that he made. Then there are a number of other measures that are not so important from our perspective. But those are also housekeeping measures which would clean up many of the things. So basically the overall spirit of these executive orders was to basically undo the damage done by short-sighted policies of President Trump. And this has been widely welcomed. But there are many more things to be done. And the disadvantage President Biden has, you all know, is not only the question of election, many people still in the United States believe that this election was stolen by Mr. Biden. So many of his measures will not get immediate approval. Even though, fortunately for him, the Democratic Party members will be in a majority in both in the Senate and the Congress. But certain things cannot be done by simple majority. You may have to have two-thirds majority in certain cases, like in the impeachment. Impeachment was done in the Congress because there was sufficient majority and about 10 Republicans had joined. Now there is going to be the new impeachment. For a long time there was discussion as to whether impeachment is possible after the President has left the position. But now the consensus is that there is precedent, not with Presidents, but some of us, to have an impeachment even after the President has left. And the President has left Washington, is in Florida. Now the report will be, will have been given today, that this Monday, the report of the Congress would be given by Speaker Pelosi to the Speaker of the Senate, which is Vice President Kamala Harris. And she has to move on. But the Senate has other business to do. Only two appointees, high-level appointees of Biden have been approved by the Senate so far. There are many, many of them and all these have to be heard and considered by the Senate. And that takes time. So if you were to start the impeachment now for several weeks, these high officials will not be able to function effectively because they wouldn't have the Senate confirmation. So now there is an agreement that the impeachment process will begin only on the 9th of February. So that gives some time for President Biden to settle down and also to discuss this whole possibility of what is the purpose of this impeachment. And you need a two-thirds majority and therefore at least 17 Republicans have to vote for the impeachment and then only it will pass. So it may fail, that may be a setback. And even if it doesn't fail and it is impeached, that does not mean that he is disqualified from being President again. It will be a punishment certainly for the insurrection. But he can still be President unless he is disqualified. But there is apparently a prohibition Article 14 which enables the Senate with a simple majority to disqualify him. Whether the Senate would like to go that far and whether this bitterness of the elections and the complete breakdown of the Republican Party because some are still supporting Trump, others are not supporting him. And therefore all this confusion would be confounded as a result of the impeachment process which starts on 9th of February. But Mr. Biden has gone on regardless of all these constraints because his strength is going to be a consistent predictable, sensible, experienced President. That is what we all need. Of course, there are decisions that he will take which may entirely not please us. For example, he has indicated that he is going to renegotiate the Afghanistan peace plan. As you may know, President Trump was expecting to withdraw all the American forces from Afghanistan by December, by Christmas. But this has not happened. And there have been differences between the United States delegation and the Taliban which was an agreement which was already signed but there are difficulties in that. And the current President of Afghanistan is questioning some of the decisions taken. And therefore, Mr. Biden has said that we need to reopen the negotiations. As far as we are concerned, the longer the Americans stay in Afghanistan is better for us because that gives some stability and does not leave the floor open to Pakistan and the Taliban. Because President Trump's decision would have certainly resulted in the United States declaring victory in Afghanistan and leaving. But President Biden has said that we need to negotiate. We will leave but there must also be some safeguards against the kind of Taliban regime which took over last time. So it is possible that some American forces will continue in Afghanistan as a precautionary measure which will be good to us. And this is what we want. But the side story is that in the process Biden has said that he has to strengthen his relations with Pakistan. Of course, that is only in the context of Afghanistan, not like the old days when India and Pakistan were equated. But in the case of Afghanistan, a major player in the negotiations is Pakistan. So till the United States is able to pull out of Afghanistan entirely, then American forces may remain there. And this Pakistan may not like, this Taliban may not like and they may want to get the Americans out of there. So his indication to the Pakistanis that he is willing to negotiate with them again has strengthened the hands of Pakistan a little bit. But Pakistan had moved away from the United States and gone on to China because of President Trump's policies. President Trump was accusing them of not fighting the terrorists for cheating. And the Americans had stopped the funding, anti-terrorist funding that given to Pakistan. And Pakistan had become an unimportant country for the United States because Pakistan went entirely to China. And as a result, there was no constraints in US-India relations. But Pakistan, if it comes back into the picture, that may create some difficulties for us. So those who think that Biden may turn out to be difficult to India are already quoting this example to say that he may do some of these things which may not be very palatable to India. So these are the major things that have happened. We can expect many more changes which would alter the situation to further better. But two things are important before the United States stabilizes. One is COVID-19. What is going to be the final shape of the United States? People say that in California and others, those who die with COVID-19 are black people. And this may cause a lot of disaffection in these areas. And it may change the demographic situation in the United States like that. And again, who is going to be the global leader? Will the United States be able to come back to that position after Trump has left? And so these two things will determine the future of the world. China is asserting itself. There was an attack by the Chinese in a place called Naku La. And the government has said that this has been sorted out. It need not be projected as a big attack or a big problem. Because the Amis have been meeting even yesterday. And therefore, we are trying to contain the situation. But the Chinese, they started this kind of aggression even when the negotiations are going on. We have to be careful. And the whole world has to be careful also. So, Mr. Biden has a huge responsibility. But he has begun well. And we always say, well begun is half done. Yes, it is half done. But half is yet to be done. And that is going to be the bigger half. Thank you.