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President Biden wants the world to know America is back, prepared to lead, committed to shared western goals, multilateralism, and diplomacy.

American foreign policy must operate at two levels. Existential threats to civilization—climate change, pandemics and nuclear proliferation. And East-West competition—Russia’s obsession with lost empire, and China’s ambition to impose an international order more friendly to its autocratic capitalism.

If China and Russia viewed proliferation as a genuine threat, Iran and North Korea by now would be subjected to enough severe multilateral sanctions to give up nuclear weapons ambitions or face regime change. Instead, Beijing and Moscow like those thorns in America’s side.

The Europeans would recognize the 2015 deal that froze Tehran’s weapons-making ambitions for only 10 years was never a solution and advocate the toughest sanctions possible to force its hand. Instead, they act as though negotiating with a terrorist regime would accomplish results with Mr. Biden’s participation that were not possible with President Obama.

China appears confident it can thrust upon the world one pandemic after another, use the resulting chaos to advance its timeline for gaining global economic dominance and manage whatever public health problems those may impose domestically, or it would be cooperating more earnestly with the WHO.

China simply won’t commit to net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 as have Europe, Japan and America with Mr. Biden. Instead, we can expect it to demand payment—a blind eye to human rights abuses, militarization of the South Pacific and incursions on Taiwanese autonomy.

No solution to climate change is possible without India, but its sense of entitlement as a developing nation make net-zero by 2050 politically impossible without massive western aid. Europe, given the state of its economy, can barely afford to finance its own energy transformation. Mr. Biden’s Middle Class First foreign policy would look a lot like President Trump’s America First if summoned to truly underwrite the Third World. 

It seems the Chinese and Indians don’t believe they will burn up with the rest of us. If climate change is truly an existential threat, then the Washington-Brussels axis should be angling for radical political change in Beijing and New Delphi but that’s a bit too much for the globalists on either side of the Atlantic

Mr. Biden wants to combine forces with European and Asian allies to address Chinese mercantilism but without entering into new regional trade agreements.  However, each nation has its particular agenda regarding the Middle Kingdom and wishes to balance its interests against confronting Beijing.

A decade ago, the Chinese saw no profit in truly transforming their economic system to embrace western free-market norms—something needed for Beijing to adhere to the letter and spirt of the WTO agreements—but at least it respected the accomplishments of the western system. In the wake of China’s robust recovery from the pandemic and American and European halting performance, they now see no need to offer even the pretense of such aspirations.

Consequently, the notion of reforming the WTO to discipline China’s state support of high-tech, for example, is fanciful and will not yield much for the next several years.

Germany sees a way to mid-Century by adopting the Indian strategy of playing off the Americans against the Chinese. Before Mr. Biden was inaugurated, it hurriedly pushed completion of an EU-China commercial agreement that effectively guarantees Beijing’s growing influence on the continent in exchange for accepting German exports.

In the Pacific, the Chinese have demonstrated they can impose biting sanctions on those who challenge its foreign and trade policies—for example on exports of rare earth minerals to Japan and on imports of coal, agricultural products and crustaceans from Australia. Only by reentering the Trans Pacific Partnership can the United States offer other benefits—in particular, preferred access to an alternative market—that outweighs the costs of confronting China’s bullying.

China has larger ambitions—dominance in cutting edge semiconductors and artificial intelligence technology, reunification with Taiwan, displacing U.S. strategic dominance in the South Pacific and demonstrating that its state managed capitalism can deliver growth and prosperity better than the teetering U.S.-European model.

Mr. Biden wishes to convene his Summit of Democracies, but he will have to put more chips on the table to get the scope of cooperation he needs. Multilateralism and diplomacy are tools of statecraft, not ends in themselves. When raised up as idols—as Mr. Biden’s Obama-era retreads do—they invite aggression and capitulation or war as surely as appeasement did in the 1930s.