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Brian Lehrer: Brain Lehrer on WNYC, and that is the Korean K-Pop sensation BTS. Singing their summer hit Permission to Dance at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City yesterday. The seven-member band opened the United Nations General Assembly with speeches on the importance of learning about climate change and promoting vaccination against COVID-19 before they danced their way through the UN headquarter premises.

The performance drew more than a million viewers on YouTube alone. By the way, The Washington Post reports that that number usually only hovers around 50,000 for events like that.

Just this morning, President Joe Biden took to the podium in the uncomfortable atmosphere created by the United States' messy withdrawal from Afghanistan and a nuclear submarine pack that angered a certain European ally that may or may not be named, France.

Joining me now to discuss the latest and hear an excerpt or two from Joe Biden's speech that just took place is Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post columnist on international affairs and author of Today's Worldview, the post-international affairs newsletter. Hi, Ishaan, welcome back to WNYC.

Ishaan Tharoor: Hey, Brian, thanks for having me back.

Brian Lehrer: By way of background before we hear what the President said at the General Assembly, for your Today's Worldview newsletter this morning, you wrote, "This was not the atmosphere Biden wanted ahead of delivering his first speech at the United Nations as President." There is, of course, what critics are calling the botched exit in Afghanistan. Let's tackle that first. We've been covering what critics at home are saying, what has been the global response?

Ishaan Tharoor: Of course, the global response, there's no united one, but among the US's longstanding allies in Europe, there were two levels of frustration. First that they did not want the Biden administration, at least some of these governments in Europe. Though, they recognized that there was a need to draw this war down. They did not want the Biden administration to stick to the timelines that had first been set in place by the Trump administration before, which was this relatively quick withdrawal this year.

Then on a deeper level, they felt very frustrated with the lack of genuine consultation with the United States, especially the NATO countries. The war in Afghanistan is NATO's only real mission that's ever happened.

It was, for a lot of these European countries, to see the collapse of the Afghan government. The way in which the Taliban took power so quickly and so steadily. It was, for them, a pretty significant blow of their prestige, and their sense of-- In the wake of the Cold War, the first major military missions that a lot of these countries involved in NATO participated in was this operation in Afghanistan. There's a lot of handling. I think at the same time, they all recognize that without the United States, they're not going to go about doing anything different in countries so far away, and so distant from their national interests as Afghanistan.

Then, of course, as you pointed to the other major irritant that has emerged in the last month, is this spat with France over a nuclear submarine arrangement that the US forged, essentially, behind France's back, alongside the British and the Australians.

Brian Lehrer: How did that happen?

Ishaan Tharoor: It's interesting. This is something clearly that the US has had in mind for some time. They wanted to boost and bolster the Australian Navy with these nuclear-powered submarines. This was an arrangement that is quite unique in the sense that they're sharing technology with the Australians that they've only ever shared with the British in manning these submarines, but of course, the Australians had to, at the same time, essentially, scrap this agreement with France that they had inked a few years ago, a mega arrangement. It was initially $50 billion and kind of overran costs through around $90 billion in a deal with the French, and French company to build these submarines in Australia.

The French are furious. They have initiated a diplomatic spat with Americans that otherwise we never saw under the Trump administration. We imagine that time as a much more combustive moment in trans-Atlantic relations, but they've withdrawn the ambassador. They're now wheeling around and trying to essentially stop altogether ongoing trade talks between the Europe and Australia. Then at the same time, they're going to be pretty skeptical of the Biden agenda going forward. There are murmurs that the French will not participate in Biden's upcoming summit of democracies.

Brian Lehrer: So much of the coverage that I hear of this says France is mostly angry because they weren't told about it in advance. Do you think if Biden had called up the President of France and said, "Hey, Macron, I hate to do this, but look, we really have to beef up Australia's nuclear submarine capacity as a defense against Chinese expansionism, so I hope you understand we've got to do this." Would that have headed off this diplomatic fury?

Ishaan Tharoor: It's complicated. What we understand is that the Biden administration did tell the French just a couple of days in advance and that all things considered was quite late. The French also believe that the US administration had essentially lied to them over the past few months by not talking about these talks while they were having these talks.

There is a degree of genuine trust that has been broken. On top I think, as you're kind of alluding to, there are other considerations that the French have. French President Emmanuel Macron is entering a presidential election cycle and is being hammered already both from the left and the right about the kind of faith he has placed in the American alliance. He does have to kind of show a bit of defiance now, and this is going to fit into the longstanding and specifically French vision of Europe's strategic autonomy.

Now, you're going to have a pretty involved European discussion about the way forward, and the ways in which Europe needs to protect itself, and perhaps keep the US at arm's length in certain ways, but there are many other European countries that want the French to get over this, and recognize that this is nobody's real interest to have this lingering dispute.

Brian Lehrer: President Biden just concluded his first speech as President before the UN General Assembly. This happens every year at this time. We're going to play a one minute clip here, in which he discusses how the US is turning away from the Middle East, broadly defined to include Afghanistan, and refocusing on the Indo-Pacific.

President Joe Biden: "We've ended 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan. As we close this period of relentless war, we're opening a new era of relentless diplomacy, of using the power of our development aid to invest in new ways of lifting people up around the world, of renewing and defending democracy, of proving that no matter how challenging or how complex the problems we're going to face, government by and for the people is still the best way to deliver for all of our people.

As the United States turns our focus to the priorities and the regions of the world, like the Indo-Pacific, that are most consequential today and tomorrow, we'll do so with our allies and partners, through cooperation at multilateral institutions like the United Nations, to amplify our collective strength and speed, our progress toward dealing with these global challenges."

Brian Lehrer: That was one clip. I'm going to go right onto another, in which Biden focuses on climate change. He spent a fair amount of his address talking about out climate change. Let's listen to his call for all nations to bring more to the table.

President Joe Biden: The scientists and experts are telling us that we're fast approaching a "point of no return," in the literal sense. To keep within our reach the vital goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, every nation needs to bring their highest-possible ambitions to the table when we meet in Glasgow for COP26 and then to have to keep raising our collective ambition over time.

Brian Lehrer: President Biden from his speech at the UN General Assembly. This morning we'll play another clip in a couple of minutes where he talks about the pandemic. Our guest Ishaan Tharoor, who covers foreign affairs for The Washington Post and their newsletter. Ishaan, what stood out to you in terms of Biden's approach to climate, anything we haven't heard before?

Ishaan Tharoor: Not particularly. These are the two major planks of his agenda right now, especially in the coming weeks. One, setting the stage for this major UN climate summit in Glasgow at the beginning of November. Where Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and other world leaders are really hoping governments from everywhere come and make major commitments to scale back emissions.

They're building up the momentum for that and then as we will probably go on to discuss later, he is now after really flooding his own country with vaccines. Is trying to shoulder the global burden in helping the rest of the world get vaccinated. He's set this pretty ambitious goal of getting 70% of the world's population vaccinated by this time next year.

That will require considerable both major donations on the part of wealthy countries, but also activists have been calling for this quite some time. Certain concessions from these major pharmaceutical companies to allow intellectual property waivers to happen, to allow poorer nations to develop versions of their vaccines themselves. This is a slightly complicated political challenge, but he's also piling ahead with that.

It was a pretty interesting speech in so far as-- Really, you heard him try to gloss over the major foreign policy stumbling blocks of the last few weeks and he has a compelling pitch on a certain level. He recognizes the war in Afghanistan needed to end. It was a 20-year American commitment that, for many years, American officials recognized wasn't going anywhere, and then by speaking very broadly to the Indo-Pacific, he is signaling America's interest, both in pivoting to Asia as is the phrase that we've come to deploy constantly now, and recognizing that the main arena of strategic confrontation is nowhere near Europe for the US, but it is in Asia, and it is, obviously, in the face of the rise of China.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls for Ishaan Tharoor from The Washington Post, anybody listening right now who watched or heard Biden speech this morning before the General Assembly before you turned on the show or if you want to talk about the US and the world generally right now or the UN General Assembly generally right now. We're going to have an interesting guest later in the week from Rwanda, by the way.

The focus right now with Biden speaking on this day one of head of state speeches, usually Brazil goes first and then the host country, which of course is the US because the UN is located here goes second and that's what happened this morning. 646-435-7280 with comments or questions, 646-435-7280, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Let me come back to climate for a minute. Then we'll pivot back to the pandemic and vaccinations, but I don't want to give climate short shrift at all here. How much has this year's UN General Assembly so far been focused on climate change compared to years before after the intense weather summer that we've had in the US and elsewhere around the world or maybe even it was planned before that?

Ishaan Tharoor: I think the talk shop often sounds quite the same year into year, especially UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, he's a bit of a broken record now in the ways in which he's compelled to constantly warn the world that now is the time and we're reaching a point of no return and we have to make commitments now. Especially during the Trump years, climate change was a major part of the conversation except that the United States wasn't part of that conversation. The United States was actively undermining that conversation.

The one thing the Biden administration has very clearly done, and perhaps one of the main ways in which it has given its allies elsewhere cause to celebrate is that it is trying to reassert American leadership in the climate space. You had this major climate conference hosted virtually by the US earlier this year, where they outlined initial commitments, and this administration, the climate envoy John Kelly, they are quite active right now in terms of figuring out how to meet some of these very aggressive deadlines that scientists are putting forward in terms of having to make certain cuts in order to prevent the rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius.

We have a very limited timeframe. Biden said this is the decade that's going to shape the future of our planet. They are quite op-ed on doing that. I think part of that is going to require very tricky diplomacy with the new emerging major emitters, China, India, and so forth, who for very long time have justifiably said, look, "The industrial nations are the ones that pumped most of the stuff into the atmosphere, we cannot make the same concessions while we're still industrializing."

Obviously, that isn't really an option the world has at this moment and so the Biden administration and many other wealthy developed powers are now figuring out what a major new global compact can look like that gets India and China on board.

Brian Lehrer: What about that? Because this is the General Assembly. You remind us in your reporting that just six weeks from now, there'll be a major UN climate conference, per se, in Glasgow. Will their goal just be to stay on the Paris Climate Agreement targets that exist or move those targets?

Ishaan Tharoor: No, I think there's-- I mean everyone's recognized that the Paris climate targets are insufficient. The US and a number of other countries have made pretty ambitious calls to fully decarbonize in the next couple of decades or cut emissions to a certainly significant amount by the next decade. Then we'd love to see what happens going forward. There's a lot of focus on coal and whether more governments can commit to phasing out the use of coal in a more rapid timeframe.

Of course, for the Biden administration, part of galvanizing political momentum around this is a major domestic push to convince the US public that this is also in the economic interest of the United States that part of the US leading the way around the world when it comes to really pressing ahead with climate action is that the US wants to be able to set the rules for new technologies. It wants to have its businesses be on the cutting edge in the green technology space and this is part of a new zone for competition in the decades to come.

Brian Lehrer: You talked about the COVAX Initiative, that's the global initiative to get 70% of the world vaccinated against COVID-19 in the next year. Let's take a listen to him, touting the US's achievements so far.

Biden: Already, the United States has put more than $15 billion toward the global COVID response. We've shipped more than 160 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to other countries. This includes 130 million doses from our own supply and the first tranches of the half a billion doses of Pfizer vaccine we purchased to donate through COVAX.

Brian Lehrer: Critics, Ishaan, as you report, are saying the Biden administration can do much more than he was touting there to ease intellectual property protections. For example, to make vaccinations more available around the world. What are they asking for?

Ishaan Tharoor: It is a bit of a tricky conundrum and it makes its way to the WTO, the World Trade Organization, a body that has the ability to wave certain property protections. It hasn't happened yet. There's also a political issue with the United States and Europe where a number of European governments, especially that of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's do not want to do this waving of international property protections on the Pfizer vaccine, for example.

There's a whole other issue of supply chains and the ways in which the pandemic, as well as export bans in various countries, has stymied the ability of COVAX to funnel vaccines to the most neglected parts of the world, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where even now only a fraction of frontline medical workers, let alone the general population, have been able to get the vaccine.

There's no single answer. I think the critics really were sounding the alarm almost a year ago when-- maybe around the time Biden came to power when it was very clear that the US was going full steam ahead in terms of amassing a stockpile of supply to vaccinate its own population, but was not doing very much. In some ways was inhibiting the capacity for poorer nations to receive vaccines or produce their own.

Now, after the US has not only vaccinated as many people as who want to get vaccinated but also presided over the astonishing waste of hundreds of thousands of doses in various states across the country, it's donating excess supply now. It's now trying to lead efforts to speed vaccinations elsewhere, but this comes amid a year of activism and pressure. What the Biden administration is now trying to do and trying to harness is good and important, but the activist will tell you that it should have happened much, much earlier.

Brian Lehrer: James in the Bronx has a question about the US-Australia submarine deal. That is nuclear-powered submarine sales from US to Australia that has so angered France, cutting out their old contract to provide submarines to Australia or sell them. James, you're on WNYC. Hi?

James: Hi, there. Thank you for taking my call. My comment comes because I think that Paris is being a little bit intellectually dishonest when it comes to their anger over the deal. The comments that this was a strategic backstab I think are a little overblown because what I think is important to remember is that Emmanuel Macron was an official in the previous administration when he inked this deal. It blowing up in his face this close to elections is just a matter of losing faith.

It also doesn't seem to me that Paris is recognizing, as readily as they should, that nuclear-powered submarines simply operate with larger range than diesel-powered submarines do. If we're going to make Australia a significant strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific, they need to be able to operate in a capacity that gets them beyond the Equator and into the South China Sea.

Brian Lehrer: James, thank you very much. I'm going to leave it there for time. Give me just a quick 15-second response to that, Ishaan, and then I want to ask you a closing question.

Ishaan Tharoor: Well, yes, they're right but the French recounter that the Australians could have purchased nuclear submarines from France, but didn't want to at the time.

Brian Lehrer: Last thing not to bury the lead, maybe we did. You were live tweeting Biden's speech, and you wrote, "Biden is delivering a speech that is an obvious rejection of America first, rooted in a kind of global empathy, respect for common struggles, liberal principles, multilateral cooperation, though all governments are keenly aware of the gap between US rhetoric and action." There's the gap, but there's also, in our last 30 seconds, the fact that he's not Donald Trump.

Ishaan Tharoor: Oh, and this was proudly on display during the speech. For anyone who's listened to it, if you remember the last four years Trump has come to the UN almost as an enemy combatant. There were incidents where he was laughed at in the General Assembly. Biden was not laughed at here. He said things that were really opinions and a certain kind of rhetorical liberalism. He talked about how we, the US, benefit when others succeed, which is the polar opposite of Trumpism, and really set his stall out in a really idealistic way.

He appealed to universal principles. He talked about how the democratic world is everywhere, which was astonishing the idealistic thing to say. This was the speech he probably wants to give without the hiccups in the last few weeks.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you should reach Ishaan through his really excellent foreign affairs column, and his email newsletter from The Washington Post. Thank you so much for coming on with us and breaking down Biden's speech.

Ishaan Tharoor: Always a pleasure to be with you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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