Can Biden mend Trump's foreign policy mess? by Ian Bond
After Donald Trump’s stormy inaugural address when he took office in January 2017, I wrote that Trump would “do enormous damage both to the US and to the rest of the world”. His term of office is ending as turbulently as it began. President-elect Joe Biden is facing a major renovation project. Trump can point to some successes. His administration brokered the diplomatic recognition of Israel by the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan – the first Arab countries to recognise Israel since Jordan in 1994. Trump developed good relations with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and strengthened defence ties between the two countries, capitalising on shared concerns about China’s rise. Some things that could have gone wrong did not. Most experts, including at the CER, predicted that moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem could cause unrest in the Arab world; it has not. Trump threatened North Korea at one point with “fire and fury like the world has never seen”; but he ended up avoiding war and holding three summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un instead. But Trump’s failures outweigh his successes. First, he wasted America’s greatest foreign policy asset: its network of allies. When taking foreign policy decisions, he generally ignored America's friends; sometimes he actively
damaged them (for example, by imposing tariffs on steel and aluminium imports from countries such as Canada on supposed national security grounds). Despite the continuing Russian threat, Trump ordered the withdrawal of 12,000 troops from Germany, less than half of whom will be redeployed elsewhere in Europe. He is currently trying to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, against military advice, even though the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State continue to threaten US and allied interests there. Second, Trump has coddled authoritarian leaders, including US adversaries. He boasted to the author Bob Woodward that he had protected Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman from facing any consequences after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Despite bipartisan concern in the US, Trump reportedly told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that building concentration camps for the Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region was the right thing to do. At the request of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Trump precipitously withdrew US troops from northern Syria, abandoning US allies in the process.