Despite his promises to move away from his predecessor's approach
Biden follows Trump's path in US foreign policy
Biden did not deliver on many of his campaign promises and stuck to the status quo in the Middle East and Asia.
Reuters
Trump has pursued an isolationist "America First" policy
Chinese military power seeks to be a match for American power.
Getty
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The administration of US President Joe Biden has followed the same path as the administration of former President Donald Trump on US strategic priorities such as China and the Middle East, and US military deployments in the world.
Biden had pledged during his election campaign to stay away from the paths taken by the previous administration, and indeed he was able to shift to some extent the course of foreign policy. .
In recent months, Biden's efforts have enabled Washington to lead a coalition that has been able to impose sanctions on Russia for its war on Ukraine.
promotion
Biden has promoted democracy and called for global cooperation on issues including climate change and the coronavirus pandemic.
However, his administration has not made much progress on critical issues, which reflects the extent to which Washington has stumbled in charting new paths in foreign policy.
This was evident when Biden traveled this month to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
"Over time, Biden did not deliver on many of his campaign promises, sticking to the status quo in the Middle East and Asia," says Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
She believes that both the Trump and Biden administrations should have dealt with the question of how to maintain American global hegemony at a time when it appears to be in decline, at a time when China has risen to become a counterweight, and Russia is becoming more and more emboldened.
The Trump administration's National Security Strategy has formally reoriented foreign policy toward "great power competition" with China and Russia, and away from prioritizing the fight against terrorist groups and other non-state actors.
The Biden administration has continued this campaign, in part due to events such as Russia's war against Ukraine.
The White House has delayed the release of its national security strategy, which was expected early this year.
Officials are rewriting it because of the Ukraine war.
tradition
Biden says that China is the largest competitor to the United States, which was confirmed by his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in a recent speech, while Russia represents the greatest threat to American security and alliances.
Some political scientists believe that the tradition of taking the same approach between administrations is a product of the traditional ideas and groupthink emerging from the bipartisan foreign policy establishment in Washington, which former President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, derisively called "The Dumb Point". ».
But others argue that external circumstances - including the behavior of foreign governments, the sentiments of American voters and corporate influence - leave US leaders with a narrow set of options.
“There is a lot of oomph that gets the policies to the same place,” said Stephen E. Biegun, the deputy secretary of state in the Trump administration and National Security Council official under President George W. Bush. “It's still the same issues, it's still the same world, and we still have Pretty much the same tools to influence others to reach the same results, and America is still the same.”
In terms of committing to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, Biden and Trump have been heeding the will of most Americans, tired of two decades of war.
For Biden, the move was also an opportunity to tackle the backlog.
As vice president, Biden had advocated bringing troops home, in line with Obama's desire to end "everlasting wars," but he found opposition through the insistence of American generals on a presence in Afghanistan.
Despite the chaotic withdrawal last August with the Taliban in control of the country, opinion polls show that most Americans support an end to US military involvement there.
Trump and Biden have called for a smaller US military presence in conflict zones.
Biden has sent more US troops to Europe since the Russian war on Ukraine and into Somalia, in contrast to the concept of withdrawing from there under Trump.
US forces are still present in Iraq and Syria.
deep doubts
“There is deep skepticism about the war on terror from senior members of the Biden administration,” said Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, who has worked on military issues as a State Department attorney, adding, “However, they are not yet ready for broad structural reform. scope to mitigate the intensity of the war.
Finucane believes the reform will include repealing the 2001 war authorization that Congress granted to the executive branch after the September 11 attacks.
Referring to this mandate, he says, "Even if the Biden administration does not take positive steps to extend the 2001 mandate, it can be used by future administrations as long as it remains on record, and other officials can extend the War on Terror."
On the issue of Iran and its nuclear program, Biden took a different path than Trump.
The administration has been negotiating with Tehran about returning to the Obama-era nuclear deal that Trump broke up, which led to Iran accelerating uranium enrichment.
But the talks reached a dead end.
Biden said he would abide by one of Trump's main actions against the Iranian military, designating its Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization, even though that represented an obstacle to a new deal.
Example of continuity
China's policy is the most visible example of continuity between the two administrations, as Biden officials have continued to send US naval ships through the Taiwan Strait and sell arms to Taiwan, in an effort to deter a possible Chinese invasion.
More controversially, Biden has kept Trump's tariffs on China, despite the fact that some economists and many senior US officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, question their usefulness and impact.
Biden and his political aides are well aware of the growing anti-free trade sentiment in the United States, which Trump has exploited to galvanize votes.
This awareness prompted Biden to move away from trying to re-enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement between 12 Pacific Rim nations that Obama helped organize to bolster economic competition against China but which was rejected by Trump and the Progressive Democrats.
Analysts believe that Washington should offer Asian countries better trade deals and market access with the United States if it is to counter China's economic influence.
“The Trump and Biden administrations did not have a trade and economic policy that they would offer to Asian friends of the United States, to help them reduce their dependence on China,” says Cory Schack, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
"Both the Biden and Trump administrations are somewhat over-militarizing the China problem, ignoring the economic part."
stay away from trump
In Europe, Biden has distanced himself from Trump.
The Trump administration has been at times ambivalent in dealing with Europe and Russia. While Trump has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, criticized NATO, and withheld military aid to Ukraine for domestic political gain, some officials under his leadership have worked in the opposite direction.
By contrast, Biden and his aides have uniformly reaffirmed the importance of transatlantic alliances, helping them coordinate sanctions and arms shipments to Ukraine in its defense of Russia's war against it.
contradictory viewpoints
The greatest contradiction among presidents, and perhaps the aspect most concerned by America's allies and adversaries, lies in their views of democracy.
Trump praised autocrats and broke with democratic traditions long before the rebellion in Washington on January 6, 2021, which congressional investigators claimed orchestrated.
Biden, on the other hand, has placed democracy promotion at the ideological center of his foreign policy, and in December hosted officials from more than 100 countries at a "Democracy Summit."
"American democracy is the magnetic soft power of the United States," says Corey Schack, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "We are different from the forces we compete against in the international system."
Biden has promoted democracy and called for global cooperation on issues including climate change and the coronavirus pandemic, but his administration has made little progress on critical issues, reflecting how far Washington has faltered in charting new paths in foreign policy.
Biden has kept Trump's tariffs on China, despite the fact that some economists and many senior US officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, question their usefulness and impact.
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