Despite all of the damage left behind by Donald Trump, he left President Biden one crucial part of the White House not just intact but radically corrected. Trump smashed the decadeslong bipartisan consensus on foreign policy and instead redirected his party to embrace realism, and Biden should build upon it.
Evidently, Biden’s incoming team knows that Trump did something right. Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, credited both former Republican nominee Mitt Romney for his early hawkishness on Russia, a stance Trump would take in practice if not in rhetoric, and Trump for taking a “tougher approach” to China. Biden himself has expressed interest in building upon the Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab nations, and he will not move our Israeli embassy from Jerusalem (though a brief Twitter flip-flop has called into question under which jurisdiction his administration will recognize the West Bank and Gaza).
Such statements should prove promising to Westerners of all political stripes, but in order for Biden to advance Trump’s foreign policy realism, he’ll need to buck some of his team’s baser instincts.
For starters, rejoining the disastrous Iran deal would blow up the process of building to the eventual endpoint of the Abraham Accords, which is the full normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Luckily for Biden, Europe has quietly acknowledged that dreams of reviving the Iran deal are receding in real time. Furthermore, although Biden has paid lip service to rejoining the international agreement with Iran and staffed his team with its original brokers, his director of national intelligence nominee, Avril Haines, acknowledged that the United States is “a long ways” from actually rejoining. With John Kerry preoccupied by climate theater, there is reason to hope that Biden abandons the world’s greatest state sponsor of terror.
Biden did, alas, make the dismaying commitment to join the bootlicking, and worse than useless, World Health Organization. But the coronavirus pandemic and the genocide of Uigurs in Xinjiang have rendered it impossible for Biden to continue believing the Kissinger hypothesis that the liberalization of relations with China would lead to the liberalization of China itself. If anything, Biden has the potential to do far better than Trump on China. By abandoning his predecessor’s futile trade war and focusing on China as a cybersecurity and global health threat, Biden can focus all of his efforts on keeping tech company Huawei out of global 5G development and discerning whether the novel coronavirus did indeed leak from a gain-of-function experiment at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He also can heal our relationships with allies to ice out China using multilateral trade and diplomatic agreements.
While the Left excoriated Trump for sanctioning the illegitimate dictator of Venezuela, it has continued to push for the boycott, divest, and sanctions movement against Israel. That dichotomy is morally untenable. Trump’s Venezuela and Iran sanctions have not yet succeeded at supporting the internal democratic movements in both countries, but Biden should continue to support them and not revert to his historic instinct to think of foreign policy as a binary choice between doing nothing or putting boots on the ground.
A single thread connecting each of these issues is how Biden could improve upon Trump’s approach in one crucial way: Unlike Trump, who alienated our most strategic allies and abhorred multilateral agreements, Biden is a globalist. That’s a bad thing if it means trying to appease dictators. But it’s an excellent thing if it means bringing our democratic allies on board to squeeze out the powers that should rightly be considered our adversaries.
Trump’s foreign policy was correct in instinct and realistic in approach, but it always had to overcome Trump’s obsession with economic isolationism and insistence on enraging our allies. If Biden can build upon the momentum of Trump’s progress with smarter diplomacy, the country and the world will become a safer and more prosperous place.
