Trump-Biden Continuity In Foreign Policy Is Normal

An entity as lumbering as America takes forever to turn even in calm seas; when they are this choppy, sometimes it's hard change course at all

John Judis has a hard-hitting piece in Compact eviscerating President Biden’s foreign policy record. He blames him for major mistakes in dealing with Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Palestine. He doesn’t talk about China and Taiwan, nor about North and South Korea, but that’s presumably because the worst hasn’t happened on either of those fronts yet. I think his critique is worth taking seriously, and I think his discontent with how foreign affairs have been going lately is reflected across the political spectrum. Nonetheless, I’m going to push back pretty much across the board, not because I don’t think his critique has teeth, but because what he’s describing is more reflective of objective difficulties in the landscape than distinctly terrible decisions made by the Biden administration.

Judis’s indictment of the Biden record rests on two broad pillars. Strategically, Biden was too willing to follow and build upon President Trump’s precedents, and where he didn’t he followed the preexisting foreign policy consensus. So, in continuity with the prior administration, he didn’t do everything possible to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran that Trump had torn up, followed through on Trump’s promise to end the American military presence in Afghanistan, and continued Trump’s strong embrace of the Netanyahu government and the pursuit of normal relations with Arab governments, particularly Saudi Arabia, without extracting any material concessions to the Palestinians. And, in continuity with the long-term foreign policy consensus, he continued to dangle the potential of NATO membership before Ukraine and opposed any kind of serious negotiation with the Putin regime that would reward Russia for its violations of Ukraine’s sovereignty both before and after the invasion in 2022.

Tactically, meanwhile, the Biden administration has been repeatedly flat-footed by events. They didn't anticipate the rapid collapse of the Afghan government, or the extraordinary Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th. And in Ukraine, they didn’t anticipate the massive Russian invasion, nor that invasion’s failure, nor Ukraine’s inability to extend their early reverses of Russian gains in the summer of 2023 and the reversion of the war to a stalemate. Inasmuch as a successful foreign policy involves successfully anticipating events and then either shaping them to America’s benefit or minimizing the damage to America from events that can’t be shaped, how can Biden’s record be judged as anything but a considerable failure?

The indictment has considerable force, and as someone who favored Obama’s Iran deal and always thought the Ukraine war was likely to drag on for many years without a decisive victory for either side, I’m sympathetic to many of Judis’s arguments. But I think it’s worth expanding the frame a bit and asking not whether Biden’s foreign policy has been a success, but the degree to which its largest failures reflect deeper currents that Biden was in no position to shift, even if he might have navigated them better in various ways.

Let’s start with the Iran deal. Judis is unhappy that Biden didn’t seize the initiative to reverse Trump’s sanctions and rejoin the pact shortly after his election. But Judis himself acknowledges that opposition to rejoining the deal was bipartisan, encompassing nearly all Republicans and numerous Democrats including the Senate Majority Leader, many if not all of whom opposed the deal when it was first negotiated. It was also opposed by nearly all of America’s regional allies, as it had been when it was originally negotiated. In retrospect, whether Obama’s effort was wise or foolish on the merits, its fatal flaw was that there simply wasn’t sufficiently broad support for such a major change of course. It’s worth remembering in that regard that in 2016 Trump—who, at the time, opposed the deal less because of deep convictions about Iran’s perfidy than because he claimed he could have gotten a much better one—faced off against Hillary Clinton, whose own support for the deal was lukewarm at best. So the odds that the deal would fall apart after Obama left office were always on the high side. In that context, would it have been realistic for Biden to reverse course sharply in support of a policy that was so widely opposed and might have chewed up much of his political capital while still failing? It’s hard to see how it could have been.

To be clear, you don’t have to have an unrealistically sunny view of Iran’s intentions to justify the nuclear deal. It can be defended in purely realpolitik terms as a way of extricating America from the depth of its Middle Eastern commitments now that it was no longer dependent on oil and gas from the region, so as to focus more attention on the Western Pacific. That kind of defense, though, amounts to saying that America should be okay with either staying out of rising conflict between Iran and the Gulf States, or okay with other key players in the region tilting more in Iran’s direction. But is that a realistic assumption? Israeli-Saudi rapprochement got a big boost from the perception that America was pulling back from the region, and scuttling that rapprochement was one reason for Hamas’s determination to do something spectacular. So it’s not hard to imagine October 7th having happened in a world where the nuclear deal was still in force. What would Judis expect an American government to do in that world? And what would he expect the Iranian government to do? It’s just not that easy to make the kind of turn that Obama was aiming for.

Obama himself understood that right at the beginning of his term, when he supported the “surge” in Afghanistan against the advice of, among other skeptics, his own vice president, and at the end of his term as well, when he supported Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen to reassure them that the Iran deal wasn’t a radical shift in American foreign policy. Now America is engaged directly in war with the Houthis—but we are finally out of Afghanistan, and while I can’t disagree about the ignominious end we made of that adventure, Judis’s criticisms still feel to me to be rooted in a bit of fantasizing about the likely alternatives. Judis criticizes the details of the Trump administration’s withdrawal agreement, but he admits that the Afghan war had long since lost any purpose, which, if the Taliban also understood (as they surely did), suggests that Trump’s team didn’t have terribly much leverage. In any event, Judis agrees that Biden was doing the right thing in abiding by Trump’s commitment. His criticisms are twofold: that American intelligence wildly overestimated the staying power of the Afghan government, and that after the Taliban took over the Biden administration refused to recognize them and do business with them, but instead imposed sanctions, leading to an opening for China to obtain influence in the country.

The first criticism is absolutely valid—but it’s an indictment of the permanent foreign policy bureaucracy rather than of the Biden administration in particular, since that’s where the mistaken assessment originated. It’s worth asking, though, what we would have done differently if we had believed that Kabul would fall even before we had finished withdrawing. The comparison with Saigon in 1975 that Judis makes is entirely apt, but the alternative in Vietnam was to throw more resources into forestalling the inevitable. Is that what Judis thinks we should have done in Afghanistan, engaged in more of a fighting retreat? It’s also worth recognizing that a serious attempt to plan for the sudden collapse of the Afghan government would have undermined what little institutional support existed for a complete withdrawal. The reality is that abandoning a losing war always looks terrible, and the only really important question is whether it was worth it to get out.

As for the second criticism, yes, America’s penchant for anathematizing regimes we don’t like is frequently self-defeating. But is it realistic to imagine that we would turn around and immediately engage the group we’d be fighting for twenty years? It took decades for America to embrace warmer relations with Vietnam; more to the point, it took a mutual interest in containing a rising China. Given time, I can easily imagine America warming to the Taliban for the same reason, but the context is not likely to be one that Judis will be pleased with.

The continuity between the Trump and Biden administrations on Israel is similarly rooted in part in lessons from the Obama administration. President Obama spent years trying to bring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to heel, to restrain the growth of settlements and make concrete efforts toward a resolution of the status of the Palestinians. His efforts were essentially all wasted. That’s in part because while Netanyahu himself was always divisive and controversial, his policies with respect to the Palestinians were widely popular in Israel, far more popular than he ever was himself. But it’s also because Netanyahu was able to go around Obama and appeal directly to the Republican opposition, and find an enthusiastic audience there for his criticisms of any pressure that was brought to bear on Israel.

Trump took America’s identification with the Israeli cause to a heretofore unforeseen level, as Judis himself acknowledges. Yet, again, he wonders why, particularly after Netanyahu returned to power at the head of the most extreme-right government in Israel’s history, Biden didn’t do more to tack back toward at least a more centrist approach. The depressing answer, though, is that none of the factors that prevented Obama from making headway have changed. This extreme right government is remarkably durable, and will remain so as long as its members realize that if they don’t hang together they will surely hang separately. The House GOP, meanwhile, has been advancing a standalone Israel aid bill even as it refuses to take yes for an answer on asylum reform and the border. Even if Hamas accepts the cease-fire and hostage-release deal that has been proposed (which it is not yet clear they will), Netanyahu could probably reject it and the Republicans would back him up. Under those circumstances, what leverage does Biden really have?

October 7th was a colossal intelligence failure, but the failure was overwhelmingly Israel’s, who were supposed to be so capable and had so much more to lose than anyone else. I find it hard, in that context, to be too critical of the Biden team for missing what was coming. I’m also very skeptical that there was anything the Biden team could have done to restrain Israel in its initial response, the period when the worst destruction was wrought in Gaza and the lion’s share of civilians died. As I said back in November, I think that right after October 7th was the period of least leverage for anyone to influence Israel’s response, and the real question is whether Biden’s team has any strategy for how to spend the political capital they earned in Israel by standing with them at that crucial moment.

But there’s a larger point to be made about Biden’s approach to Israel/Palestine. The assumption in Judis’s piece is that America’s role should be to facilitate peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians. I am on record as being on team peace is good, but I think the notion that America is an “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians has not been credible for a long time, and no matter what the Biden administration did, he was not going to restore the plausibility of that stance. America can try to facilitate peace between allies, like Israel and Saudi Arabia, who already have important interests in common, which is why we were trying to do that (though one can argue that the price we were prepared to pay for that rapprochement was too high). But the Palestinians have little reason to trust us. That’s not just something one might lament if one is so inclined; it’s also a fact, the kind of fact that constrains our realistic options.

In all of these areas, Biden’s policy has demonstrated a high degree of continuity with Trump’s, and they aren’t even the most important area of continuity; that would be China, where Biden has gone considerably further down the road that Trump was traveling. I understand why a left-wing critic would be upset about those signs of continuity. But continuity in foreign policy is normal. You can’t actually have a foreign policy if every time an administration changes the policy changes radically. If policy did swing wildly like that, it would just encourage intransigence and distrust among allies and adversaries alike.

Which brings us to Ukraine, the foreign policy priority that will, I suspect, be most specifically associated with the Biden administration, and where the possibility of discontinuity going forward is highest.

As with Biden’s policy in Iran and Afghanistan, Biden’s Ukraine policy initially reflected a fairly broad foreign policy consensus, encompassing both Democrats and Republicans and in continuity with longstanding American foreign policy priorities. I say that even though as president Trump often spoke disdainfully of the NATO alliance and made a variety of gestures of friendship and admiration toward Russia’s president, because while those gestures were real, at the same time Trump’s administration was increasing American military support for Ukraine’s government (that’s how Trump was able to attempt to extort political favors by threatening to withhold that aid), and inducting new members into the NATO alliance. Trump even proposed expanding NATO into the Middle East.

Judis is aware of this history; it’s part of his indictment. And in that regard, I have a lot of respect for the indictment. I think there’s a good case to be made that American policy toward Russia substantially contributed to the likelihood of war in Ukraine, but the policy in question goes back to the Clinton administration, as Judis is well-aware. Biden doesn’t have a time machine at his disposal; by the time he came into office, Russia was already occupying Ukrainian territory and was subject to American sanctions, and Ukraine was already led by a more conciliatory president than his predecessor, which was not remotely sufficient to mollify Moscow. Is it plausible in that context to imagine the Biden administration making an even more radical break with prior American policy than his predecessor had? I don’t think so.

America’s intelligence agencies did a much better job assessing Russia than they did in assessing Hamas or the Taliban. They were also more correct in their assessment of Russia’s intentions than either most of their European counterparts or Ukraine’s own leadership. Judis wisely doesn’t press too hard on the claim that the war could readily have been avoided by last-minute concessions to Putin, since there’s very little evidence for that view. And he acknowledges that, once the war started, Biden was right to support Ukraine in resisting the invasion. The case against Biden’s approach, then, is that the administration has missed or even sabotaged opportunities for a negotiated settlement that may or may not have been available at the outset of the war when Putin expected an easy victory, but were available later after Ukraine had pushed Russia back to roughly the lines they are defending today. How strong is that case?

It’s frankly hard to say, because everyone with knowledge of the events has their own reasons for describing them in a way that puts them in a better light. I note that the individual most-credibly indicted for pushing Ukraine to fight rather than talk is Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who Judis implausibly assumes must have been speaking for NATO more generally (I find it far more plausible, given his overall character, that Johnson was freelancing). As for how real any chance for peace ever was, it strains credulity in my view to believe that Putin was prepared to surrender all that his armed forces had achieved in the invasion in exchange for a mere commitment by the Ukrainian president not to pursue NATO membership. Nor is that just a matter of Putin’s goals being obviously more sweeping; it’s also a matter of simple lack of trust. Just as Kyiv had every reason to fear that Russia would renege on any commitment it made to respect Ukrainian sovereignty and independence, Moscow had every reason to doubt the sincerity of Ukraine’s commitments. After all, they already believed that the West had broken its promises not to extend NATO further east, and that Ukraine had broken its commitments under the Minsk agreements.

Even if he’s right though that the Biden team got overly enthusiastic about Ukraine’s prospects and lost sight of an opportunity for peace, it’s worth remembering that, from a very cold-eyed realpolitik perspective, a bloody stalemate is a not-worst outcome for America—not as good as a Russia that was prepared to abandon its revisionist ambitions entirely, but better than acceding in Ukraine being turned into a version of Belarus. A long-term bloody stalemate would be a tragic outcome for Ukraine, but it’s not completely absurd to assign Ukraine the responsibility for understanding their own interests and capabilities best, nor is it terribly surprising if America assessed the risk/reward in a somewhat different way.

The deep risk to Biden’s approach, though, is the assumption that it was and would remain a consensus position in America. That can no longer be taken for granted—and that fact has profound implications. Trump has made his disenchantment with the Ukrainian cause abundantly clear, but even if he loses in 2024 the Republican Party is growing more hostile to America’s involvement in that war with every passing week. At the point that support for Ukraine becomes a merely partisan priority, American policy will simply no longer be credible. If no one in Kyiv—or in London or Paris or Berlin—has been reckoning with that possibility and planning accordingly, they have only themselves to blame. Here’s one more case where I can imagine a change of course, but if it comes, it likely won’t take the form that Judis would have wished for.

I guess that’s my ultimate defense of Biden’s approach to foreign policy. He has attempted to chart a course in continuity with America’s long-established objectives, and has tried to integrate his predecessor’s deviations from the prior trajectory in ways aimed at making America’s commitments more reliable rather than less. That, it seems to me, was always his job. If the results are less than encouraging, that has more to do, I think, with the objective position in which America finds itself—with a wide variety of commitments around the world and a diminishing edge against an array of actual and potential adversaries, while simultaneously growing only more capable with time than our longest-standing allies—than with the capability of his team. In many ways Trump’s own foreign policy was more a visceral expression of dissatisfaction with this situation than a coherent alternative approach, but as such it nonetheless represented a recognition of the new reality. That’s maybe the most important reason why continuity is unsurprising.