US foreign policy under Biden draws inglorious comparison with Trump era
New administration’s overtures fail to convince friends and foes alike
At the United Nations’ annual gathering of world leaders this week, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke ambitiously about international cooperation and a new diplomatic approach for a post-Trump America.
But nearly all their diplomatic efforts at a pared-down UN General Assembly were shadowed — and complicated — by the legacy of President Donald J. Trump.
Biden soothed strained relations with France in a call with President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday. Blinken met in New York with his French counterpart on Thursday. But French officials openly likened the Biden administration to Trump’s in its failure to warn them of a strategic deal with Britain and Australia that they said muscled them out of a submarine contract.
The flare-up with Paris might have been dismissed as an isolated episode but Nato allies too claim lack of consultation on the Afghanistan exit.
Fiery address
In a fiery address to the global body on Wednesday, President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran suggested that there was little difference between Biden and his predecessor, invoking their respective foreign policy slogans: “The world doesn’t care about ‘America First’ or ‘America is Back.’”
And in response to the ambitious targets Biden offered in his own address to reduce global carbon emissions, an editorial in Beijing’s hard-line Global Times newspaper raised an all-too-familiar point for Biden officials: “If the next US administration is again a Republican one, the promises Biden made will be very likely rescinded,” the paper wrote — a point the Iranians also made about a potential return to the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump abruptly exited.
The flare-up with Paris might have been dismissed as an isolated episode but for its echoes of complaints by some NATO allies that Biden had withdrawn from Afghanistan without fully consulting them or alerting them to Washington’s timeline. Trump was notorious for surprising longtime allies with impulsive or unilateral actions. Biden allies say they find the comparisons overblown, though not lacking a germ of truth.