President-elect Donald J. Trump comes to office with a view of America’s place in the world that is dramatically different from his predecessor’s.
Branding President Biden’s foreign policy as “historically horrible,” Mr. Trump is vowing to reinstate an America First approach that in his first term swept away years of policy consensus and shook U.S. alliances around the world.
He wants friendly relations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, may slash U.S. support for Ukraine and has threatened to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He admires foreign autocrats and shows little interest in Mr. Biden’s goal of championing democracy abroad. He is hostile to international organizations and treaties including the United Nations and the Paris climate accord.
But amid the many areas of potential disruption, Mr. Trump will also find plenty of things to like in Mr. Biden’s policies. Beyond the glaring exceptions of Europe and his plans for Russia and Ukraine, Mr. Trump’s initial approach could bear a surprising resemblance to the Biden status quo.
One reason is that abrupt foreign policy swerves are rare and difficult to execute, analysts say. America’s military, economic and political power tends to provide a fairly fixed amount of leverage over other countries. Pressure from allies, Congress and the federal bureaucracy push commanders-in-chief toward consensus views.
“There tends to be more continuity between administrations of different parties — even administrations of very different styles, like Trump and Biden — than the casual observer might expect,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “We tend to focus on the big differences.”
One reason is that Mr. Biden continued several key policies from the first Trump term.
In his dealings with such countries as Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, China and even Israel, Mr. Biden broke with Mr. Trump’s approach in relatively modest or short-lived ways. National security strategy plans issued by both the Trump and Biden White Houses identified “strategic competition” with China and Russia as the north star of U.S. policy.
Saudi Arabia is a prime example. Mr. Biden initially branded the kingdom a “pariah” over the 2018 murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi and other human rights abuses. The president also suspended offensive weapons for Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen, which he said was causing a humanitarian disaster.
But Mr. Biden has since bowed to the reality of Saudi Arabia’s oil-powered influence. He restored the arms shipments and has sent aides to Riyadh in pursuit of a U.S.-Saudi security agreement that would bring the two countries closer militarily, on the condition that Saudi Arabia establish formal diplomatic relations with Israel.
“Biden went from trying to make the Saudis a pariah to trying to make them a treaty ally of the United States,” Mr. Fontaine noted — an approach Mr. Trump is expected to continue.
Mr. Trump’s plans for China are hazy, beyond threats to impose huge tariffs on its exported goods. But Mr. Biden will hand off an approach built on foundations laid in Mr. Trump’s first term. They include a muscular U.S. military presence in East Asia to counter Chinese territorial aggression, tough action against Chinese technology that could threaten American security and existing tariffs — first imposed by Mr. Trump and left in place by Mr. Biden.
Mr. Biden has softened his competitive approach with dialogue and speaks regularly with China’s president, Xi Jinping — but so did Mr. Trump.
One wild card is Taiwan. Mr. Biden vowed to defend the democratic island from a Chinese invasion; Mr. Trump has sounded ambivalent. But several of Mr. Trump’s top national security picks, including Michael Waltz for national security adviser and Marco Rubio for secretary of state, are China hawks committed to Taiwan’s defense.
As a candidate, Mr. Trump claimed that Mr. Biden had lifted the sanctions he had piled onto Iran’s economy as part of his first-term “maximum pressure” policy. In fact, Mr. Biden left those sanctions intact. The difference was in the need for enforcement: Iran eventually found ways to increase its black market oil sales, reaping billions in revenue, but Mr. Biden took only modest steps in response. Trump advisers say he will crack down.
But Mr. Trump will face the same hard choices, including added tensions with China, the top customer for Iran’s illicit oil, and the prospect of higher oil prices caused by any loss in Iranian supply. After campaigning on inflation and high gas prices, Mr. Trump may be especially wary.
This time around, Mr. Trump will have no Iran nuclear deal to rip up, as he did in his first term. Mr. Biden tried without success to restore the Obama-era agreement, which slowed Iran’s progress toward a potential atomic bomb. Now, with Iran closer than ever to nuclear weapons capability, Mr. Trump sounds prepared to try again: “We have to make a deal,” he told reporters in September, calling an Iranian bomb an “impossible” outcome.
Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution, said she expected “significant continuity in U.S. policy on Iran” under Mr. Trump, noting that both Democratic and Republican presidents have sought to coerce and negotiate with the country’s Islamic government. “That includes the first Trump administration,” she added. “The complexity of the challenges posed by Tehran provides few easy alternatives, as prior presidents have found.”
Mr. Trump, Ms. Maloney said, will most likely be more willing to take risks with Iran, as when he ordered the assassination of the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. But his pressure campaign will probably include efforts to talk, she said.
Mr. Trump casts himself as Israel’s best friend in American politics, and he may give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wide latitude on security issues and his treatment of Palestinians. But so did Mr. Biden. While the Biden administration often criticized Mr. Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza, it took few concrete steps to restrain his behavior.
Some Biden officials fear that Mr. Trump could green-light an Israeli move to annex the occupied West Bank, something Mr. Biden would never accept. But in his first term Mr. Trump opposed a plan by Mr. Netanyahu to annex large parts of the West Bank, and such a move now could spoil his high hopes for a Saudi-Israel diplomatic agreement.
During his first term, Mr. Trump complained that the war in Afghanistan was “a waste.” But he never completed a U.S. withdrawal — another reminder that big strategic changes are hard to pull off quickly. Mr. Biden wound up solving the problem for him, by executing on a withdrawal agreement that Mr. Trump had negotiated with the Taliban. Mr. Trump even initially called that “a wonderful and positive thing to do,” before hammering Mr. Biden over the chaotic nature of the American exit. Neither has any inclination to deal with the Taliban leaders today.
And in Cuba, U.S. policy remains much as Mr. Trump left it four years ago — frosty and stagnant. As president Mr. Trump took measures to roll back the Obama administration’s diplomatic opening, including by restoring Cuba to the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. Mr. Biden never undid that move. Similarly, Mr. Biden has largely maintained heavy Trump-era sanctions on Venezuela meant to pressure its authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, from power.
Even some foreign officials worried about Mr. Trump’s intentions are consoling themselves with the idea that his disruptive instincts may have limits.
One European diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Trump’s election had created a climate of uncertainty and alarm on the continent. But asked about the prospect that Mr. Trump would withdraw the United States from NATO, the diplomat said he and many of his colleagues thought that fear is overblown.
Few in Europe, he said, believe that Mr. Trump will actually take such a radical step.
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