Stacking up Biden’s foreign policy vs. Trump’s bravado

Last week, Donald Trump called President Joe Biden’s foreign policy “terrible” and the “lowest point” in our country’s history. The same day, the outgoing president praised his foreign policy team’s achievements, saying they were leaving the next administration “a very strong hand to play.”

So, which is it?

Looking back on Biden’s foreign policy, the saddest thing I see is his failure to exert sufficient pressure to ensure his praiseworthy efforts led to success — see Ukraine, the expansion of NATO, and the Middle East.

But Trump’s fact-free braggadocio about his own foreign policy plans exposes him to future disasters. Already he has abandoned his promise, repeated dozens of times, to produce a Ukraine deal in “24 hours” — even before his inauguration. Starting Monday, he will need to start adapting his bluster to reality. Otherwise, America’s enemies may come to regard him as an emperor with no clothes.

It is useful, then, to look at what Biden’s foreign policy did or didn’t achieve, and what a deal-obsessed Trump would have to do to produce success. Here are six quick points:

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1. Biden’s Afghanistan pullout and Trump’s tendencies. As I’ve written, the exit from Kabul was a disaster. Never mind that Trump signed a surrender deal with the Taliban that boxed Biden in, his team failed to get Americans and Afghan allies out while we still controlled Bagram Air Base.

But Trump’s initial deal betrayed an instinct to cut and run to get unpleasant issues off his agenda. Just before his first term ended, he ordered a pullout from Afghanistan within six weeks, before he was warned by the Pentagon that this was physically impossible.

Even worse, he ordered U.S. special forces to leave the Kurdish area of northern Syria in 24 hours, right after a request by Kurd-hating Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Apparently, Trump was unaware of the crucial U.S.-Kurdish partnership in fighting ISIS on Syrian soil and had to reverse course after much damage had been done.

What to watch for: Will Trump continue the same erratic pattern with pullouts, perhaps again in Syria, or in Europe, or in South Korea, without considering the impact on U.S. security and its alliances? If he can learn to resist those impulses, it will prevent future disasters much worse than Biden’s in Afghanistan.

2. The Middle East. Trump’s Ukraine team worked well with Biden’s team in recent weeks to produce an apparent ceasefire for hostages deal in Gaza. Biden proposed the same deal in May but was unable to follow through, in large part due to Israeli domestic politics and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to wait until Trump was in the White House.

Trump must now decide whether he is satisfied with taking credit for the ceasefire, or whether he wants to aim for a grander Mideast deal that will include normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This won’t happen unless he recognizes that the Palestinian population can’t be ignored, but must be offered a political future.

Without continued U.S. pressure and hard work by the White House, the ceasefire deal will soon collapse on Trump’s watch.

3. Ending Russia’s war on Ukraine. Biden understood the importance of blocking Vladimir Putin’s aggression by rallying European and U.S. military aid for Kyiv. His mistake was letting Putin bluff him with nuclear red lines into withholding critical military systems and sending crucial arms too late.

Trump still wants to end the war quickly, in six months, but has been far more sympathetic to Kremlin proposals than Ukraine’s. His Ukraine team, special emissary and retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, and future national security adviser, Rep. Michael Waltz, are better informed than he is but still see the need to please Putin rather than the necessity of preventing future Russian aggression.

If Trump cuts off aid and betrays Ukraine, he will go down in history as the U.S. leader who handed the global edge to Moscow and Beijing.

4. Building and retaining alliances to stand up to the authoritarian axis of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. This was Biden’s strong point, bringing NATO allies together after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and building new alliances across Asia to deal with Chinese expansionism.

Trump deserves credit for prodding NATO allies to spend more of their GDP on their own military budgets. But he refuses to appreciate that our ties to other democracies are vital in pushing back against growing Russian and Chinese threats on the seas, in space, and cyber sabotage and disinformation. He prefers threats, tariffs, and bluster rather than using the alliances to project Western strength.

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5. Disinformation. Biden recognized the growing danger of Russian and Chinese disinformation, which has overwhelmed social media, enhanced by artificial intelligence into a real security threat.

Driven by anger at (true) claims of Russian intervention in the 2016 election, Trump has promised to eliminate the U.S. State Department office dealing with this danger. His best friend Elon Musk has turned X (formerly Twitter) into a trolling machine for Russian bots and other foreign propaganda. Now Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, kowtowing to Trump, will no longer permit fact-checking on Facebook.

Unchallenged trolling aimed at weakening the United States is a stab in this country’s back.

6. Personnel. Biden had a fairly strong foreign policy team. They had the right ideas on most things (except for excess timidity on Ukraine). And they, along with their boss, failed badly in forcing more aid into Gaza for civilians.

Trump, however, is putting forward a team based on loyalty, not experience or foreign policy chops. In today’s world, that can lead to disaster with a president as erratic and ill-informed as he. If his nominees for posts at the Pentagon, the FBI, and as director of national intelligence are confirmed, his foreign policy starts with two strikes against it. The third strike being Trump’s belief that he alone knows everything, without the benefit of advisers.

While failing on many fronts, Biden did leave Trump a legacy of alliances as a basis for tough stands against aggression by our adversaries. However, unless the president-elect rethinks his preference for autocrats, and curbs his narcissism, we may soon be yearning to have an imperfect Biden back.