The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has a soft spot for Politico’s Nahal Toosi, for reasons this tweet sums up nicely:
Her greatest strength in 2020, however, has been to ask equally uncomfortable foreign policy questions of the Biden campaign. Her story from last month about whether Joe Biden would cease the practice of appointing big donors to ambassadorial posts caused a lot of President Trump’s critics to clam up, but it was a perfectly legitimate and trenchant question to ask.
This week Toosi asked another uncomfortable question for Democratic foreign policy mavens: What Trump policies are likely to persist under a Biden administration? As she notes at the outset, “it’s the type of question that does not land well with advisers to Joe Biden.” Nonetheless, Toosi writes that “cooler-headed Biden advisers grudgingly admit that maybe, just maybe, some of the current president’s approaches are worth considering.” Among the possibilities: a hawkish approach toward China, and the U.S. Embassy in Israel staying in Jerusalem.
It is worth asking which policies will be likely to endure but to think about it in a more conceptual way. The first cut is to divide Trump’s foreign policies into actions that would be easy or difficult to reverse. The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, for example, is now law — that ain’t changing. Reversing the embassy move in Israel would also probably be too costly (though I would not be surprised if Biden’s team threatened to do so as a way of accelerating moves toward a two-state solution).
On the other hand, a Biden administration would reverse almost all of Trump’s actions on both climate change and nuclear nonproliferation. Rejoining the Paris climate change accords would be easy. So would extending New START with Russia. The Iran deal is now a complete mess, but it is possible to envisage a way for the other members of the P5+1 to walk the United States and Iran back into the contours of the deal.
Those are the easy calls. The more interesting portions of the Trump legacy are areas where the administration might have contributed a strategic insight but implemented a disastrous policy in response. For example, Biden might very well be more hawkish on China than he has sounded in the past. There are national security dimensions that will permanently intrude on the bilateral economic relationship.
That said, there is a LOT the Biden administration is likely to change while maintaining an overall hawkish posture. I doubt the Biden team will launch a multi-front economic war while trying to pressure China. Biden will not give his tacit approval to Xi Jinping’s crackdown of Hong Kong or the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide in Xinjiang.
The most interesting question will be the U.S. approach toward traditional allies and partners. Over the past four years, I have occasionally chatted with the same Biden advisers who talk to Toosi. As a group, they find almost everything Trump has done to be abhorrent. That said, they have also been surprised that the allied blowback from some of Trump’s coercive policies has been less than they expected.
Does this mean that a Biden administration will continue with the steel and aluminum tariffs or threatening sanctions unless NATO members spend more on defense? No, but they will probably be less averse to brandishing coercive pressure than they would have in an Obama administration. The best way to think about it is the Biden team will keep the “pressure allies” chit on hold for something important that might come up in the first term.
Perhaps the greatest difference between a Biden administration and a Trump administration will be which regions get more attention and which ones get less. The Trump team lavished a lot of attention on the Middle East. It is the only region where Trump can claim some legitimate accomplishments. This is also the area where I expect a Biden team to de-emphasize unless absolutely necessary. For Biden and his advisers, the Middle East is so full of land mines that sustained engagement has little upside.
One former Obama administration official told the Financial Times that a Biden administration would be likely to “revisit and potentially reformulate the entire approach to the Gulf.” Biden advisers told the FT that “the region would be a low priority.”
The region I would expect to benefit the most would be Latin America. To the extent that Trump cared about the Western hemisphere, it was about immigration and sanctioning Cuba/Venezuela. A Biden team probably sees more fruitful areas of cooperation and ways of checking the influence of a rising China.
Stepping back, Trump’s foreign policy legacy looks pretty meager. He renegotiated NAFTA, ratcheted up tensions with China and tightened the Israeli-Sunni alliance in the Middle East. Most of that will probably endure. Very little else will remain standing, however, beyond the widespread perception that Trump made America weaker.
