The continuities in Trump’s and Biden’s foreign policies
The continuities in Trump’s and Biden’s foreign policies
WRITTEN BY RICHARD JOHNSON
1 November 2021
Donald Trump’s announcement of his 2016 presidential candidacy is hard to forget. In June 2015, Mr and Mrs Trump descended the elevators of the ostentatious Trump Tower to be greeted by a crowd of the enthusiastic, curious, and perplexed. The future president’s speech included extensive commentary on US foreign policy. He argued that the US’ exports were failing to compete and that insufficient protections had left American industry and workers vulnerable. Trump specifically cited China (“They kill us”), Japan (“When did we beat Japan at anything?”), and Mexico (“They are not our friend, believe me”) as key competitors.
Trump condemned the wars of the past two decades, arguing that “We spent $2 trillion in Iraq…We lost thousands of lives… And we have nothing”. He painted President Barack Obama as naïve and weak, saying he “doesn’t have a clue. He’s a bad negotiator”. Trump warned that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated with Iran during Obama’s presidency was “a disaster” that endangered Israel, predicting, “He makes this deal; Israel maybe won’t exist very long”. In sum, Trump believed that weak leaders had made the US weak on the global stage (“Our enemies are getting stronger and stronger by the way, and we as a country are getting weaker”), which in turn had driven down living standards for ordinary Americans (“Sadly, the American dream is dead”). He promised strength with his ambition to “have the strongest military that we’ve ever had” and his vow to bring the country back “bigger and better and stronger than ever before”.
As Biden preaches his commitment to being “ethical, straight, telling the truth, supporting our allies, all those good things”, observers might wish to jot in the corner “France, Afghanistan, tariffs”. The list will likely grow.
Joe Biden’s announcement of his 2020 presidential candidacy was more subdued. In April 2019, his campaign released a short video, which contained fewer specifics. Biden outlined his vision of the US’s role in the world in broad terms. He insisted, “America is an idea” that consisted of the US being the hope of the world, where “everyone is treated with dignity and gives hate no safe harbour”. For Biden, the American creed is “the belief that no matter where you start in life, there’s nothing you can’t achieve if you work at it”. For the future president, it was “an idea that’s stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant”. On the day this video was released, Joe Biden went to Gianni’s Italian Restaurant in Wilmington, Delaware and ordered a pepperoni pizza. On his way out, a reporter asked if he had any message for the world about what his presidency would mean. Biden replied, “America is coming back like we used to be — ethical, straight, telling the truth, supporting our allies, all those good things”.
Shallow differences and fundamental continuities
Rhetorically, the Trump and Biden announcement speeches are useful fodder for international relations scholars. They are almost paradigmatic examples of ‘realist’ and ‘liberal’ foreign policy rhetoric, respectively. Trump’s talk of strength and Biden’s talk of the US as an idea are convenient foils. One might expect that the Trump and Biden administrations would pursue fundamentally different foreign policy approaches. Yet, increasingly, observers of the Biden presidency are wondering whether these differences stretch far beyond the rhetorical. US allies and adversaries alike have remarked on the curious similarities in approach between both presidents.
US allies have felt that the Biden administration has treated them with disdain. European partners are unhappy that Trump-era tariffs on European steel remain. At the time, Trump designated various EU exports as threats to US national security, justifying the imposition of tariffs. The Biden administration continues to designate the EU as a national security threat, with Biden’s Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo echoing Trump-era language in her insistence that it “is a national security risk, it’s an economic risk”. The European Union and the United Kingdom governments were irritated by the Biden administration’s sluggishness in lifting the ban on EU/UK citizens visiting the United States, which was imposed by the Trump administration at the start of the pandemic in 2020. It took Biden eleven months to lift the ban, long after European nations had removed travel restrictions for Americans visiting their countries.
On occasion, the Biden administration has shown its willingness to upset allies if it means serving US strategic interests. The French government is furious with the US’s role in prying Australia out of a submarine contract, losing French suppliers USD 66 billion, calling it a “stab in the back”. In response, France withdrew its ambassador from the US. The French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian denounced, “The brutal, unilateral, and unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr Trump used to do”. When it came to Afghanistan, Joe Biden implemented the 2020 Doha Agreement, which the Trump administration had negotiated with the Taliban. Just as the agreement lacked Afghan government input, Biden’s implementation of the plan was also largely done with little input from or warning to President Ashraf Ghani’s government. The Agreement required the US to withdraw all of its troops by 31 August 2021; otherwise, the Taliban would resume fighting US forces, leading to numerous casualties. Once more, US allies felt left out in the cold: there was little consultation with the other members of the multi-national alliance that was providing security in Afghanistan before the US withdrawal began.
On China, the continuities are striking. There has been no fundamental reassessment by the Biden administration of the threat China poses to the United States and its allies. Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has repeatedly said that Donald Trump was correct to take a tougher line on China. On one such occasion, Blinken said, “I think in fairness to President Trump he was right to take a tougher approach to China. That was the right thing to do”. Biden has sought to curb Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region by forming the ‘Quad’ and AUKUS. He has extended Trump-era sanctions on Chinese firms, issuing an executive order in June 2021 that warned of “the threat posed by the military-industrial complex of the People’s Republic of China”. Through an August 2021 Memorandum on Deferred Enforced Departure (DED), Biden has granted temporary refuge to Hong Kong citizens, who may stay in the US for up to 18 months. In the memo, Biden wrote, “the PRC has continued its assault on Hong Kong's autonomy, undermining its remaining democratic processes and institutions, imposing limits on academic freedom, and cracking down on freedom of the press”.
Multilateralism in theory, unilateralism in practice
None of this should be terribly surprising. Most US presidents have been criticised for talking multilateralism but pursuing a unilateral approach when it suited the US. The reality is that American leaders have made use of multilateral alliances when they have been regarded as serving US interests, as the Quad and AUKUS suggest, but the US has rarely placed multilateralism above the pursuit of US interests. As Hilde Restad, a Norwegian scholar of US international relations wrote in her 2014 book American Exceptionalism, the US sees multilateralism as a means rather than an end in itself. Donald Trump’s catchphrase was “America First”. If the Biden presidency has a catchphrase, “America is Back” would be a strong contender. But the difference has been largely rhetorical.
Biden’s first speech to the United Nations was full of references to international cooperation and support for US alliances. In practice, however, the Biden administration has shown itself committed to putting “America First”. In the last few months, Biden has been willing to maintain punitive sanctions that declare allies a national security threat (the EU), treat international partnerships as an afterthought (NATO and Afghanistan), subject vulnerable governments to military takeover (the Ghani government and the Taliban), and undercut allies by playing them off each other (France and AUKUS).
If ‘America is Back’ means anything, then, it means a return to the hypocrisy of US foreign policy: lofty rhetoric that is often not met by equivalent action. As I wrote in US Foreign Policy: Domestic Roots and International Impact, hypocrisy has been a defining feature of the last century of US foreign policy. The US simultaneously contains the impulse to be the world leader and defend its own interests. These are not always possible to hold in common. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson drafted a speech in which he asserted, “It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be”. His Secretary of State of Robert Lansing, noting the erroneousness, jotted in the margin, “Haiti, S. Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama”. As Biden preaches his commitment to being “ethical, straight, telling the truth, supporting our allies, all those good things”, observers might wish to jot in the corner “France, Afghanistan, tariffs”. The list will likely grow.
What this all means for the international community is expectation management. The Trump administration was not nearly as big a departure from US foreign policy practice as people expected, even if his rhetoric sounded very distinctive. Conversely, while Biden has restored the high idealism of presidential oratory on foreign policy, he has already shown himself willing to put US interests first, even at the expense of US allies. Policymakers will continue to need to account for these interests and realise that US global leadership is not purely an act of benevolence, even if it has positive consequences for other countries and the wider international system. All US presidents have known this. Trump was just less shy in saying it aloud.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dr Richard Johnson is Lecturer in US Politics, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of US Foreign Policy: Domestic Roots and International Impact (Bristol University Press, 2021). Image credit: Flickr/Number 10.