Toxic pills: How Donald Trump's legacy still weighs on US foreign policy
Created: 08/03/2022 05:38
From: Foreign Policy
His policies are having an impact: Ex-US President Donald Trump.
© Adrian Dennis/afp
Whether it's Iran, China, Cuba or immigration, US President Joe Biden often finds himself held back by the foreign policy of his predecessor Donald Trump.
The list of foreign policy problems that Donald Trump left behind for his successor, Joe Biden, is long.
The new US government is often blocked by the balance of power in the Senate.
But it’s not just the Trump administration’s “poisonous pills”: the Biden administration also makes mistakes – with serious consequences.
This article is available in German for the first time – it was first published in
Foreign Policy
magazine on May 16, 2022 .
Former US President Donald Trump appears to be preparing to seek the presidency again in 2024.
Should he move back into the Oval Office, he might find that much of his foreign policy remains intact after a four-year absence.
That's in large part because crucial change has been complicated by the "poison pills" Trump left in his wake: massive sanctions on Iran, heavy tariffs on China, draconian immigration rules, and more -- combined with an almost unsolvable political standoff, with which his successor, current US President Joe Biden, is facing on Capitol Hill.
This has prompted Biden — who has been sympathetic to Trump's populist "America First" appeal from the start — to be too harsh on too many issues at once, particularly when it comes to foreign policy.
US foreign policy: did Trump want to paralyze the next government?
In the corporate world Donald Trump hails from, a poison pill is a defense mechanism designed to prevent a hostile takeover by another company.
And the list of poisoned policies Trump has bequeathed to Biden is long.
Although Trump officials have never said openly that their intention was to shut down the next administration.
That policy includes more than a thousand additional sanctions against Iran that have thwarted Biden's promised return to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which Trump rejected in 2018.
In the final days of his presidency, Trump imposed hundreds more tariffs on China, adding to the high tariffs he had imposed in previous years.
only three days
after Biden won the presidential election, the Trump team put an unexpected cherry on top of their poisonous sundae: They removed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a militant group that wants an Islamic state for the Uyghur minority, from the US terrorist list.
Trump's message to Beijing: Washington stands with the Uyghurs, who are being brutally repressed by Beijing, and not with the Chinese government.
"The Chinese were completely outraged," said Raffaello Pantucci, China expert at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
"It was clearly a move by the outgoing Trump administration to sabotage Biden's policies." A year and a half after taking office, Biden has not changed the classification.
US consumers are paying the price for Trump tariffs
He is also reluctant to lift trade sanctions despite their impact on soaring domestic prices.
That's despite the president last week calling inflation, which is being driven in part by higher prices being paid by US consumers thanks to Trump's continued tariffs, his "top domestic policy priority."
In other areas, Trump's legacy has an equally ugly aftertaste.
As a candidate, Biden pledged to restore the Obama-era opening to Cuba that Trump had shattered.
He hasn't, however, amid staunch opposition from Republicans and leading Democrats like Senator Bob Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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On immigration, the Biden administration has had a grueling abolition of the "Title 42" deportation rule -- a tactic Trump has used to further build his anti-immigrant "wall" on the southern border of the United States by deporting asylum-seekers due to COVID-19 19 rejected.
When the Biden administration proposed an amendment, it ran into its own bipartisan wall on Capitol Hill.
As
Foreign Policy
recently reported, Biden has struggled to fulfill his campaign promise to reverse Trump's policy of minimizing the number of refugees allowed into the country.
US foreign policy: why Joe Biden's hands are often tied
A key problem is that Biden is struggling to move votes in a Senate that remains split 50-50 -- with Democrats often being just as militant as Republicans on China and Iran.
In addition, the House of Representatives is more or less under democratic control.
And he needs every vote he can get to push through his domestic agendas, especially what's left of the Build Back Better bill he championed.
He has just six months before the crucial midterm elections that are expected to see Republicans regain power in at least one chamber of Congress.
Key members of Biden's team, led by White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, rightly fear
"The decision-making process in government is such that the people who have the last word with the president are prioritizing domestic policy over foreign policy," said Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group, a former top adviser to Robert Malley, the chief negotiator the Biden government for Iran.
The result, Vaez said, was "tragic" for Biden and would haunt him all over again, especially as Iran heads toward a possible nuclear breakout -- a point at which the country will have enough fissile material for a bomb.
"That someone like him, who has so much foreign policy experience, should give politics such a role is incredible."
US foreign policy: progress in dealing with NATO
When asked about the poison pill problem, a senior administration official said that despite Trump's attempts to codify his policies, Biden has made great strides in reversing some of those measures.
This is especially true when it comes to raising U.S. alliances like NATO -- which Trump once dismissed as "obsolete" -- to "unprecedented levels" in the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggression in the Ukraine war, the administration official said who wished to remain anonymous.
Biden has also managed to lift or freeze Trump's tariffs on the European Union, Japan and Britain, restore US cyberwarfare capabilities, promote democracy and human rights abroad, and launch new initiatives against COVID-19,
Elsewhere, Trump's poison pill approach to paralyzing his successor has met with only partial success.
After Trump hesitated over whether to uphold the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), Biden managed to persuade Russia to extend the treaty by five years, despite talks picking up since Putin's invasion of Ukraine lying ice.
Biden managed to reverse another last-minute Trump decision in Yemen when his predecessor designated the Iran-backed Houthi rebels as a foreign terrorist organization.
But critics say Biden has since failed to take decisive action to end the seven-year war between the Saudi-backed government and the Houthis,
by completely ending US support for the Saudi blockade of the country.
Biden has also reauthorized the deployment of hundreds of special forces to Somalia, largely reversing another move by Trump.
National Security Advisor: US withdrawal from Afghanistan was 'very Trumpish'
In Afghanistan, too, Trump left a poisoned chalice in Biden's hands as he effectively abandoned the country when he spurred peace talks with the Taliban that barred the Afghan elected government.
Despite delaying Trump's planned withdrawal by a few months, Biden followed his predecessor's approach so closely that Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, described the disastrous haste of the withdrawal as "very Trumpish."
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden has also faced stiff opposition in Congress to his earlier decision to stop funding a Trump-approved new nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile.
The Iran nuclear issue is perhaps the prime example of Biden's problem defeating the specter of Trump.
By withdrawing from the 2015 deal, the Trump administration freed Iran from any real limitations on its nuclear development.
Trump imposed additional sanctions and punitive measures on Iran.
Certainly one of the most sensitive moves was to designate the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the instrument of Iran's paramilitary operations in the region, as a foreign terrorist organization.
Iran's nuclear program: Negotiations with Tehran have reached an impasse
Even as negotiations with the hard-line Tehran government remain at an impasse, on May 3 the Senate passed by a large majority (16 of Biden's Democratic allies voted in favour) a non-binding motion calling for any nuclear deal to be signed also needs to cover Iran's ballistic missile program and support for fighters in the Middle East.
Both were previously demands of the Trump administration.
Tehran has insisted that such a move is out of the question and that the 2015 deal be restored to its original form.
The Biden administration itself has made a return to the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), more difficult by imposing new sanctions on Iran's ballistic missile program following a missile attack in Iraq in March.
Biden's Treasury Department also announced new sanctions against the IRGC unit responsible for developing ballistic missiles, as well as other Iranian entities involved in the procurement of missile parts.
According to Trump officials, the additional Iran sanctions were not intended as a poison pill but as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign.
They wanted to force Tehran to return to the negotiating table to negotiate what Trump said should be a tougher nuclear deal.
Nonetheless, the Trump administration has largely stuck to the suggestions of some militant think tanks such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
As Biden was still bidding for the Democratic nomination and calling for a reinstatement of the Iran deal, the FDD argued that the Trump team should "put up a wall of additional sanctions that a pro-Tehran successor could not easily smash." Other late Trump actions requested by the FDD include designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization and imposing sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran.
Iran policy has also been muddled under President Biden
Still, JCPOA negotiations were close to agreement at the end of February, government officials said - until Russia insisted on new terms.
Biden even proposed removing the IRGC's designation as a terrorist organization in exchange for a commitment by Tehran not to retaliate against the United States for Trump's 2020 assassination of a senior Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani, NBC News reports.
However, Iran has reportedly rejected this proposal.
"While it is tempting to see Iran's impasse as the result of a Trump-era poison pill, after more than a year and a half in office and a year of indirect nuclear talks, Biden now bears direct responsibility for this impasse," Behnam Ben said Taleblu from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
"There have already been too many own goals, pulled registers and missed opportunities on the Iran record."
Some critics say Biden's troubles in delivering on some of his foreign policy promises -- and in particular his failure to find a new way to engage China -- suggest that he and his team (particularly US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan ) are more likely to be influenced by the politics of Capitol Hill than vice versa.
Joe Biden thought he was 'the smartest politician ever'
A former senior Biden aide said the president was perhaps overconfident in thinking his long experience on Capitol Hill would allow him to bridge the party divide.
In this respect, Blinken and Sullivan are primarily following the bidding of Biden, who bears full responsibility for foreign policy.
"One of his favorite lines was, 'Just give me the facts.
I take care of politics,'" said the former adviser, who wished to remain anonymous.
"He thought he was the smartest politician ever and didn't need any help."
The Biden administration has certainly only been in office for a year and a half.
The president said he remains committed to working to restore the JCPOA and remove at least some tariffs from China, although he added last week that "no decisions have been made on this yet." Trump recently hinted that he intends to run again, saying in a speech last weekend, "We're going to take back the House of Representatives, we're going to take back the Senate, and we're going to take back our country."
Should he return to the White House as US President, Trump could also get a large part of his foreign policy back.
By Michael Hirsh
Michael Hirsh
is a senior correspondent at
Foreign Policy
.
Twitter: @michaelphirsh
This article was first published in English in the magazine "ForeignPolicy.com" on May 16, 2022 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to the readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals. *Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.
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