Maybe Not So Back

In his regular Washington Post column Josh Rogin expresses dismay at the continuity between the Trump foreign policy and the Biden foreign policy:

senior European diplomat noted that, in dealings with Washington on everything from vaccines to travel restrictions, the Biden policies were “’America First’ in logic, whatever the rhetoric.” A Canadian politician said that if followed, Biden’s “Buy America” plans are actually more protectionist than Trump’s. Despite having criticized Trump’s tariffs repeatedly, Biden has kept nearly all of them. (In fact, many have been expanded since most exemptions to them have been allowed to expire.) Key Asian allies keep pressing Biden to return to the Trans-Pacific Partnership — much praised by him when the Obama administration negotiated it. Instead, it has been shelved.

Another striking example of Biden’s surprisingly Trumpian foreign policy is the Iran deal, one of the landmark accomplishments of the Obama administration. Throughout his election campaign, Biden argued that Trump’s withdrawal from that agreement had been a cardinal error and that, as president, he would rejoin it as long as Iran would also move into compliance. His national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, described Trump’s reimposing of secondary sanctions against Tehran despite opposition from U.S. allies as “predatory unilateralism.”

But since he took office, Biden has failed to return to the deal and has even extended some sanctions. Having long argued against trying to renegotiate the deal, Biden officials now want to “lengthen and strengthen” it. So far, this Trump-Biden strategy has not worked. Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium went from less than 300 kilograms in 2018 to more than 3,000 kilograms in May.

Or consider policy toward Cuba. The Obama administration was bold enough to tackle one of the most glaring failures in U.S. foreign policy. Having isolated and sanctioned Cuba since 1960 to produce regime change in that country, the United States had instead strengthened Cuba’s Communist government. Fidel Castro sparked nationalist fervor by blaming all of Cuba’s problems on the embargo and, far from being toppled, he ended up staying in power longer than any nonroyal leader on the planet.

It has been observed time and again that there is a remarkable continuity in American foreign policy regardless of president, regardless of party. There’s a simple reason for that. U. S. foreign policy is not created from whole cloth every four or eight years but is an emergent phenomenon crafted by balancing a number of competing even conflicting forces. Presidents may change and the letters behind their names may change but the competing interests don’t change other than to become more entrenched.

Mr. Rogin might consider that the possibility that presidents are responding to the events and political imperatives of the day and frequently, much to their surprise, whatever he or she said on the campaign trail simply does not fit with those events and imperatives, viz. Candidate Biden’s invitation to those who wanted to come to the U. S. and his rather obvious need to reverse course to something that more closely resembles what the Trump Administration was doing. You can’t step in the same foreign policy river twice.