Trump Tramples Biden on Foreign Policy

Donald Trump’s foreign policy is a hotly contested feature of his presidency. His unorthodox way of doing things across the world has sparked outcry from establishment figures and foreign policy talking heads. 

His crown jewel on the global stage, is his Middle East policy. Historic peace agreements between Israel and the Arab world, drawing down troops embroiled in seemingly endless conflicts, even negotiations to end the Afghanistan war. Amazingly, thank G-d, 2020 has seen the lowest number of US troops dead in that war since it began in 2001. He has not started any new Middle East wars.

Middle Eastern policy is also Joe Biden’s biggest weakness. It goes all the way back to 2003, when Joe voted for the Iraq intervention but then during Obama’s presidency went along with a pullout of troops in 2011 wasting all the gains previously made in Iraq up to that point.

It got no better in the VP debate, when Kamala Harris hinted that a Biden-Harris admin would pursue a new deal of sorts with the Iranian regime. While standing behind the JCPOA–the Iran Deal–, Joe promises to build on the advancements made in the Israel-Arab world. As long as he is embracing the Islamic Republic, he will never have the trust of either Israel nor the Arab world to do that. What he really plans on doing is going back to the old status quo, of Israel and its relations with the Arab world hinging on the Israel-Palestine conflict. 

Trump understands how Middle Eastern foreign policy work and always negotiates from a place of strength. He may not have started any new wars but he is smart in posturing that he is willing to crater a rouge regime if they get aggressive with the US or its allies. On the other hand Biden and President Obama would always put Middle Eastern despots in the driver seat of negotiations through an unwillingness to get tough leading to terrible agreements like the Iran Deal.

Trump oversaw the assassinations of two terrorist masterminds, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS and Qasem Soleimani, a high ranking member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Council-a terrorist designated organization. Meanwhile, Joe Biden opposed the Bin Laden strike in 2011, although he did a great job of keeping that under wraps until recently. Kamala Harris, like many other Democrats, said that the strike against Soleimani was wrong, while Biden said he wouldn’t have ordered it had he been in the White House. Not an attitude the Israelis or Sunni Arabs will be keen to hear when he asks them to come to the peace table. 

When it comes to the greatest threats facing the West today, Trump has fought them like no one else. Although Trump is oddly warm to Kim Jong Un, he crippled North Korea through the toughest sanctions ever placed by the UN Security Council. He has not coddled Iran with semi-functional nuclear deals that ignore the havoc they wreak across the Middle East and has made it clear who is the boss. 

He played hardball with China, and he continues to do so. China is the pre-eminent global concern at this time, between the Coronavirus pandemic caused at least in part by their actions and negligence as well as the horrible oppression of Uyghur Muslims, some of whom are allegedly being detained in concentration camps. Joe Biden’s record on China, plus the Obama administration’s policy on China, indicate that Joe is not up to the task of dealing with them. 

One of the more controversial aspects of Trump’s foreign relations has been his UN policy. In June of 2018, US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, announced the US decision to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council citing chronic anti-Israel abuse and political bias. That bias and their willingness to look the other way at dictators and brutal regimes while continually singling out Israel for resolutions and condemnations is truly egregious behaviour on behalf of the Council. 

This was confirmed this year with the elections of China, Pakistan and Cuba to the Council. According to the organization UN Watch, after these new members are added, a whooping SIXTY percent of the Council members will be non-democracies. Fortunately, Saudi Arabia’s attempt to get on it ended in failure.

Joe Biden however, attacked the decision to leave the corrupt council and said that Trump’s withdrawal from it allowed Cuba to be elected. The problem is, that they were also elected in 2009, 2013 and 2016 when he was still VP and the US was a member of the Council. He has said that his administration will seek to rejoin the HRC. 

Trump also withdrew funding from another wasteful UN organization in September 2018, the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), despite the vocal objections of most foreign affairs ‘experts’. The UNRWA is a corrupt organization that redefined the word “refugee” for the purposes of the Israel-Palestine conflict. With that redefinition, they took around 700,000 refugees in 1948 and turned them into around five million today, who claim a supposed ‘right of return’, which would mean demographic death for Israel as the Jewish State. Investigations into the textbooks they provide Palestinian students has shown glorification of violence against Jews and other antisemitic material. 

UNRWA, with all that is on their agenda, is one of the greatest obstacles to peace in the region, and should be disbanded. A Joe Biden presidency would mean that they continue their work, with US backing and renewed funding. 

Donald Trump has made the right decisions, the hard decisions, with almost the entire international community and foreign policy establishment opposing them. He put America back in the lead. Joe Biden would rather take the easy way out, go along with the establishment, and let America fall from the top.