Zaraki KenpachiIn just 100 days, President Joe Biden has begun to transform America’s image in the eyes of the world, recasting it in a mold of diplomacy and professionalism and undoing some of the brash, unpredictable reputation built by his predecessor.
But that’s the easy part.
While Biden’s dramatic changes have been welcomed by allies and even adversaries, some foreign policy experts say his early moves have been mostly tonal or symbolic — low-hanging fruit when it comes to the real meat of foreign policy.
For an administration preoccupied with fighting domestic fires on the coronavirus and the economy, his answers to the toughest challenges abroad — climate change, vaccinating the world, countering China, the Iran nuclear deal and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal — are mostly still to come.
First 100 Days: Biden’s foreign policy challenges
APRIL 28, 202402:06
“Never underestimate the value of language and behavior in diplomacy and foreign policy,” former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb said. “Joe Biden is a politician of principle and values, whereas Donald Trump was a politician of transaction.”
Still, the world has not seen what Biden is really made of, according to Salvatore Babones, an associate professor at the University of Sydney.
“At this point, his foreign policy has been conducted largely at the level of platitudes,” he said. “But there hasn’t really been any engagement yet with really tough, divisive issues that are going to hit home very soon.”
‘America is back’
Stubb, now director of the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, said it would take some time to determine how successful Biden would be on the international stage.
“Biden has said all the right things, but when differences of opinion emerge the tone will change,” he said. “And, of course, I think China will be one of the key areas.”
From his first day in office, Biden wasted no time in bulldozing some of the Trumpian pillars of foreign policy that shocked and dismayed much of the world.
“America is back,” was how Biden opened his first foreign policy speech Feb. 4. “Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.”
Image: Biden attends a virtual summit on climate change with other world leaders in April
Biden attends a virtual summit on climate change with other world leaders in April. Brendan Smialowski / AFP – Getty Images
With a few strokes of the pen, he reversed Trump’s decisions to leave the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement on climate change. And he has since joined COVAX, a global vaccine-sharing project that Trump was the only major Western leader to reject.
Biden rescinded Trump’s travel ban on five Muslim-majority countries, and pledged to raise the cap on refugees from 15,000 to 62,500, recommitting to that target last week following Democratic uproar when the White House initially announced it would be kept at the Trump-era low.
The campaign to oust the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine is part of the federal inquiry into the dealings of Rudy Giuliani, the personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump, who dismissed Marie Yovanovitch from her post two years ago.
Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello, said Friday that Yovanovitch’s name was among about eight others referenced in a search warrant served during an early morning raid Wednesday at the former New York mayor’s Manhattan apartment and law offices.
Yovanovitch, a career diplomat, was a key witness in the 2019 Trump impeachment hearings in which lawmakers examined the president’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to investigate then-Democratic rival Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
The former ambassador’s connection to the Giuliani probe was first reported by the New York Times.
More:Rudy Giuliani’s apartment raided by feds, accelerating inquiry into Ukraine dealings; warrant served on DC lawyer
More:Rudy Giuliani: FBI raid on NY apartment, offices ‘unjustified’; denies wrongdoing
In this file photo taken on November 20, 2016, then President-elect Donald Trump meets with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani at the clubhouse of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Giuliani has acknowledged that federal investigators are reviewing whether he failed to register as a foreign agent while representing Ukrainian interests in the United States.
On Thursday, Giuliani characterized the FBI raid on his Manhattan apartment and law offices as “unjustified,” and denied any wrongdoing related to his dealings in Ukraine, where he had openly sought to gather damaging information against Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
Giuliani, in a Thursday appearance on Fox News, said FBI agents seized up to eight personal electronic devices, along with two other devices belonging to a separate person the former New York mayor did not identify.
Former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch returns from a break on Nov. 15, 2019 as she testifies before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in a public hearing in the impeachment inquiry into allegations President Donald Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.
He said that seven agents arrived at his apartment at 6 a.m. Wednesday, making their presence known with a “bang, bang, bang” on the door.
Federal investigators have been examining Giuliani since at least early 2019 related to his business dealings in Ukraine, including with Ukrainian-born Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, of Belarus, who were indicted in the fall of 2019 on campaign finance charges.
The two men played instrumental roles in connecting Giuliani with Ukrainian officials as Giuliani sought information about the financial dealings there of Hunter Biden.
In the last year of the Trump administration, the federal inquiry had been tangled in an internal dispute as prosecutors sought to push it forward.
During the transition to the Biden administration, it was expected that Attorney General Merrick Garland would be consulted on how the inquiry would proceed.
The Justice Department has declined comment on the inquiry.
During his Thursday television appearance, Giuliani claimed he had sought to cooperate with federal authorities multiple times before he was served with the search warrant Wednesday.
His administration entered indirect talks with Iran to revive the nuclear deal, and ended American support for a Saudi-led offensive in Yemen that has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The president has characterized Russian President Vladimir Putin as “a killer” and imposed sanctions accusing Moscow of malicious maneuvers, which it denies. The Trump administration imposed sanctions too, but the president himself was also criticized for appearing to kowtow to his Kremlin counterpart.
Biden has set a firm date of Sept. 11 to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, delaying a previous deadline for troop withdrawal agreed to by the Trump administration with the hardline Taliban militia in 2024. Ending America’s “forever wars” was a goal Trump and former President Barack Obama pursued in vain.
And earlier this month, Biden offered his unconditional backing to Ukraine when Russian forces amassed at its border. That stands in contrast to Trump, who often berated European allies and said Washington did not get enough in return for protecting them.
‘An issue with groupthink’
Some progressive observers say Biden has reverted to the habits of the Washington foreign policy establishment. He approved an almost $200 million arms deal with Egypt despite its dire human rights record. Biden declined to sanction Saudi Arabia’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman despite a declassified intelligence report saying he approved the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Some believe he should have eased sanctions on Iran even before negotiations restarted. These sanctions were imposed when Trump walked away from the nuclear deal that Iran was honoring because he said it was too lenient. These sanctions have brought suffering to the poorest Iranians.
There are also those who fear that, despite the experienced aides with whom Biden has surrounded himself, “there may be an issue with groupthink,” according to Karin von Hippel, a former nonpolitical senior adviser at the State Department under Obama.
Recommended
WORLD
At least 4 U.S. citizens among the dead in stampede at religious festival in Israel
WORLD
Kabul on high alert amid ‘deadline’ for U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan
“I think that’s a danger with this crowd in particular,” said von Hippel, director-general of the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London. “They are all quite alike, and there aren’t many people I can think of who are going to challenge the foreign policy, and push alternative views.”
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has a simpler test on whether Biden’s first 100 days have been a success.
“The first criteria I apply is: Has he screwed up or not?” Rudd said. “In politics, that’s no small thing domestically or internationally. And so far, I cannot see him having done so.”
Image: Then Vice President Biden held talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in August 2011
Then Vice President Biden held talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in August 2011.Lintao Zhang / Getty Images file
Gone are Trump’s rollercoaster, norm-busting approaches to China and North Korea, in which he flattered their authoritarian leaders while launching a trade war and warlike rhetoric, respectively.
Instead, Biden has vowed to tackle China’s “advancing authoritarianism” while calling out alleged rights abuses of the ethnic Uyghur minorities in the Xinjiang region and eroding freedoms in Hong Kong, all of which Beijing denies.
But he has also vowed to work with China “when it’s in America’s interest to do so,” on subjects such as climate change and dealing with North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
This tough talk has caused some “unhappiness” in Beijing, according to Victor Gao, a former interpreter for Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. But overall the Chinese government “is relatively happy to see that the Biden administration has demonstrated a higher level of professionalism as well as a deeper knowledge,” said Gao, now chair professor at Soochow University in Suzhou, China.
China-watchers were impressed with the timing of Biden’s call to Chinese President Xi Jinping. It came on the eve of Chinese New Year, and therefore was seen as a “mark of civilizational respect to the Chinese people” and showed a cultural “deftness” from Biden and his team, according to Rudd, president of the Asia Society, a New York nonprofit group.
Not ‘Conan the Barbarian’
Biden has clearly won plaudits simply by not being Trump, whom Rudd likens to “Conan the Barbarian” because of his “swaggering indifference to climate change policy, contempt for the history of alliances, and his egregious sucking up to dictators.”
Trump’s relationship with Washington’s allies was so toxic and unpredictable that it was comparable to “domestic violence” on a geopolitical scale, according to Stubb, who was also a Finnish foreign minister and a career diplomat. “No one knew what they were in for.”
Now with the Biden administration, “we see a fairly traditional democratic foreign policy emerging from a president whose instincts are multilateral, whose instincts are about cooperation, whose instincts are about alliances, whose instincts are about democracy,” he said.
Image: A newspaper in Iran covering the U.S. elections in November
A newspaper in Iran covering the U.S. elections in November.Fatemeh Bahrami / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images file
The call with Xi was not an isolated incident. Biden sent a video message to the African Union ahead of its annual summit this year, “which was tremendously significant,” said Tibor Nagy, who until February was assistant secretary of state for African affairs. “In Africa, symbolism matters a lot.”
The optics couldn’t be more different from that of the previous president, who once referred to countries in Africa as well as Haiti as “shithole” nations.
But explaining how you’re going to solve the world’s intractable puzzles is a lot easier than actually solving them.
If these obstacles were daunting when Biden was Obama’s vice president, they have gained a new complexity now.
America finds its global dominance challenged, and there is now far more domestic scrutiny on foreign commitments than the relative leeway in the years after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Babones believes.
“It’s just a more complex world,” von Hippel at RUSI said. “The U.S. is not as strong as it was four years ago, and it needs to compromise more and be a different type of superpower.”
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/ho-to-watch-kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-free-online-reddit-164915326/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-free-2021-live-stream-online-reddit-164915358/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watch-kentucky-derby-live-streaming-online-free-202151-164915396/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-2021-live-streaming-online-free-164915426/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-free-live-streaming-online-reddit-164915470/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-free-online-reddit-1521-164915533/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watch-kentucky-derby-free-live-stream-online-reddit-2021-164915639/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watch-kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-online-tv-channel–164915687/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-free-online-reddit-164915722/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-2021-live-streaming-free-reddit-164915771/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watch-kentucky-derby-2021-live-streaming-free-reddit-164915831/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-2021-live-streaming-online-free-164915864/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watchstreams-kentucky-derby-live-streaming-online-free-164915944/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-live-streaming-online-free-2021-164916003/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watchstreams-kentucky-derby-live-streaming-online-free-2021-164916507/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watch-kentucky-derby-live-streaming-online-free-2021-164916534/
————
https://www.sdgphilanthropy.org/node/3897
https://www.sdgphilanthropy.org/node/3899
https://www.sdgphilanthropy.org/node/3901
Here’s@~!! Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv
Horse^^RACE!~!Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv
Cracstrewams~~!!!Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv
Bufstreams!!) Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv
RACING! FIGHT!! Kentucky Derby 2024 Live Stream Reddit Free 1th May Today
FOX@!~Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv-P@P
Horse.. Race)! Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv
http://poynton-post.co.uk/advert/bufstreamstvlive-kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-reddit-horseraceliv/
http://poynton-post.co.uk/advert/livecracstrewamskentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-reddit-horseraceliv/
http://poynton-post.co.uk/advert/today-heres-kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-reddit-horseraceliv/
http://poynton-post.co.uk/advert/today-heres-kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-reddit-horseraceliv/
http://poynton-post.co.uk/advert/hereschecking-to-crackstreams-kentucky-derby-2021-live-streaming-free-online-reddit-full-hd/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/ho-to-watch-kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-free-online-reddit-164915326/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-free-2021-live-stream-online-reddit-164915358/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watch-kentucky-derby-live-streaming-online-free-202151-164915396/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-2021-live-streaming-online-free-164915426/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-free-live-streaming-online-reddit-164915470/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-free-online-reddit-1521-164915533/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watch-kentucky-derby-free-live-stream-online-reddit-2021-164915639/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watch-kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-online-tv-channel–164915687/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-free-online-reddit-164915722/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-2021-live-streaming-free-reddit-164915771/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watch-kentucky-derby-2021-live-streaming-free-reddit-164915831/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-2021-live-streaming-online-free-164915864/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watchstreams-kentucky-derby-live-streaming-online-free-164915944/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/kentucky-derby-live-streaming-online-free-2021-164916003/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watchstreams-kentucky-derby-live-streaming-online-free-2021-164916507/
https://247sports.com/high-school/california/board/105685/contents/watch-kentucky-derby-live-streaming-online-free-2021-164916534/
————
https://www.sdgphilanthropy.org/node/3897
https://www.sdgphilanthropy.org/node/3899
https://www.sdgphilanthropy.org/node/3901
Here’s@~!! Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv
Horse^^RACE!~!Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv
Cracstrewams~~!!!Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv
Bufstreams!!) Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv
RACING! FIGHT!! Kentucky Derby 2024 Live Stream Reddit Free 1th May Today
FOX@!~Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv-P@P
Horse.. Race)! Kentucky Derby (2024) Live Stream Reddit (@HorseRaceLiv
http://poynton-post.co.uk/advert/bufstreamstvlive-kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-reddit-horseraceliv/
http://poynton-post.co.uk/advert/livecracstrewamskentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-reddit-horseraceliv/
http://poynton-post.co.uk/advert/today-heres-kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-reddit-horseraceliv/
http://poynton-post.co.uk/advert/today-heres-kentucky-derby-2021-live-stream-reddit-horseraceliv/
http://poynton-post.co.uk/advert/hereschecking-to-crackstreams-kentucky-derby-2021-live-streaming-free-online-reddit-full-hd/
Hugh Hay
