[President Biden’s speech at the
U.N. was a stark contrast to President Donald J. Trump’s. But it came amid
complaints that some of Mr. Biden’s policy moves echoed his predecessor’s
approach.]
But nearly all their diplomatic
efforts at a pared-down U.N. General Assembly were shadowed — and complicated —
by the legacy of President Donald J. Trump.
Mr.
Biden soothed strained relations with France in a call with President
Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday. Mr. Blinken met in New York with his French
counterpart on Thursday. But French officials openly likened the Biden
administration to Mr. Trump’s in its failure to warn them of a strategic
deal with Britain and Australia that they said muscled them out of a
submarine contract.
In a fiery address to the global
body on Wednesday, President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran suggested that there was
little difference between Mr. Biden and his predecessor, invoking their
respective foreign policy slogans: “The world doesn’t care about ‘America
First’ or ‘America is Back.’”
And in response to the ambitious
targets Mr. Biden offered in his address to reduce
global carbon emissions, an editorial in Beijing’s hard-line Global Times
newspaper raised an all-too-familiar point for Biden officials: “If the next
U.S. administration is again a Republican one, the promises Biden made will be
very likely rescinded,” the paper wrote — a point the Iranians also made about
a potential return to the 2015 nuclear deal that Mr.
Trump abruptly exited.
In a news conference capping the
week of diplomacy, Mr. Blinken offered a positive assessment. He said U.S.
officials had met with counterparts from more than 60 countries and emphasized
American leadership on climate and the coronavirus.
Asked about several recent
criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, such as the Afghanistan withdrawal, stalled
nuclear talks with Iran and diplomatic offense in Paris, the secretary of state
said he had not heard such complaints directly in New York this week.
“What I’ve been hearing the last
couple of days in response to the president’s speech, the direction that he’s
taking us in, was extremely positive and extremely supportive of the United
States,” Mr. Blinken said.
He spoke before departing a
weeklong diplomatic confab that had cautiously returned in-person after the
coronavirus pandemic forced a virtual U.N. event last year.
Many foreign leaders skipped this
year’s gathering, including the presidents of Russia, China and Iran. Their
absences precluded the drama of previous sessions around whether the president
of the United States might have an impromptu encounter with a foreign rival.
Mr. Biden made only a brief appearance, departing a few hours after his address
on Tuesday.
In
that speech, he depicted an America whose withdrawal from Afghanistan had
turned a page on 20 years of war after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Now, he
said, the United States was embarking on a new era of cooperative diplomacy to
solve global challenges, including climate change, the coronavirus and rising
authoritarianism.
The speech was a grand homage to
internationalism and a stark contrast to Mr. Trump’s undiplomatic bluster. But
it came amid growing complaints that some of Mr. Biden’s signature policy moves
carried echoes of Mr. Trump’s approach.
French officials said they were
blindsided by the U.S. submarine deal with Australia, a complaint for which
Biden officials had no easy answer.
“This brutal, unilateral and
unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr. Trump used to do,”
Jean-Yves Le Drian, the foreign minister, told a French radio outlet, according
to Reuters. “I am angry and bitter. This isn’t done between allies.”
That had eased some by Thursday,
after Mr. Biden’s call with Mr. Macron and Mr. Blinken’s meeting with Mr. Le
Drian. But the French diplomat’s statement suggested that the matter was not
quite forgotten. “Getting out of the crisis we are experiencing will take time
and will require action,” he said.
The flare-up with Paris might have
been dismissed as an isolated episode but for its echoes of complaints by some
NATO allies that Mr. Biden had withdrawn from Afghanistan without fully consulting
them or alerting them to Washington’s timeline. Mr. Trump was notorious for
surprising longtime allies with impulsive or unilateral actions.
Mr. Blinken protested that he
visited with NATO officials in the spring to gather their views on Afghanistan,
but officials in Germany, Britain and other countries said that their counsel
for a slower withdrawal was rejected.
Biden allies say they find the
comparisons overblown. But some admit that global concerns about whether Mr.
Trump, or someone like him, might succeed Mr. Biden and reverse his efforts are
valid.
“It’s absurd on its face for
allies, partners or anyone to think that there is any continuity between Trump
and Biden in terms of how they view allies, negotiate internationally or
approach national security,” said Loren DeJonge Schulman, who worked at the
National Security Counsel and the Pentagon during the Obama administration.
“It’s a talking point, and it’s a laughable one.”
But Ms. Schulman added that other
nations had valid questions about how, in the shadow of the Trump era, the
Biden administration could make sustainable international commitments like a
potential nuclear deal with Tehran and build more public support for foreign
alliances.
“This can’t be a matter of ‘trust
us,’” said Ms. DeJonge Schulman, who is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center
for a New American Security.
It is not just irritated allies
that have embraced the notion of a Biden-Trump commonality; adversaries have
found it to be a useful cudgel against Mr. Biden. The Global Times, which often
echoes views of the Chinese Communist Party, has said that Mr. Biden’s China
policies are “virtually identical” to those of Mr. Trump.
They include Mr. Biden’s
continuation of Trump-era trade tariffs, which Democrats roundly denounced
before Mr. Biden took office but his officials quickly came to see as a source
of leverage in their dealings with China.
Similarly, Iranian officials
complain bitterly that Mr. Biden has not lifted any of the numerous economic
sanctions that Mr. Trump imposed after he withdrew from the nuclear
deal. Early in Mr. Biden’s presidency, some European allies urged the
administration to lift some of those restrictions as a way to jump-start
nuclear talks, but Biden officials declined
to do so.
Last month, Iran’s supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, charged that “America’s current administration is no
different from the previous one, because what it demands from Iran on the
nuclear issue is different in words but the same thing that Trump demanded,”
Mr. Khamenei’s official website quoted him as saying.
Now, after a monthslong pause in
negotiations and the election of a new, hard-line government in Tehran, Biden
officials are warning Iran that time is running out for a mutual return to the
nuclear agreement.
Mr. Trump was criticized by
countless foreign policy veterans of both parties. But critiques of the Biden
team’s management are also growing, particularly after the U.S.
military’s erroneous
drone strike in Kabul last month killed
10 civilians, including seven children and an aid
worker.
Some Biden officials, without
admitting much fault, say the work of diplomacy has been particularly difficult
given that scores of experienced Foreign Service officers retired during the
Trump administration. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, has also blocked
dozens of Biden nominees to senior State Department positions and
ambassadorships.
Mr. Biden is also encountering the
Trump comparison in other settings, including on immigration.
“The question that’s being asked
now is: How are you actually different than Trump?” Marisa Franco, the
executive director of Mijente, a Latino civil rights organization, told
The Times this week.
