Why Do We Still Have Trump's Foreign Policy?

After a campaign critical of Biden towards Trump’s Foreign Policy, significant changes were expected that have not happened.

By Nicolas J S Davies, Medea Benjamin, The Progressive Magazine

President Joe Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of former President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts.

As a senior member of the Obama Administration, Biden played a role in diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve long-standing foreign policy problems. But as President, Biden has failed to restore Barack Obama’s progressive initiatives and has instead doubled down on many of Trump’s most dangerous and destabilizing policies.

Here is our assessment of Biden’s handling of ten critical foreign policy issues:

Photo by Gage Skidmore

1. Prolonging the agony of the people of Afghanistan. It is perhaps symptomatic of Biden’s foreign policy problems that the biggest achievement of his first year in office was an initiative launched by Trump—withdrawing the United States from its twenty-year war in Afghanistan. But Biden’s implementation of this policy was tainted by his failure to understand Afghanistan. The United States’ twenty-year hostile military occupation gave way to the speedy restoration of the Taliban government and the televised chaos of the U.S. withdrawal.