Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: January (December 4, 2021-January 11, 2022)
Access the foreign policy tracker HERE.
FDD | Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: January
fdd.org · by David Adesnik Senior Fellow and Director of Research · January 11, 2022
Trend Overview
Edited by David Adesnik
Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Once a month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch. Shortly after taking office, President Joe Biden set a “goal of building a stable and predictable relationship with Russia.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has not obliged. In December, Moscow put Europe on edge with persistent threats to launch a major military offensive against Ukraine. Meanwhile, nuclear negotiations with Iran continued even though Tehran’s proxies targeted U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria with armed drones. Belatedly, the White House announced a “diplomatic boycott” of next month’s Winter Games in Beijing, yet only a handful of allies will keep their diplomats home.
With hostility growing on almost every front despite the administration’s “relentless diplomacy,” Congress signaled the need for greater strength by authorizing $740 billion in defense spending, or $25 billion more than the president requested. There was overwhelming bipartisan support for this increase, with veto-proof majorities in the House and Senate. Congress lent similar support to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which Biden signed into law just before Christmas. The United Nations is expected to release its own findings on Beijing’s human rights violations in the coming days; in December, it approved plans to spend $4.2 million on an open-ended investigation of Israel. The Biden administration dismissed the inquiry as “inherently biased and an obstacle to the cause of peace,” but could not block the funding.
Trending Positive
Cyber
By RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery and Trevor Logan
Defense
By Bradley Bowman
International Organizations
By Richard Goldberg
Trending Neutral
China
By Craig Singleton
Europe
By John Hardie
Israel
By David May
Korea
By David Maxwell
Russia
By John Hardie
Trending Negative
Arms Control and Nonproliferation
By Anthony Ruggiero and Andrea Stricker
Gulf
By Hussain Abdul-Hussain
Indo-Pacific
By Craig Singleton
Latin America
By Carrie Filipetti and Emanuele Ottolenghi
Sunni Jihadism
By Thomas Joscelyn
Syria
By David Adesnik
Turkey
By Aykan Erdemir
Trending Very Negative
Iran
By Richard Goldberg and Behnam Ben Taleblu
Lebanon
By Tony Badran