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