Columnist blames Trump for inflexibility of Biden's foreign policy

In this column, Fareed Zakaria complains that U.S. foreign policy has “lost all flexibility.” Not some flexibility. All of it.

Zakaria writes:

Today. . .our foreign policy usually consists of grand moral declarations that divide the world into black and white, friends and foes. Those statements quickly get locked in place with sanctions and legislation, making policies even more rigid. The political atmosphere becomes so charged that merely talking with a “foe” becomes risky.

There is now a whole slew of countries with which the United States has either no relations or only limited, hostile contact — Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Myanmar, North Korea. You can make the case for opposing any one of these countries individually; collectively, though, the effect is to create a rigid foreign policy — one in which we’re unwilling to talk to everyone in the room and unable to show flexibility, presumably based on the idea that it’s best to simply hope for the overthrow of these regimes.

I don’t see the downside of having no relations with Cuba, Venezuela, and Myanmar, but Russia and China are another matter. So is North Korea, now that it’s a nuclear power.

To the extent that our ability to communicate and deal flexibly with these powers is impaired, who is to blame? Naturally, Zakaria puts much of the blame on Trump.

But Trump was always willing to talk with Putin and Xi . He did so on a number of occasions. And when he talked with Putin, his enemies, including those in the mainstream media, attacked him — with some going so far as to claim (without evidence) that he was a puppet of Putin or even his agent.

Zakaria went almost that far. In 2017, he attacked Trump for saying “there’s nothing I can think of that I’d rather do than have Russia friendly.” He then strongly suggested that this desire by Trump stemmed from the dark motives Robert Mueller was investigating.

Thus, it’s beyond cynical for Zakaria to praise Barack Obama for “trying to maintain a working relationship with Russia,” and to criticize Trump for allegedly lacking this kind of flexibility. The baseless talk about Trump as serving Putin was always likely to limit Trump’s flexibility in dealing with Russia.

Russia wasn’t the only adversary Trump showed flexibility towards. He was the first American president to meet with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. To be sure, these efforts didn’t produce a deal. I never thought they would, but I praised Trump for establishing a relationship with the weird, brutal dictator because it’s good to have a relationship with a guy who’s able to send nuclear weapons our way.

I assume from his article that Zakaria would agree —at least if someone other than Trump had established the relationship.

In the case of Iran, Zakaria seems unhappy that Trump exited the nuclear deal. But Trump’s purpose was to reimpose sanctions and thereby bring Iran back to the bargaining table. This effort may or may not have succeeded in a second Trump term (my money would have been on “not”). Nonetheless, it was an effort to give the U.S. flexibility — as opposed to sitting back and letting events already in motion take their course.

Trump also engaged with China. He wanted to increase U.S. leverage through tougher policies, especially on trade. The result was some compromise on tariffs. So again, there was flexibility.

Zakaria ignores the Trump administration’s successful efforts to normalize Israeli relations with certain Arab nations. Yet, this is the kind of diplomacy Zakaria praises early in his article when he argues for a strategy of superpower as “broker.”

Whatever one thinks of Trump’s policies in these areas, it’s absurd to blame him for any lack of flexibility Zakaria perceives in our current foreign policy — and, as noted, cynical for Zakaria to do so. Trump’s approach to foreign policy was hardly inflexible (“art of the deal” and all that), and Biden is free to reverse any positions and approaches Trump took — a freedom he has used.