Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Early August

Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Two times per 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. In Afghanistan, the Taliban captured six provincial capitals in a span of just four days, underscoring how the administration’s complete withdrawal of U.S. troops has worsened the conflict as well as the country’s humanitarian crisis. Even though, as vice president, Joe Biden saw how the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq led to the rise of the Islamic State as well as tremendous suffering for the Iraqi people, he appears not to have prepared for similar risks in Afghanistan. Tensions also rose in the Persian Gulf, where an Iranian drone attacked an Israeli-operated oil tanker, resulting in the death of two European crewmen. Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic of Iran inaugurated a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, responsible for executing thousands of political prisoners. Check back in two weeks to see how the Biden administration has responded to events that call into question its hopes that diplomatic outreach could elicit more cooperative behavior from U.S. adversaries.