Small Wars Journal

Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: June

Thu, 06/02/2022 - 8:32pm
Access the Foreign Policy tracker HERE(link is external).

 

June 2, 2022 | FDD Tracker: May 3, 2022-June 2, 2022

FDD | Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: June


Trend Overview

Edited by David Adesnik and John Hardie

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.

Bipartisan majorities in Congress approved(link is external) a $40 billion assistance package for Ukraine and regional security, while President Joe Biden welcomed Finland’s and Sweden’s bids to join NATO.

Biden made his first trip to Asia, where he met with democratic allies but still did not lay out a clear policy toward China(link is external). Rather, Biden made an unexpected pledge to defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression, which White House staff swiftly retracted. While struggling to contain COVID-19 outbreaks at home, Beijing won election to the Executive Board of the World Health Organization despite China’s perennial obstruction of pandemic-related investigations. The agency’s member states also rewarded Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus with a second five-year term despite his deference to Beijing, challenging Biden’s strategy of reforming multilateral organizations(link is external) via deeper engagement.

The president’s campaign to revive the 2015 nuclear deal(link is external) with Iran(link is external) also stalled, apparently because Tehran continued to demand that Biden lift the designation of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Meanwhile, North Korea(link is external) launched three ballistic missiles amid signs of activity at one of its nuclear test sites.

Please check back with us in 30 days to see if the administration has laid out a clear path for dealing with China, Iran, and North Korea while continuing to oppose the Kremlin’s aggression.