Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: May

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. As Russian forces withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv, they left behind evidence of torture, summary executions, and other crimes. In the town of Bucha, corpses littered the streets and hundreds of bodies filled mass graves, yet the Kremlin insisted the atrocities were an elaborate hoax. President Joe Biden called for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be put on trial for war crimes, yet that prospect seems remote. However, the United States has led an increasingly rapid and effective effort to arm Ukrainian forces, who continue to exact heavy costs on their adversary. Washington and its allies also continued to levy sanctions against Russia and are discussing measures to target its vital energy export revenue.

In Vienna, nuclear negotiations with Iran reached an impasse when the White House rejected Tehran’s demand to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Under pressure from Congress as well as U.S. victims of IRGC attacks, the administration appeared to reverse its initial readiness to grant this concession to Tehran. Check back in a month to see if the White House continues to hold the line against unreasonable Iranian demands and if escalating support for Ukraine enables Kyiv to thwart Russia’s offensive in eastern Ukraine.