Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: February

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.

In January, the administration scrambled to deter Russia from launching a major military offensive against Ukraine. Under pressure, NATO’s internal fault lines lay exposed. A year ago, President Joe Biden set a “goal of building a stable and predictable relationship with Russia.” That policy is now in tatters.

In other cases, Biden overestimated American adversaries’ readiness to grasp an outstretched hand. Iran remains intransigent at nuclear negotiations in Vienna, while three U.S. diplomats quit Washington’s negotiating team, reportedly objecting to the unwarranted concessions the administration is offering Tehran. In Yemen, the Iranian-backed Houthis, whom Biden removed from the U.S. list of terrorist organizations in a failed bid to promote peace, conducted drone and missile strikes against the United Arab Emirates, attacking both civilians and a base housing U.S. forces.

In Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State rebounded with coordinated attacks that American troops had to help suppress. Kim Jong Un ordered seven missile launches in January, the most rapid pace since 2017. Despite the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses, only five countries have chosen to participate in Biden’s so-called “diplomatic boycott” of the Winter Games in Beijing.

“America is back,” Biden said last February, shortly after taking office. But America’s comeback is not going according to plan.