Biden's Foreign Policy Shifts Have Made Just About the Whole World Either Mad or Unimpressed

Many years ago I started my own company. I had worked for three years for a man whose business leadership seemed so unimpressive, I was convinced that as long as I did the opposite of what he did, I would be a huge success.

Well. I still own and run that company, but I found out quickly that it’s not enough just to do the opposite of someone you didn’t respect. That path will lead you to plenty of mistakes of your own, because it’s no substitute for knowing the right thing to do, for the right reasons.

I don’t think Joe Biden understands this, certainly not when it comes to foreign policy. As much as our new president may detest his predecessor, it doesn’t hold that everything you do will be correct if it’s the opposite of what Trump does. And as Walter Russell Mead reports in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, just about the entire world is either seething or rolling its eyes as Biden’s policies:

European leaders are also dismissive of American moralism. French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the importation of U.S.-academic and cultural wokeness as a threat to the French way of life, while pragmatists on the Continent are pushing to strengthen economic relations with Russia and China—virtually ignoring the Biden administration’s efforts to raise the pressure on human-rights abusers in Moscow and Beijing. With the U.S. trade representative’s recent announcement that Trump-era retaliatory tariffs on European wine, cheese and food imports aren’t going away soon, this has been one of the shortest and coldest diplomatic honeymoons on record.

In the Middle East, Iran is showing no eagerness to ease the administration’s path back into the 2015 nuclear deal. And both Israel and the conservative Arab states resent the American shift in that direction. As for restless NATO ally Turkey, Mr. Biden promised during the campaign to help President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opposition. The new administration has so far criticized a crackdown on pro-LGBTQ student demonstrators and called on Ankara to release the dissident Osman Kavala.

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Closer to home, the unceremonious cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline miffed Canadians. The Biden administration appears headed for a fight with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro over deforestation in the Amazon basin—a sensitive issue for the Brazilian right. Mexico’s left-populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador delayed congratulating Mr. Biden on his election, passed a law limiting U.S.-Mexican collaboration over drug trafficking, and offered political asylum to Julian Assange.

Three fundamental problems drive Biden’s foreign policy fiasco.

The first is that he doesn’t really believe in America’s fundamental role in the world. The United States has long served as the essential nation in the protection of global security, political liberty and overall peace. The world’s bad actors restrain themselves mainly out of concern for what will happen if the American eagle decides to swoop down and attack.

Biden and most modern-day leftists don’t believe America has the moral standing to exercise this role, and they would rather redirect the money it costs to fund “stimulus packages” or send people unemployment checks when they could be working.

The second fundamental problem is that, when Biden does decide to use American influence, he applies it to the wrong priorities. Forcing cultural wokeness down the throats of the French, or picking a fight with Brazil over the disposition of its own forests, will cost you lots of global capital you could be using to countermand the influence of the Russians and the Chinese. America has plenty of global capital but that doesn’t accomplish anything if it isn’t used wisely.

How does a left-wing American president manage to make Justin Trudeau’s Canada mad? Joe Biden is a man of special gifts.

The third fundamental problem is that Biden and those who surround him have a hubris-fueled delusion about their ability to tame rogue regimes, even as they dismissively blow off the value of our real allies. You especially see this in the Middle East, where Biden still hasn’t made a call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but he’s already working overtime to try to get the U.S. back into the terrible Iran nuclear deal.

Left-wing dreamers like John Kerry are convinced that outlaw countries like Iran are no worse than any other country – and certainly not worse than Israel – and all that’s needed to get them to behave is the skill of a brilliant American diplomat. This is the most delusional of conceits, that you can bring people like the mad mullahs into the family of responsible nations just by knowing how to talk to them.

There was never any chance it would go another way. By surrounding himself with the likes of Kamala Harris, John Kerry and Susan Rice, Biden guaranteed he’d be getting advice about world affairs that would lead America into a foreign policy muck.

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China has designs on economic, cultural and military domination of the world. Beating that back will require a clear-eyed American president who understands the nature and the purpose of American global influence, and isn’t afraid to use it.

But we have Joe Biden instead.