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April 4, 2023 |: FDD Tracker: March 1-April 4, 2023
Trend overview
By John Hardy and David Adesnick
Welcome back to tracking the foreign policy of the Biden administration. Once a month, we ask FDD experts and scholars to rate the administration’s foreign policy. They provide very positive, positive, neutral, negative or very negative trends for the areas they look at.
Last month, President Joe Biden hosted his Australian and British counterparts to announce the next steps in their trilateral defense agreement, known as AUKUS, which seeks to strengthen Beijing’s deterrence. Meanwhile, Japan and South Korea are working to mend relations, which bodes well for U.S. efforts to counter threats from China and North Korea. The White House also released a long-awaited national strategy that outlines US cybersecurity priorities.
However, the good news ends there. While it is working with allies to help Ukraine prepare for a spring counteroffensive, the administration continues to keep key weapons from Kiev. The administration also refuses to lower the G7-imposed price cap on Russian oil exports, neutralizing its ability to cut into the Kremlin’s revenues. In addition, the president’s proposed defense budget, adjusted for inflation, would leave the US military with flat or even declining resources while failing to fund key priorities identified by the Indo-Pacific Command.
Meanwhile, Biden continues to struggle to establish leadership in the Middle East. Beijing brokered a deal to normalize relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Middle Kingdom’s first major foray into Middle East politics. Tehran is inching closer to nuclear weapons capability, but the White House appears to have no strategy to stop it. The administration is also continuing to greenlight a normalization of Arab relations with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Check back with us next month to see if Biden manages to right the ship.
