President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are set to square off in their first debate of the 2024 cycle Thursday night, and foreign policy could play a big role.
The Biden administration came into power hoping to restart the Iran nuclear deal and sought to fulfill Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of war. The first one failed and the second, while it occurred, did so despite significant stains, including the deaths of 13 U.S. service members who were killed during a terrorist attack in the final week of the war.
Since then, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly 10 years after it annexed Crimea, and Hamas carried out a terrorist attack in Israel last October that proved to be a seismic event for the region and still threatens to plunge the Middle East into a wider conflict.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Examiner that he thinks both candidates will utilize foreign policy to paint their long-held criticisms of one another. For Biden, that means repeating his oft-used claim that Trump poses a threat to democracy, and for Trump, that means accusing Biden of not being capable of handling the rigors of the presidency.
“Pollsters always tell us that foreign policy doesn’t matter that much to voters on an issue-by-issue basis unless we’re at war, and that may be true, but I think that pollsters and political analysts sometimes miss that foreign policy can be a way in which you paint a broader picture of the person, not just of the policy agenda, but of the character and the dependability of the person that you’re thinking of voting into the Oval Office,” he said.
“I believe that Biden will start and finish with Jan. 6 and link foreign policy to Jan. 6,” O’Hanlon explained, adding that Trump will likely point to the Afghanistan withdrawal as a message sent across the globe that the U.S. is being led by an “aging, irresolute president that they thought they could take advantage of.”
Iran’s proxies have played a significant role in the Middle East since the attack as well. Israeli forces are believed to have killed more than 35,000 people during the war, though it is unclear how many were civilians and combatants. They have engaged in limited rocket and missile attacks against Hezbollah along Israel’s northern border, and both sides are threatening to expand the conflict.
The former president described himself as a very pro-Israel president. He ushered in newfound normalization agreements between Israel and a couple of its Middle Eastern neighbors, and he moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as Israel’s capital. But, since the war began, Trump has been critical of Israel.
Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria have carried out more than 100 attacks against U.S. forces in those countries, and they killed three U.S. service members in Jordan in January. The Houthis, a Yemen-based terrorist group, have launched dozens of attacks against commercial vessels transiting the waterways around Yemen’s coasts, which has had an impact on commercial shipping. Hamas, Hezbollah, the militias, and the Houthis are backed by Iran, which conducted its own historic attack against Israel in April.
Despite the foreign policy crises that have dominated Biden’s tenure, his administration has successfully ended the war in Afghanistan, strengthened the NATO alliance following Russia’s invasion, and successfully aided a coalition to help Israel defend against Iran’s aerial attack that consisted of hundreds of missiles and rockets.
All of these matters popped up during the Biden administration, but whoever wins in November likely will have to handle many of these crises.
Trump has repeatedly said he would be able to end Russia’s war in Ukraine quickly, but he has yet to publicly outline detailed plans for how that would occur.
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Two former Trump officials publicly outlined a plan that they said the former president supported. The plan included telling Ukraine it would only get additional U.S. military support if it entered peace talks and warning Moscow that refusing to negotiate would increase U.S. support for Ukraine, according to Reuters. Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, who both served as chiefs of staff in Trump’s National Security Council during his presidency, came up with the plan.
O’Hanlon said he does not believe China is likely to be a key topic during the debate because both leaders’ China policies “have been so similar.”