In first debate of 2024, Biden and Trump could clash over foreign policy

WASHINGTON Foreign policy is supposed to be a specialty of President Joe Biden, but in Thursday's debate with Donald Trump, he could easily find himself on the defensive.

Two wars have started on Biden's watch, allowing Trump to argue that despite Biden's vast experience and global contacts as a former senator and vice president, the world seems more dangerous today than when Trump left office, some foreign policy experts say.

It’s a simple argument that obscures much of the complex realities of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war against Hamas. Biden assembled an international coalition that prevented Russia from marching directly on kyiv, and he provided Israel with the weapons it needed after Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7.

On two occasions he put himself in danger by travelling to war zones, to kyiv and Tel Aviv.

Yet in a 90-minute debate characterized by rapid-fire questions and snappy retorts, Biden might struggle to come up with a convincing response in real time.

Follow the news live from the Trump-Biden presidential debate

Anticipating Trump's remarks, Richard Goldberg, who was national security chief in his administration, said: “The world is on fire today. It was not on fire when I was president. My policy was peace through strength.”

One way for Biden to try to counter arguments along these lines would be to look to a period in Trump's term when his own aides feared he would withdraw from the NATO alliance and weaken European governments in the face of intentions expansionists of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, some experts said.

“It’s a tricky debate for Biden on foreign policy,” said Lewis Lukens, who was a U.S. diplomat for 30 years and is now a senior partner at Signum Global Advisers.

If he were advising Biden, Lukens said, I would point out that Trump’s approach to the world is making the world less stable, not more stable. The challenge for Biden is that the two wars that are going on right now were not happening when Trump was president. Trump will simply say, “Look at the evidence; you’re wrong.”

Foreign policy is rarely at the heart of presidential elections. In this case, however, Trump's return to power could reshape the order established after World War II.

He has made clear his personal regard for some of the world's autocrats, including Putin, China's Xi Jinping and North Korea's Kim Jong Un.

At the same time, Trump has denigrated the leaders of democratically run European countries. Since leaving the White House, he has gone so far as to threaten not to come to their defense unless they meet their financial obligations to NATO.

To say that Europe is worried about a Trump victory would be an understatement, said Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, a London-based international affairs think tank. Here, Europeans are terrified.

During his 2018 appearance before the United Nations, Trump boasted about his administration's accomplishments, prompting laughter from some audience members.

All of this gives Biden a wealth of information that Trump might have difficulty deflecting.

Trump would destroy the transatlantic alliance that has protected peace for 80 years, said Jeremy Bash, who was chief of staff at the CIA and the Defense Department under Barack Obama. He would capitulate to Putin. He has explicitly said he would end the war [in Ukraine] in 24 hours, and the only way to do that is to pull the rug out from under NATO and withdraw American support for Ukraine.

One of the topics expected to come up in the debate is the war in Afghanistan. It’s a double-edged issue for Biden. He withdrew U.S. forces from the country in 2021, ending a 20-year conflict that had become unpopular in the United States. But that withdrawal led to a tragedy at the Kabul airport: A terrorist attack killed 13 U.S. service members who were helping with the evacuation.

Biden can argue that he was simply honoring a peace deal that Trump struck in 2020. That argument may fail, however, given the chaotic scenes at the airport as his administration executed a withdrawal.

“Trump’s response to almost every foreign policy question about an unfortunate event is that it wouldn’t have happened if he had been president,” said John Bolton, Trump’s White House national security adviser who later fell out with Trump. “That’s of course an argument that’s impossible to prove one way or the other.”

As for Afghanistan, Bolton continued: “What Trump will focus on is the Kabul airport debacle. He said, I could have done better. That’s another one of those unprovable claims. But he’s just going to make that claim.”

The debate will test both men’s ability to deliver their lines succinctly and memorably. Neither speaks with particular fluency when not reading from a script. Given widespread concerns about Biden’s age, he may be under more pressure than Trump to deliver a convincing performance.

Democrats need to be able to count on President Biden to do that, Vinjamuri said. And if the debate doesn't go well, people are very worried that it's going to get to the point where it's going to be too late for Democrats.

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