No end in sight to the Biden administration's growing pains
With midterm congressional elections ten months away, voters will soon ask if they’re better off financially than they were last year. Tweak that question and apply it to foreign policy, specifically in the Middle East, one might ask if the region is safer and more stable after one year of Biden.
It’s not entirely fair to compare Biden only to Trump. All administrations inherit a complex set of problems, policies, and relationships. In the Middle East, many of those are hundreds of years old and predate America.
Three weeks ago, a senior administration official briefed the media, recapping the highlights of the first year of Biden’s Middle East policy, as he saw them, making it clear that the administration had turned its back on the “maximalist and quite grandiose goals” of his predecessors to focus instead on “sound strategy and statecraft.”
It all sounds pragmatic, but the execution has been poor, as we will see from a closer analysis of five major trouble spots and relationships that have taken a turn for the worse.
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