At the United Nations’ annual gathering of world leaders this week, President Biden and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke ambitiously about international cooperation and a new diplomatic approach for a post-Trump America.
But nearly all their diplomatic efforts at a pared-down U.N. General Assembly were shadowed — and complicated — by the legacy of President Donald J. Trump.
In a phone call on Wednesday with President Emmanuel Macron, Mr. Biden reopened strained relations between France and the United States. On Thursday, Mr. Blinken met his counterpart from France in New York. But French officials openly likened the Biden administration to Mr. Trump’s in its failure to warn them of a strategic deal with Britain and Australia that they said muscled them out of a submarine contract.
In a fiery address to the global body on Wednesday, President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran suggested that there was little difference between Mr. Biden and his predecessor, invoking their respective foreign policy slogans: “The world doesn’t care about ‘America First’ or ‘America is Back.’”
And in response to the ambitious targets Mr. Biden offered in his own address to reduce global carbon emissions, an editorial in Beijing’s hard-line Global Times newspaper raised an all-too-familiar point for Biden officials: “If the next U.S. administration is again a Republican one, the promises Biden made will be very likely rescinded,” the paper wrote — a point the Iranians also made about a potential return to the 2015 nuclear deal that Mr. Trump abruptly exited.
M. Blinken made a positive assessment at a news conference that concluded the week’s diplomacy. He noted that U.S. officials met with counterparts representing more than 60 nations and stressed the importance of American leadership in climate and coronavirus.
When asked about recent criticisms of U.S. international policy, including the Afghanistan withdrawal and the stalled nuclear talks between Iran and diplomatic offense at Paris, the secretary-of-state said that he hadn’t heard of such complaints in New York this week.
“What I’ve been hearing the last couple of days in response to the president’s speech, the direction that he’s taking us in, was extremely positive and extremely supportive of the United States,” Mr. Blinken said.
Before he spoke, he was leaving a weeklong diplomatic conference that had been cautiously returned in person after last year’s coronavirus pandemic.
Many foreign leaders skipped this year’s gathering, including the presidents of Russia, China and Iran. The drama surrounding whether the US president might have an unplanned encounter with a foreign opponent was not possible due to their absence. He left the room just a few hours after Tuesday’s address.
In his speech, he described America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan as turning the page on 20 years worth of war following the September 11, 2001 attacks. He said that the United States was now embarking on a new era in cooperative diplomacy to address global challenges such as climate change and rising authoritarianism.
The speech was a grand homage to internationalism and a stark contrast to Mr. Trump’s undiplomatic bluster. But it came amid growing complaints that some of Mr. Biden’s signature policy moves carried echoes of Mr. Trump’s approach.
French officials claim they were blindsided when the U.S. submerged ship deal with Australia was announced. Biden officials did not have an easy answer to this complaint.
“This brutal, unilateral and unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr. Trump used to do,” According to Reuters Jean-Yves Le Drian told a French radio station that he was blindsided by the U.S. submarine deal with Australia. “I am angry and bitter. This isn’t done between allies.”
That had eased some by Thursday, after Mr. Biden’s call with Mr. Macron and Mr. Blinken’s meeting with Mr. Le Drian. But the French diplomat’s statement suggested that the matter was not quite forgotten. “Getting out of the crisis we are experiencing will take time and will require action,” He stated.
The flare-up with Paris might have been dismissed as an isolated episode but for its echoes of complaints by some NATO allies that Mr. Biden had withdrawn from Afghanistan without fully consulting them or alerting them to Washington’s timeline. Trump was known for shocking long-time allies by taking unilateral or impulsive actions.
Mr. Blinken alleged that he visited NATO officials in the spring in order to collect their views about Afghanistan. But officials from Germany and Britain said that their recommendation for a slower withdrawal was rejected.
Biden allies claim that the comparisons are overblown but not without a hint of truth.
“It’s absurd on its face for allies, partners or anyone to think that there is any continuity between Trump and Biden in terms of how they view allies, negotiate internationally or approach national security,” Loren DeJongeschulman, who was a National Security Counsel employee and worked at the Pentagon under the Obama administration, said that they find the comparisons overblown. “It’s a talking point, and it’s a laughable one.”
Ms. Schulman stated that there were valid questions from other countries about how the Biden government could make lasting international commitments in the Trump era. She also suggested that the administration might be able to build public support for foreign alliances and possibly strike a nuclear deal with Tehran.
“This can’t be a matter of ‘trust us,’” Ms. DeJonge, an adjunct senior fellow at The Center for a New American Security, said that Schulman.
Not only are allies irritated by the idea of a Biden–Trump commonality, but also adversaries have found it to serve as a useful cudgel for Mr. Biden. The Global Times, which often echoes views of the Chinese Communist Party, has said that Mr. Biden’s China policies are “virtually identical” to those of Mr. Trump.
They include Mr. Biden’s continuation of Trump-era trade tariffs, which Democrats roundly denounced before Mr. Biden took office but his officials quickly came to see as a source of leverage in their dealings with China.
Iranian officials are bitterly complaining that Mr. Biden failed to lift any of the economic sanctions Mr. Trump imposed following his withdrawal from the nuclear agreement. Early in Mr. Biden’s presidency, some European allies urged the administration to lift some of those restrictions as a way to jump-start nuclear talks, but Biden officials declined to do so.
Last month, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, charged that “America’s current administration is no different from the previous one, because what it demands from Iran on the nuclear issue is different in words but the same thing that Trump demanded,” Mr. Khamenei’s official website quoted him as saying.
Biden officials warn Iran that there is no time for a mutual agreement to be restored after a prolonged halt in negotiations and the election a new hard-line government in Tehran.
Numerous foreign policy veterans from both parties criticized Trump. But critiques of the Biden team’s management are also growing, particularly after the U.S. military’s erroneous drone strike in Kabul last month killed 10 civilians, including seven children and an aid worker.
Despite not admitting any fault, some Biden officials claim that diplomacy is difficult because many foreign service officers who were highly trained during Trump’s administration have retired. Ted Cruz, Republican from Texas has blocked the nominations of many Biden officials to high-ranking State Department positions and ambassadorships.
Biden is also being compared to Trump in other contexts, such as on immigration.
“The question that’s being asked now is: How are you actually different than Trump?” Marisa Franco was the executive director for Mijente (a Latino civil rights group), and spoke to The Times this Week.