Leaving aside President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated wrangling about the legitimacy of the US election, President-elect Joe Biden is set to engage in a policy of rectification on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts. In US external relations, he can be expected to be a multilateralist and liberal realist in promoting America’s global role.
One key focus will be the Middle East and, in contrast to Trump, Biden is most likely to follow his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, in dealing with the troubled region. There are four areas where he could seek to make a difference.
The first is the July 2015 landmark Iran nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). A longstanding critic of the deal, Trump withdrew from it in May 2018. He lambasted the Iranian Islamic regime as an aggressive and destabilising actor in the region and beyond, and adopted a policy of maximum pressure. His aim was to force a defiant Tehran to renegotiate the JCPOA and reduce Iran’s missile capability and regional influence, which would also please Iran’s regional archrivals and Trump’s favoured US allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Trump ignored the fact that the JCPOA was a multilateral agreement. The other signatories, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, opposed his measures and maintained their support for the deal as important for international security, causing a major rift in the transatlantic alliance. Trump’s approach has failed: the Iranian regime has resisted and survived Washington’s pressure, though it has taken a heavy toll on Iranian society.
Biden has indicated that he will restore US participation in the JCPOA and reach out to Iran, as Obama had done, to make the agreement work and thus also remove one of the obstacles in America’s relations with its traditional European allies. He will face strong opposition from the Trump-dominated Republican Party at home, and from Israel and the Saudi-led Arab states in the region. But he should be able to override their objections as Obama did.
Read the article by Amin Saikal in The Strategist.