Editor's Note· 2024.03.20

In recent years, the rotation of political parties in the United States has often resulted in a "resonance effect" with the country's foreign policy, and the transition between the Biden administration and the Trump administration has led to a major transformation in American foreign policy. In what areas has the Biden administration's foreign policy shifted significantly compared to the Trump administration, and what has been its diplomatic record?

The author believes that diplomacy based on alliances and partnerships is an important part of American diplomacy. The Trump administration's foreign policy overemphasized “America First,” alienating America's allies and partners, while the Biden administration's diplomatic team has reversed the unilateralist tilt in U.S. diplomacy under Trump and brought a multilateralist tradition back to U.S. foreign policy.

This article first briefly reviews the composition of the Biden administration's diplomatic team, and on this basis explores how the Biden administration's diplomatic team was able to reverse the Trump administration's previous diplomatic "decline" and how it was able to reshape the US-led "rules-based order" in three years.

The Trump administration

A Diplomatic Mess?

When the Biden administration's foreign policy team took office, they were faced with a "mess" left by the Trump administration. Looking around the world, the EU's distrust of the US was deep-rooted, and the EU was strongly promoting strategic autonomy, while the transatlantic relationship faced unprecedented challenges since World War II. Even the UK, which is relatively close to the US, failed to reach a consensus with the Trump administration on a US-UK free trade agreement, leaving it unknown whether the special relationship between the UK and the US would remain "special". Russia's relations with the Trump administration were closer than those during the Obama era, but the Trump administration was still unable to break through the "stranglehold" of sanctions imposed on Russia since the Crimean crisis. In terms of US-China relations, after the Sino-US trade war negotiations and the initial sharp deterioration of US-China relations during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration urgently needed to reshape US-China relations from the diplomatic foundation laid by the previous administration. From the perspective of the US's grand strategy for diplomacy, the US at the time had to some extent fallen into the predicament of "strategic overdraft". Although the Trump administration had intended to promote strategic contraction, this strategic shift still failed to fundamentally change the situation in which other countries "hitchhiked" on US hegemony.

It can be said that the diplomatic status quo faced by the Biden administration's diplomatic team when it took office was not very optimistic-it was neither in line with its liberal values nor its perceived national interests of the United States.