Whipsaw diplomacy: Pompeo leaves behind a ‘to-undo list’

You might say that outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is leaving his successor and the Biden administration foreign-policy team a lengthy and hastily compiled “to-undo” list.

In just the past few days, Mr. Pompeo has: returned Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism – from which President Barack Obama removed the communist island nation in 2015; designated Yemen’s Houthis a terrorist group; ended decades-old restrictions on U.S. diplomatic contacts with Taiwan; and continued to pile on sanctions targeting the Iranian and Chinese governments.

Most are measures President-elect Joe Biden will likely want to reverse as quickly as possible in order to implement his vision for addressing the issues involved through diplomacy.

But undoing the recent actions adds a layer of unanticipated risk to the work of the new foreign-policy team, placing what experts call “land mines” in their path. Reversing the Cuba and Houthi designations, for example, will invite attacks from political opponents that the new administration is soft on communism and terrorism.

Mr. Biden, who takes office at noon Wednesday, was already going to be busy reversing some of President Donald Trump’s signature foreign-policy actions. He announced over the weekend that among his Day One actions will be rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement – from which Mr. Trump withdrew the United States on his first day in office – as well as a cancellation of Mr. Trump’s controversial Muslim travel ban.

Mr. Biden has also pledged to return the U.S. to the Iran nuclear deal (from which Mr. Trump withdrew the U.S. in 2018) once Iran commits to return to the limits the 2015 agreement placed on its nuclear program.

Unlike most presidential transitions of yore, when the departing administration focused on enabling a smooth transition to the next and significant last-minute foreign-policy actions were rare, Mr. Pompeo has taken a dizzying number of actions many experts say can only be explained as efforts to tie the hands of the incoming team and to make its foreign-policy path more onerous.

“It’s like pulling the pin of the grenade and rolling it into the room where the new administration is getting ready to try to deal with all of these issues in the ways they see fit,” says Heather Conley, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. “You’re setting them up for failure. It’s just making things worse,” she adds, “not better.”

Last-minute executive order

The last-minute measures demonstrate how foreign policy, once largely above the domestic partisan fray and more consistent than not from one administration to the next, has become as polarized and divisive as domestic policy, some experts say.

President Trump has also taken last-minute steps of his own to, if not tie Mr. Biden’s hands, then at least complicate his initial days in office. On Monday Mr. Trump signed an executive order lifting coronavirus travel restrictions for a handful of countries as of Jan. 26 – when he will no longer be in office.

Mr. Biden’s spokeswoman quickly tweeted that, given the gravity of the pandemic and following the advice of the new administration’s medical team, the restrictions would not be lifted.

One result of this politicization is more sidestepping of Congress and foreign policy by executive order, experts say, which has only encouraged what Ms. Conley calls the “swinging pendulum” of U.S. foreign policy.

Swinging the pendulum back takes time and energy on the part of the new administration, and complicates its path forward by increasing tensions with the countries involved.

But perhaps the most damaging impact of a zigzag foreign policy, experts say, is that allies and adversaries alike can no longer trust the United States to be a consistent and stable diplomatic interlocutor.

“You want your word to be credible, but it becomes hard for our allies and adversaries to commit to working with us or entering into agreements with us if they can’t believe what we’re saying or that it’s going to last,” says Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

“In international relations you have the idea that the parties ‘credibly commit’ to something,” he adds, but the recent changeableness of U.S. foreign policy “raises questions for many about the U.S. ability to ‘credibly commit’ going forward.”

Continuity is the norm

Mr. Drezner says Republican and Democratic administrations have for decades played a kind of ping-pong of enforcing and undoing what is called the Mexico City Policy. Since 1984 the policy has been implemented by Republican administrations to ban U.S. health aid to foreign NGOs providing abortion services or counseling including the abortion option. Incoming Democratic administrations, on the other hand, have quickly lifted what is also known as the “global gag rule.”

But other examples are hard to come by, Mr. Drezner says. He notes that President Bill Clinton negotiated late into his second term a free-trade accord with Jordan that included labor and environmental components that the incoming Bush administration opposed.

But in the end the Bush administration “swallowed hard” and went forward with the trade deal, he says.

As other examples, Professor Drezner notes that the Carter administration negotiated for the Iran hostages’ release right up to its final hours, and President George H.W. Bush sent troops into Somalia in December 1992 – just weeks before leaving office. But he adds that Mr. Bush kept Mr. Clinton, the president-elect, “looped in” on the Somalia troop deployment, while the hostage negotiations with Iran ended up providing a boost to the incoming Reagan administration.

“The difference is that these things were not intended as land mines to blow up under the new guys, they were more part of a seamless foreign policy that in many ways carried on from one administration to the next,” he says.

Noting that “foreign policy is now in many ways as polarized as domestic politics,” Professor Drezner says it’s not surprising that Mr. Pompeo would act on issues that “have domestic political resonance,” like Cuba, China, and terrorism.

Pompeo’s political ambitions

Mr. Pompeo, who leaves office touting as one of his major accomplishments the reversal of the “appeasement policies” of the previous Obama-Biden administration – toward Iran and China, for example – is assumed by many political observers to be laying the groundwork for a presidential run in 2024.

Daring Mr. Biden to risk strengthening that “appeasement” image by reversing the terrorist designations of Cuba or the Houthis is widely seen as essentially a political move.

Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthis may not be a hot-button issue in the U.S., but Yemen’s devastating humanitarian crisis is a rallying cry for many human rights and aid groups. Recognizing the reality that the rebel Houthis control most of Yemen’s territory, and thus the distribution of desperately needed food assistance, could prompt the incoming Biden administration to reverse the Houthis’ designation as a terrorist group, some regional experts say.

But such action could in turn prompt political opponents to label the new administration soft on terrorism, Professor Drezner says.

Some experts say there are still areas of significant and even growing consensus in foreign policy. China is one, says Ms. Conley of CSIS, noting that “if anything, we’re seeing greater bipartisanship and agreement on getting tough” with Beijing.

Indeed, when Mr. Pompeo announced Tuesday that the U.S. now considers China’s treatment of the minority Uighurs to be “genocide,” it was a rare instance of the administration endorsing a position already taken by Mr. Biden – who announced last year through a spokesman that he considered China’s Uighur policies to be “genocide.”

“China is a perfect example of our position in the world and our pursuit of national interests only getting worse when we are divided, so I think a lot of people are saying, ‘Let’s try a more bipartisan approach to China, clearly one of our major challenges going forward,’” Ms. Conley says. “The U.S. will be stronger globally when allies and adversaries alike know we’re unified, and can have confidence that we’ll have some stick-to-it-iveness in our policies.”