The Trump and Biden teams insist they're working hand in glove on foreign crises

[December 12, 2024]  By AAMER MADHANI and ZEKE MILLER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump doesn't think much of Joe Biden's foreign policy record. The Republican president-elect frequently casts the outgoing Democratic president as a feckless leader who shredded American credibility around the world during his four-year term.

But a funny thing happened on Trump's way back to the White House: The Biden and Trump national security teams have come to an understanding that they have no choice but to work together as conflicts in Gaza, Syria and Ukraine have left a significant swath of the world on a knife's edge.

It's not clear how much common ground those teams have found as they navigate crises that threaten to cause more global upheaval as Trump prepares to settle back into the White House on Jan. 20, 2025.

“There is a deep conviction on the part of the incoming national security team that we are dealing with ... and on our part, directed from President Biden, that it is our job, on behalf of the American people, to make sure this is a smooth transition,” Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan said during a weekend appearance at a forum in California. “And we are committed to discharging that duty as relentlessly and faithfully as we possibly can.”

To be certain, Trump and his allies haven't let up on their criticism of Biden, putting the blame squarely on the shoulders of Biden and Democrats for the series of crises around the globe.

The president-elect says Biden is responsible for the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, arguing that policies under his watch led to Hamas and Russia becoming emboldened. And shortly before Syria's Bashar al-Assad's government collapsed last week, Trump blamed Biden's old boss, former President Barack Obama, for failing to enforce his own “red line” in 2013 after Assad deployed chemical weapons that killed hundreds of civilians, and laying the groundwork for Islamic militants to establish a beachhead in the country.

But amid the hectoring of Biden, Trump team officials acknowledge that the Biden White House has worked diligently to keep Trump's circle apprised and help ensure there is a smooth handoff on national security matters.

“For our adversaries out there that think this is a time of opportunity that they can play one administration off the other, they’re wrong, and we are — we are hand in glove," Mike Waltz, Trump's pick for national security adviser, said in a Fox News interview last month. “We are one team with the United States in this transition.”

While Trump rarely has a good word for the Democratic administration, there's an appreciation in Trump world of how the Biden White House has gone about sharing critical national security information, according to a Trump transition official who was not authorized to comment publicly.

The coordination is precisely how lawmakers intended for incoming and outgoing administrations to conduct themselves during a handover when they bolstered federal support for transitions. It's already the most substantive handoff process since 2009, aides to Biden and Trump acknowledged, surpassing Trump's chaotic first takeover in 2017 and his wide refusal to cooperate with the incoming Biden team in 2021.

Trump's pick to serve as special envoy to the Middle East, Florida real estate developer Steve Witkoff, consulted with Biden administration officials as he recently traveled to Mideast to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to comment publicly about the sensitive talks and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Sullivan, who was to travel to Israel on Wednesday for talks with Netanyahu, has in turn kept Waltz in the loop about the Biden administration's efforts at getting a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza before Trump's inauguration.

Biden administration officials say that the two national security teams have also closely coordinated on Ukraine and Syria, though they have provided scant detail on what that coordination has looked like.

“Let me put it this way: Nothing that we’re doing and nothing that we’re saying are coming as a surprise to the incoming team,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby said. "They will decide for themselves what policies they might want to keep in place, what approaches they might want to continue and which ones they won’t."

Trump made clear during his campaign that he would move to end the war in Ukraine quickly once he came to office. He called on Russian leader Vladimir Putin earlier this week to act to reach an immediate ceasefire with Ukraine.

But the Biden White House has begun gently — and publicly — making the case for how continued support for Ukraine lines up with Trump's priorities.

On Saturday, Sullivan pointed to comments made by Trump on social media to buttress the case that Biden’s push for continued support of Ukraine falls in line with the incoming president’s thinking.

Trump earlier that day had noted that Assad’s rule was collapsing because Russia “lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever.”

“Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success,” Trump said in the posting on Truth Social.

Sullivan underscored that Biden and Trump are in agreement that there should be no American boots on the ground in Syria and that the war in Ukraine was a major factor in Assad’s fall.

“I was a little bit struck by it — earlier in the post, he said part of the reason this is happening is because of Russia’s war against Ukraine,” Sullivan said of Trump. “And I think he even referenced the sheer scale of the casualties that Russia has suffered in Ukraine, and for that reason, they’re not in a position to defend their client, Assad. And on that point, we’re in vigorous agreement.”

Two days later in Washington, Sullivan made the case that Trump should bolster the little-known U.S. International Development Finance Corporation that was created during the Republican’s first term.

The push for reauthorizing the foreign aid agency comes as Trump has promised to make massive cuts to the federal bureaucracy.

Trump signed into law the agency's authority -- tucked into a five-year reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration — to provide $60 billion in loans, loan guarantees and insurance to companies in developing nations.

Sullivan called the agency an effective tool for private-public partnerships, before allowing that “maybe I shouldn’t be the one” making the case “since I’m leaving, but I will give my advice anyway.”

“It was created as we’ve all noted, under the Trump administration,” Sullivan said in remarks at the agency’s annual conference. “It has been strengthened under the Biden administration. And as we look to DFC reauthorization next year, it has to remain a bipartisan priority.”

After Assad's government fell, the Biden administration issued a warning to Iran not to speed up its nuclear program after one of its closest allies was toppled, declaring “that’ll never happen on our watch.” The U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic, hinted at coordination on the matter with the Trump team.

The official said there had been “good discussions” with the incoming administration on the matter and there was an expectation the same policy would carry over.

Biden has also approved a new national security memorandum that is meant to serve as a road map for the incoming Trump administration as it looks to counter growing cooperation between China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, the White House announced Wednesday.

Biden administration officials began developing the guidance this summer. It was shaped to be a document that could help the next administration build its approach from Day 1 on how it will go about dealing with the tightening relationships between the United States’ most prominent adversaries and competitors, according to two other senior administration officials.

One of those officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House, sought to assure the incoming Trump team that the Biden White House effort “isn't trying to box them in or tilt them toward one policy option or another.”

Instead, the official said, it's about helping the next administration build “capacity” as it shapes its policies on some the most difficult foreign policies it will face.

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