Biden Vows to Repair U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump Years

President-elect Joe Biden lamented the state of U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump, and said he would invest in diplomacy and national security.

“Right now there’s an enormous vacuum,” he said after a meeting in Wilmington, Delaware,with his appointees for national security jobs and the agency review teams for national security and foreign policy agencies. “We’re going to have to regain the trust and confidence of a world that has learned to work around us, or without us.”

Biden also said his team had faced “obstruction” from the political leadership at the Pentagon.

Before his meeting with advisers, he noted that the last four years saw “our security jeopardized by the go-it-alone approach of this administration” and brought “a lot of damage” to American leadership. Trump withdrew the U.S. from such global organizations as the World Health Organization and from multinational agreements like the Paris Climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal. Biden wants the U.S. to return to all three.

“The truth is the challenges we face today can’t be solved by any one country acting alone,” Biden said.

The president-elect will inherit a number of pressing national security concerns when he’s sworn in on Jan. 20. The federal government is still assessing the scope of what is believed to be a Russian-backed hack of federal government computer systems this month.

Biden has promised to make cybersecurity “a top priority” in the wake of that incident and said he would begin dealing with the issue “from the moment we take office.”

Biden is also preparing to to quickly implement significant changes in several areas of U.S. foreign policy, which until recently had been largely consistent from administration to administration.

Biden has been receiving the presidential daily briefing — the same top-secret intelligence report given to Trump — several times a week since Nov. 30.

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