Trump team agrees to work with Biden team on world crises
WASHINGTON — 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 Trump national security team has come to understand that it has no choice but to work with the Biden team 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.
“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 advisor Jake Sullivan said during a weekend appearance at a forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. “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, blaming 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 Assad’s government collapsed last week, Trump blamed Biden’s old boss, former President 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.
Syrian insurgents’ sweep concludes a lightning offensive that ended the half-century Assad dynasty. President Bashar Assad reportedly has fled to Russia.
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 advisor, said in a Fox News interview last month. “We are one team with the United States in this transition.”
Syria now searches for a new identity, as Damascus residents face a future without President Bashar Assad.
While Trump rarely has a good word for the Democratic administration, there’s an appreciation in Trump’s camp 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 the Middle East 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 cease-fire 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 F. 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 cease-fire with Ukraine.
President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin share some traits and want some of the same things. But a chasm divides them.
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.”
Madhani and Miller write for the Associated Press.
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