By John Ubaldi
“Ubaldi Reports”

In 2020, the United States will have to endure a contentious presidential election set for November, and it will need to deal with many foreign policy challenges.

Throughout the Democratic Party’s primary campaign to decide who will be the party’s standard bearer to run against President Donald Trump, each of the contenders seeking the presidency has articulated their ideas on domestic policy but have been conspicuously vague on how they would deal with the various foreign policy challenges facing the country.

Whoever is president on Jan. 20, 2021 will have to deal with American troops still in Afghanistan; he or she will be facing a hostile North Korea (who will not give up its nuclear weapons); and the president will go toe-to-toe with a belligerent Iran – fermenting turmoil across the Middle East.

If this wasn’t enough, the next president will oversee U.S. military personnel engaged in some form of combat in Syria and Iraq, coupled with anxiety with regard to Russia and Turkey, strained relations with our European allies along with a tumultuous relationship with China.

Trump Presidency Unpopular with our Allies

The Trump presidency has never been popular with our allies and the recent impeachment proceedings helped divert considerable time to the political situation at home instead of focusing on the various complex international issues facing the U.S.

No one knows if foreign leaders are hedging their bets or waiting until they know for certain that Trump will be reelected before they engage in any deals.

“Despite all of the great success that our Country has had over the last 3 years, it makes it much more difficult to deal with foreign leaders (and others) when I am having to constantly defend myself against the Do Nothing Democrats & their bogus Impeachment Scam. Bad for USA!”  – Tweet from President Trump on Dec. 26th.

Impeachment Places a Stain on U.S. Foreign Policy

Impeachment has obviously topped Congress’s to-do list so far in 2020, and with the President’s acquittal, it’s time to move on with other issues.

“America still has an awful lot of power,” said Ronald Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, a three-time ambassador and former deputy assistant secretary of state. “With a year to go, a president can still make a lot of waves, impeachment or not.”

Tensions With Iran Start in the New Year

As 2020 began, tensions with Iran where escalated when a U.S. airstrike killed top Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani, at the Baghdad airport who had been the leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force.

The situation with Iran has been building for some time with the Trump administration pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal – with the president signaling that this was a one-sided agreement which gave Iran sanctions relief and unfroze decades of Iranian assets. Missing was the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program.

Once the Trump administration exited the nuclear agreement he reinstated crippling economic sanctions on Iran that have placed a stranglehold on the Iranian economy.  The primary goal of the administration was to force Iran to renegotiate the agreement favorable to the U.S. and with other nations and use it as leverage to cease Tehran’s aggressive activities throughout the Middle East region.

Iran uses Benefits of Nuclear Deal to Ferment Oppression in Middle East

Since the nuclear agreement was signed in 2015, Iran has used sanctions relief and the lifting of unfrozen assets to support its proxies in Lebanon such as Hezbollah, propping up the Assad regime in Syria and the aiding of the Shiite dominated Iranian backed government in Iraq.

The other potential flash point for the United States is the ongoing saga in how to deal with a nuclear armed North Korea?

North Korea on Top of U.S. Agenda

Last month, North Korea had threatened to produce a “Christmas surprise” if the United States failed to meet concession that Kim Jong Un demanded with his year-end deadline to revive stalled nuclear talks.

The Trump administration failed to accept North Korea’s demands, with Stephen Biegun, the top U.S. envoy to North Korea, said the window for talks with the U.S. remains open. “We are fully aware of the strong potential for North Korea to conduct a major provocation in the days ahead,” Biegun, the new deputy secretary of state, said recently. “To say the least, such an action will be most unhelpful in achieving lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula.”

In 2019, North Korea has conducted various short-range missile launches and other weapons tests.

How this all turns out as former National Security Adviser John Bolton told National Public Radio, “The North Koreans are very happy to declare that they’re going to give up their nuclear weapons program, particularly when it’s in exchange for tangible economic benefits, but they never get around to doing it.”

What to do with the Long Simmering Afghanistan Conflict?

At the end of the year the United States will be entering its nineteenth year of conducting combat operations in Afghanistan that spans three administrations, but the looming question is how many concessions to make to the Taliban and will they honor any agreement to end the conflict.

President Trump has repeatedly signaled that he wants the U.S. out of Afghanistan,  “We’ll see if they want to make a deal,” Trump told U.S. troops on Thanksgiving Day when he visited Afghanistan for the first time. “It’s got to be a real deal, but we’ll see. But they want to make a deal.”

The situation in Afghanistan has perplexed three administrations and now it is up to the Trump administration to figure out how to extract the U.S. from this morass, without having the Taliban and other Islamic extremist groups turn the country into a terror safe haven.

Not only will the administration have to deal with Afghanistan but whatever happens there will definitely impact Pakistan and the surrounding region.

As the nation enter the 2020 presidential election year, foreign policy has been relegated to second tier status in the Democratic Party debates, maybe we will get more clarity at the next debate on January 14th.