No link - Voters don’t care about domestic issues - foreign policy issues overwhelm.

Of course, it is much too early to speculate on what U.S. foreign policy will look like after the next election. Biden might not win, and his most likely opponent—former President Donald Trump—would almost certainly do things differently if he regains the Oval Office. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis might still catch fire and end up on top, but nobody has any idea how DeSantis will handle foreign policy if he manages to become president. (And I doubt he knows himself.) This level of uncertainty is a serious problem, because both allies and adversaries are less likely to make lasting adjustments to their behavior if they expect U.S. policy to shift every time the White House changes hands. Furthermore, the world is full of surprises, and no president can anticipate all the challenges they are going to face. Biden took office intending to improve relations with Russia and focus on China, for example, and look what happened instead. A president’s second term often differs dramatically from the first, as key advisors are replaced and the results of the first four years create new problems or unexpected opportunities. Ronald Reagan’s first term was a caricature of Cold War hawkishness, but his second term produced an unlikely détente with Mikhail Gorbachev. George W. Bush made huge mistakes during his first term, but his performance improved once he stopped listening to Vice President Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives. Bill Clinton’s first term focused on domestic issues and contained some notable foreign-policy stumbles, but he grew more comfortable with foreign-policy issues as time wore on and racked up several noteworthy second-term achievements. The bottom line is that nobody knows what the U.S. foreign policy will be like after November 2024. Let’s consider a more modest question instead: Given that winning reelection will take precedence over just about everything else, how will the Biden administration handle foreign policy between now and Election Day? #1: Staying the Course in Ukraine. The administration has been all-in on Ukraine since the beginning of the war and repeatedly said it will back Kyiv “for as long as it takes.” Barring an unlikely military breakthrough by Kyiv’s armed forces or an even less likely change of heart in Moscow, I expect the Biden team to maintain that position. U.S. arms and aid will continue to flow, allies in Europe will be pressured to follow suit, Biden’s rhetoric will not waver, and there won’t be public pressure on Ukraine to cut a deal, even if some insiders believe a negotiated compromise of some sort is inevitable. Why will the administration do this? Because even if Ukraine can’t win the decisive victory most of us would like to see, Biden won’t want to acknowledge that unhappy reality in the run-up to an election. If he did, it would allow Trump or other MAGA-types to accuse Biden and his administration of squandering billions of taxpayer dollars in an unsuccessful crusade, and will invite others to scrutinize their handling of the prewar diplomacy with a more critical eye. At the same time, any sign of wobbling would also encourage Ukraine’s advocates to go after them for not having done enough. Like previous presidents facing an unpromising military situation, therefore, Biden will crank up what Daniel Ellsberg called the “stalemate machine”: he’ll do enough to prevent a decisive Ukrainian defeat, but not enough to deliver a ticker-tape style victory. He’ll just kick the can into a second term and decide what to do about it then. #2: On Autopilot in the Middle East. It’s been obvious from the beginning that neither Biden nor Secretary of State Antony Blinken have any new ideas for dealing with the Middle East. They aren’t happy with human rights conditions in Egypt, the looming internal threats to Israeli democracy, the possibility of a new intifada, or Saudi Arabia’s increasingly independent behavior, but they haven’t done anything significant about any of these concerns to date, and they are unlikely to do anything important in the near future. Nor will there be a new nuclear deal with Iran. No incumbent president wants a Middle East war in an election year, and though the Israel lobby may have lost some of its previous clout, Biden won’t want to be knocking heads with Israel in public while he’s running for reelection. He and Blinken will just cross their fingers and hope the region stays quiet until the votes are cast.