Some experts, ex-diplomats and even President Donald Trump's opponents concede his overseas initiatives have produced limited, qualified successes.

President Donald Trump appeared at the opening night of the Republican National Convention in a taped video with six former hostages freed during the Trump administration.

On the world stage, many foreign policy experts say President Donald Trump has slashed and burned his way through international agreements and commitments on climate change, trade, troop deployments, public health, nuclear weapons and more. .

But for the mother of an American hostage held overseas, the outgoing U.S?

officials during the Obama administration was dominated by "a constant shuffling of the cards" – being passed from official to official without clear purpose, and with little apparent strategy to secure her son's release. By contrast, she said, Trump has made "Austin's release a very high priority.

But some foreign policy experts, ex-diplomats and even Trump's harshest opponents concede that for all of his "America First" nationalism and unorthodox style, Trump's various overseas initiatives have produced limited, qualified successes.

President Donald Trump looks on during a meeting Polish President Andrzej Duda in the Oval Office of the White House on June 24, 2020. (Photo: Pool, Getty Images).

While Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including his continuing alienation of China, has been criticized, other moves were necessary and there are areas where Trump is deserving of more credit, some analysts and experts say.

And president-elect Joe Biden may keep some of Trump's hardline China policies in place even if he adopts a less controversial tone.

'His first love': Why Biden may be a foreign policy president despite domestic crises.

"What I have an issue with is the execution," he said, noting that there's been no indication whatsoever that Trump's unilateral decision to pull the U.S.

Max Abrahms, a professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University, said that for all Trump's tough and sometimes non-sensical talk on China, Iran and North Korea, he has not started anynew wars. .

"Leaving Afghanistan is the most important foreign policy objective of the remaining days of the Trump administration, and it should be the Biden administration’s first priority if Trump fails to remove all U.S

Anthony Blinken, Biden's nomination for Secretary of State, was a key national security adviser to Biden when the then-Senator voted to give President George W

Biden's pick as National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, is regarded as an exceptionally smart, dedicated and experienced multilateralist who shares the hawkish foreign policy instincts of his former boss at the State Department, Hillary Clinton. 

Brian Glyn Williams, a professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, and author of "Counter Jihad: America's Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria," has calculated that the Obama administration had liberated about 50% of ISIS territory in Iraq and Syria "before handing off the war effort to Trump."

Abrahms said that Trump did not, as has been repeatedly claimed by the Washington foreign policy establishment, "essentially just maintain the Obama administration's counter-terrorism strategy" in Syria and sit back and watch as ISIS "imploded."

He said Trump's withdrawal of support for Syrian rebel groups battling Assad's regime, and a separate but related action to remove some U.S

Foley Legacy Foundation, an organization that advocates for Americans held hostage abroad and is named after a journalist who was murdered by the Islamic State group (ISIS) in Syria during the Obama administration. 

For a mixture of privacy, logistical and definitional reasons it's also not easy to make direct comparisons between the number of overseas captives freed under the Obama administration versus those released while the Trump administration has been in power

Robert O'Brien, Trump's national security adviser, said during a Nov. 16 forum on global security that reuniting families with Americans wrongfully held overseas is a "pure distillation" of the Trump administration's "America First" foreign policy

"I think that he is personally offended that either a government or a terrorist organization would take an American hostage and so he's made it literally one of the top priorities," O’Brien said in comments streamed online

"The president turned hostage release into political grandstanding and personalized it to the point where his photos-ops, I believe, caused many countries to say 'Oh, this is how we get their attention," Richardson said

Some families coping with the detention of their relatives overseas say the Trump administration has not been tirelessly working on their behalf or all that engaged. 

Tice may be delighted by Trump's attentiveness to her son's case but she released a scathing statement last month about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after he said he tried to "compartmentalize" hostage issues from foreign policy. "Unfortunately for Austin," she said, "Mike Pompeo is undermining the president's crucial outreach, refusing any form of direct diplomatic engagement with the Syrian government."

Diane Foley, whose son James was murdered by ISIS in 2014 and who runs the foundation that bears his name – said that "as you might expect, people who have had their loved ones come home in general are very supportive of the Trump administration

However, Foley said overall Trump's prioritization of American detainee issues represents, for the majority of families, an improvement – even if it was the Obama administration, not Trump's, that established a coordinated hostage response unit and a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs position that's improved family outreach.