An unsparing look at the outgoing US president’s international legacy
AFP
US President Joe Biden pulls a note card from his pocket as he speaks from the Treaty Room in the White House about the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan on April 14, 2021, in Washington, DC.
I voted for US President Joe Biden in 2020, and as readers here know, I supported Vice President Kamala Harris last November despite my misgivings about the administration’s handling of foreign policy. As Biden takes his final bow on the global stage, how well did he and his team perform? As one would expect, Biden’s final foreign-policy speech claimed that they did a terrific job. My assessment is rather different.
At the most general level, the Biden administration sought to turn the clock back to an earlier era of benign US global leadership. Instead of “America First,” the United States would resume its self-appointed role as the so-called leader of the free world, aligned with its fellow democracies against a rising tide of autocracy.
Trans-Atlantic amity would be restored, alliances in Asia would be strengthened, and the United States would make liberal values such as human rights the “centre” of its foreign policy. Washington would back key global institutions, lead efforts to halt climate change, rejoin the deal that had successfully rolled back Iran’s nuclear program, and enlist its many allies to contain great-power rivals such as China and Russia. Increased military spending and aggressive measures to preserve technological supremacy would extend US primacy far into the future.
To be sure, Biden did not embrace the full blueprint for “liberal hegemony” that had guided US foreign policy from the end of the Cold War until then-President Donald Trump moved into the White House in 2017. Indeed, Biden continued Trump’s retreat from globalisation: He kept Trump’s tariffs in place, used export controls and other economic sanctions even more vigorously, and embraced national industrial policies to revive manufacturing jobs (which didn’t happen) and ensure US dominance in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and other advanced technologies.
But on balance, Biden’s approach fit comfortably within the mainstream elite consensus that has guided US foreign policy for decades. It was run by an experienced team that shared the same worldview, with progressives and foreign-policy realists relegated to the sidelines.
Although US officials insist NATO has never been stronger, their upbeat rhetoric ignores the considerable damage the Ukraine war has done to European security and politics
How well did they do? To be fair, the record does contain some important successes.
Most US allies in Europe greeted Biden's inauguration in 2021 with obvious relief. Both he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were die-hard Atlanticists, and they moved quickly to reassure allies in Europe that the United States would remain firmly committed to their security.
Europe's favourable response was hardly surprising, of course, because having the United States as its de facto first responder is a pretty good deal for the continent. This position paid off in two ways: It helped the administration coordinate a rapid response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and it persuaded some key allies to swallow the protectionist features of the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act as well as the various export controls directed at China, despite the costs that these measures imposed on them.
The administration also deserves credit for strengthening US partnerships in Asia as part of a broad effort to counter China's rise. These measures included greater access to bases in the Philippines; hosting the leaders of South Korea and Japan at Camp David, which led to a new trilateral security agreement; and reinforcing security ties with Australia through the AUKUS initiative (between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States).
Biden's team also refined US efforts to slow Chinese advances in several key technological domains, though the long-term impact of this effort remains uncertain. One can also argue that the administration achieved these goals without causing a significant worsening of US-China relations, which remained intensely competitive but did not spiral into open conflict.
To be sure, the Biden administration's efforts were aided by China's unfavourable demography and economic missteps—which gave Beijing ample reason to limit tensions—and by regional fears of Chinese revisionism. The administration might be faulted for failing to implement a meaningful economic strategy toward Asia, but it would have faced an uphill fight to develop one, given the bipartisan turn toward protectionism back home.
On balance, its handling of relations in Asia is probably the Biden administration's most important foreign-policy achievement.
An US Air Force aircraft takes off from the airport in Kabul on August 30, 2021. Rockets were fired at Kabul's airport on August 30, where US troops were racing to complete their withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Finally, Biden was unfairly criticised for his courageous and, in my opinion, correct decision to end the futile US war in Afghanistan. The withdrawal was destined to turn out badly because the Afghan government was a house of cards that was going to collapse whenever the United States chose to leave. Moreover, staying longer would not have produced a significantly different outcome.
Biden paid a political price in the short term, but his decision was mostly forgotten by 2024 and played hardly any role in the recent election. Although no one should be happy about what has happened in Afghanistan since the US withdrew, it is increasingly clear that the United States had no idea what it was doing and was never going to win that war. Biden deserves full points for recognising that fact and having the courage to act on it.
Unfortunately, these achievements must be weighed against several more serious failures.
The first failure is the war in Ukraine. The administration likes to tout all the help it has given Ukraine and the costs that it has imposed on Russia, but proponents of this focus tend to ignore the enormous price that Ukraine has paid and the damage that the war has done to the rest of Europe.
And here, it is important to recognise that the war did not suddenly emerge out of nowhere; it was a problem Washington's own actions helped create. Russia bears full responsibility for launching an illegal war, of course, but Biden and his team are far from blameless. In particular, they failed to see that their policies were making that war inevitable. Specifically, they remained staunchly committed to open-ended NATO enlargement and to bringing Ukraine into a close security partnership with the West and eventually into the alliance.
They persisted in this risky course of action even though Russia's leaders—and not just President Vladimir Putin—had made it clear that they saw this development as an existential threat and were willing to use force to try to eliminate it. With the threat of war looming, the administration made only half-hearted efforts to find a diplomatic solution and avoid a clash.
Once the war was underway, the administration also erred by not trying to stop it as quickly as possible. It was convinced that Russia's armed forces were incorrigibly inept and that imposing "unprecedented" sanctions would crash its economy and force Putin to reverse course, assumptions that proved to be overly optimistic.
Instead of condemning Israel's disproportionate response, Biden's administration vetoed most Gaza ceasefire resolutions and attacked the ICJ and ICC instead
As a result of these misjudgments, the administration did little to support early efforts to end the war and may even have helped scuttle them. Nor did they explore prospects for a cease-fire when Ukraine's prospects briefly improved in the fall of 2022 (as Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised), or tell Ukraine's leaders that launching a major offensive into the teeth of Russia's defenses was doomed to fail.
Unfortunately, the war will likely end in a significant defeat for Ukraine and its Western backers. Although US and NATO officials insist that alliance solidarity has never been stronger, their upbeat rhetoric ignores the considerable damage that the war has done to European security and politics.
The conflict has imposed significant economic costs on most European governments (many of whom are now facing intractable budgetary pressures), raised energy costs that further reduced European competitiveness, fuelled the resurgence of right-wing extremists, and magnified divisions within Europe itself. It has also diverted attention and resources that could have been devoted to balancing China.
Yes, Russia has also paid an enormous price, but it is hardly in the United States' or Europe's interest to have Moscow ever more closely tied to Beijing and looking for additional opportunities to undermine the West. Europe, the United States, and especially Ukraine would have been far better off if the war had never occurred, and the Biden administration bears substantial blame for a policy that made the war more likely.
The second disaster, of course, is the Middle East, where it seems every president's dreams go to die. Biden's overarching mistake was to abandon his campaign promises and continue the misguided policies that he inherited from Trump. He didn't rejoin the Iran nuclear deal—as he'd said he would—which led Tehran to resume nuclear enrichment to near-bomb grade levels and strengthened the hands of hard-liners there.
The administration also ignored questions about the future of the Palestinian people—just as Trump had—and focused its efforts on a failed effort to get Saudi Arabia to normalise relations with Israel. This approach intensified Palestinian fears of being permanently marginalised and helped convince Hamas's leaders to launch their murderous assault against Israel on October 7, 2023.
The Biden administration's misreading of the situation was painfully exposed when National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared the region was "quieter than it had been in two decades" a mere eight days before Hamas attacked.
Since then, Biden and his team have supported Israel at every turn, even as Israel ignored its requests to show a modicum of restraint and conducted a relentless and indiscriminate military campaign that has killed at least 46,000 Palestinians—and perhaps far more. This onslaught has rendered most of Gaza uninhabitable, destroyed all its universities and nearly all its hospitals, killed hundreds of journalists, and inflicted vast suffering and permanent trauma on more than 2 million civilians.
No sensible person denies that Israel was justified in responding after October 7, but its campaign of vengeance was indefensible on both strategic and moral grounds. Among other things, this relentless outpouring of violence has failed to achieve the stated objective of eliminating Hamas or obtaining the release of the remaining hostages. And the Biden administration provided the bombs and diplomatic protection that made it possible.
Step back for a moment and reflect on what this means. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Criminal Court (ICC), several independent relief agencies, and several noted experts on genocide have all concluded that Israel has committed significant war crimes and is "plausibly" conducting a genocide, with full American support. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called the situation in Gaza a "moral outrage." Videos of the carnage are readily available on social media.
Instead of cutting Israel off and condemning its disproportionate response, these self-proclaimed defenders of a "rules-based order" vetoed several UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages and began attacking the ICJ and ICC instead. Nor did they make a serious effort to stop the increasing violence against Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank. These actions led several government officials to resign in protest and appear to have seriously undermined morale at the State Department and elsewhere.
In his valedictory speech at the State Department on 13 January, 2025, Biden seemed to suggest that these policies have paid off. Hamas and Hezbollah have been severely weakened, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has fallen, Iran has suffered a serious setback, and the risks of needing to carry out an air campaign to destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure had been diminished. These ends, in this view, justify the means.
This defence is morally vacuous and strategically shortsighted. Normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia has been put off, and another wave of jihadist-style terrorism may be around the corner. Hamas and Hezbollah have been weakened but not destroyed; the Houthis in Yemen remain undeterred; and the Palestinians' desire for a state of their own or for political rights in a "greater Israel" is not going to disappear.
Iran's leaders are more likely to conclude that going nuclear is the best way to avoid the fates that befell Muammar al-Qaddafi and Assad. If they do, the Middle East will see yet another war it doesn't need, oil prices will rise, and the United States could get dragged into an expensive debacle. Even if one ignores the indelible moral stain, none of these developments are in the United States' interest.
Bear in mind that the administration's handling of the Israel-Hamas War was not forced upon it by dire strategic necessity; it was a conscious political choice. We all recognise that governments will sometimes compromise their moral principles when facing an existential threat, but the situation in Gaza posed little or no danger to the United States, and Washington could have refused to back Israel's genocide without jeopardising its own security or prosperity in the slightest.
Biden and Blinken acted otherwise either because they feared the political clout of the Israel lobby in an election year, or because they believed that Israel was a special case that was exempt from the normal rules. Such a blatant double standard inevitably eroded the legitimacy of the existing order and squandered the United States' dwindling moral authority.
Henceforth, when Chinese diplomats try to convince other countries that Western notions of human rights are hypocritical claptrap, the Israel-Hamas War will be Exhibit A. Biden likes to say that the United States leads "by the power of our example," but in this case, he set an example we should hope that others reject.
Biden is a self-proclaimed Zionist, yet his unconditional support for Netanyahu's actions wasn't good for Israel either. Its prime minister and former defence minister now face arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court—a distinction that they share with Putin—and that stain will not be erased.
Meanwhile, messianic extremists in Israel have been strengthened rather than chastened, deepening the divide between secular and religious Israelis and intensifying pressures to annex the West Bank.
If Israel goes ahead with that goal, the post-World War II norm against territorial conquest will be weakened further, and other leaders will be encouraged to seize lands that they covet. Such a step would also erase any distinction between the West Bank and Israel proper, ending debates about whether it is an apartheid state. It could easily lead to another round of ethnic cleansing, with horrific human consequences and dangerous effects on neighbouring states such as Jordan. It is hard for me to see how any of this is in Israel's interest, either.
Finally, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East—wars that Biden's policies helped cause—consumed vast amounts of time and attention and made it harder to give sufficient weight to problems that are arguably of greater long-term significance. Efforts to prepare for future pandemics languished; progress on climate change fell far short of what is needed; and the administration's failure to come up with a credible immigration policy cost Harris dearly last November.
Africa got especially short shrift despite its growing importance: Over the past four years, Blinken made 16 trips to Israel (population: just under 10 million) and seven trips to Ukraine (population: 35.6 million), but he made only four trips to Africa, a continent whose population is roughly 1.5 billion.
Demonstrators hold up painted hands as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on May 21, 2024.
When the administration took office, its overarching goal was to strengthen the "rules-based order" and demonstrate the superiority of democracy over autocracy. Biden and Blinken did not hesitate to break the rules when it suited them, however, and they actively undermined several institutions (e.g., the World Trade Organisation, the ICJ, the ICC) that sought to enforce them.
Other countries can no longer blame such behaviour on a rogue outlier such as Trump; they will correctly see it as an intrinsic element of the United States' approach to the world. Meanwhile, democracy continues to retreat worldwide, despite the administration's much-ballyhooed "democracy summits," and a man whose commitment to strong democratic institutions is paper-thin is moving back into the White House next week.
There is a sad irony here. Despite some genuine accomplishments, Biden's mishandling of Ukraine and the Middle East did enormous and possibly fatal damage to the "rules-based order" that he said he wanted to strengthen. By failing to consistently uphold some critical global norms, Biden and his team have made it easier for the next administration to abandon them entirely, and plenty of other countries will be happy to follow suit.
It didn't have to be this way, but Joe Biden's foreign-policy legacy will be a world that is less rule-bound, less prosperous, and significantly more dangerous.
