President Joe Biden’s decision to pull out of the race on Sunday afternoon shocked the country. A day earlier, the president was talking as if his campaign was full steam ahead. His change of heart left even some of his closest advisers in the White House bewildered.
Much will be written in the next several days about why Biden bowed out. But there’s an altogether different conversation to be had, and it centers on legacy. How does Biden stack up compared with other presidents on the big, meaty questions of foreign policy? Did he try to do too much? Too little? And was he all that successful?
Biden was arguably the most experienced foreign policy hand to enter the White House since the late George H.W. Bush. Starting with his election to the Senate in 1972, Biden took a particular interest in international relations. His 36-year career in the upper chamber included three stints as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He delivered countless speeches on the international news stories of the day, wrote op-eds proposing unconventional schemes (one of the more infamous was a 2006 piece he co-wrote proposing that Iraq be split into three autonomous zones along sectarian lines) and led congressional delegations on foreign trips abroad.
During his eight years as vice president, Biden managed the Ukraine file, where he was a vocal proponent within Barack Obama’s administration of giving Kyiv more support to deal with the Russia-backed rebellions in eastern Ukraine. Notably, Biden was also the one person who tried to talk Obama out of sending another 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan, a position that he believed would bog down the U.S. down even further into a quagmire.
By the time Biden took the oath of office as president in January 2021, he had an established philosophy about how the world worked and what the U.S. role in that world should be. His main foreign policy priority was clear from the outset: Rebuild the U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia that he believed Donald Trump’s administration damaged. He wanted allies and adversaries alike to know that “America is back.”
How has he done as he nears the end? Like all U.S. administrations in history, Biden’s hasn’t been perfect on the foreign policy front. There is the good, bad and ugly.
First, the good. Biden’s most consequential achievement by far was his brave call to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 despite the formidable opposition his policy received from the foreign policy commentariat, some of his own advisers in the Pentagon as well as his own chairman of the joint chiefs. Granted, the mechanics of the withdrawal itself were ugly — chaotic scenes of desperate Afghans running for U.S. evacuation planes, the shaky security around the Kabul airport and the deaths of 13 U.S. troops in an Islamic State suicide bombing at the airport’s gates won’t be forgotten.
Yet regardless of how the evacuation was conducted, the policy to pull out after a 20-year war was entirely correct. Unlike most of the national security bureaucracy, Biden was willing to accept the hard realities of the conflict there. Keeping the Afghan government afloat and expecting the U.S. military to carry on in perpetuity were exercises in inertia, not strategy. The Afghan government, riddled with corruption, was a highly inefficient, ineffective mess that was hemorrhaging support from the people it was supposed to represent. The Afghan economy was mostly dependent on foreign aid infusions.
And the Taliban, kicked out of power after 9/11, was prepared to keep the war going for another 20 years if that’s what it took to return to Kabul. Biden deserves immense credit for doing what his predecessors should have done years earlier.
While most observers would put Ukraine in the “good” portfolio, I would put it in the bad. This isn’t because Biden has chosen to support Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in military aid over the last 2 1/2 years. Such a move was frankly inevitable the moment Russian missiles struck Ukrainian cities and Russian troops poured over the border in February 2022. Others have argued that supporting Ukraine was a low-cost way to weaken Russian military power, all without putting U.S. troops on the ground.
Editorial: President Joe Biden finally bows to the inevitable and leaves race
Biden, however, has gone too far rhetorically. He talks about the war as a downright existential contest between the forces of light and darkness, bringing back the morality-infused binaries that proliferated during the George W. Bush-era. This type of language is dangerous because it could lead to the kinds of salami-slicing tactics that bring the U.S. closer to becoming a direct party to the conflict. Ukraine isn’t the be-all and end-all of global civilization. Biden’s diplomatic strategy is wanting as well; in essence, he has committed Washington to arming Kyiv for as long as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants those arms to flow. This treads toward outsourcing U.S. foreign policy to a foreign leader.
The ugly, meanwhile, can be summed by one word: Gaza. The nearly 10-month-old conflict in this coastal Palestinian enclave wasn’t Biden’s fault of course. But it long ago turned into a significant moral problem on America’s shoulders. Even as billions of dollars in bombs flow into Israel’s military coffers, the U.S. looks weak in the eyes of the world. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to ignore Biden’s complaints with how the war is prosecuted yet receives U.S. bombs regardless. The U.S. is now the junior partner of the U.S.-Israel relationship and America’s moral standing is jeopardized.
This is but a sample of Biden’s record. No column can do it justice. We will leave that up to the historians.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
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