In the final days of his presidency Joe Biden was still clinging to the idea that he could have won the 2024 election, if only he had not been forced to stand aside. Seated behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, a portrait of his political hero, Franklin D Roosevelt, looking on, the outgoing president insisted in a valedictory interview that he could have beaten Donald Trump. “It’s presumptuous to say, but I think yes,” Biden told USA Today on 5 January. Never mind that, at 82, a consistent majority of American voters had said, for years, that he was too old to serve another term. Or that when asked whether he would have had the vigour for another four years in office, he responded: “Who the hell knows?”
In Biden’s telling, the central failure of his presidency was not his own stubborn refusal to acknowledge his decline, even as the ravages of his advancing age were painfully clear in his weakening voice, halting gait and, during last year’s disastrous presidential debate with Trump, his inability to finish sentences. It was not that he had refused to abandon his re-election campaign even then, fighting on for another four weeks before finally dropping out in late July, long past the point when the Democrats could have held a competitive process to replace him, and leaving Kamala Harris just 106 days to mount her own doomed campaign.
No, for Biden, defensive and prideful as he reckons with the end of his half-century-long political career, the fault lies instead with his fellow Democrats. In his mind, the party grandees, such as former House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who publicly appealed to Biden to stand down – denied him, already the oldest president in American history, one last chance to be the great “comeback kid” he has long styled himself. He was failed by his party, not the other way around. “I think I would have beaten Trump, could have beaten Trump,” Biden repeated in his final White House press conference on 10 January. As he presented it, his eventual decision to drop out was not a belated acknowledgement of the glaringly obvious – that he should not have run again – it was a noble gesture that placed his warring party’s interests above his own. “Even though I thought I could win again,” Biden reiterated. “I thought it was better to unify the party.”
“Alas it is the story of Lear,” said Eliot Cohen, a foreign policy and defence expert who served as a senior adviser to Condoleezza Rice and the author of The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. Biden’s presidency, Cohen told me, was ultimately “a story of decay in old age, and the inability to recognise it; being surrounded by advisers and relatives who deny it, and irascibility when confronted by the reality.” Above all, he said, Biden would be defined by his “reluctance to let go when the time has clearly come”.
Washington, never a sentimental town, has already moved on. As Trump’s cabinet nominees descend on the Senate for their confirmation hearings, trailed by mobile phone-wielding scrums of reporters, and ten-foot-high security fencing goes up around the Capitol in preparation for the inauguration ceremony – a legacy of the attack on the Capitol by Trump’s supporters four years ago – Biden has become yesterday’s man.
Still, he has used the last week of his presidency to attempt a victory lap. Holding fast to the strategy that helped lose Democrats the White House in November – whereby, if you just keep telling people the economy is good for long enough, eventually, surely, they will believe you – Biden has boasted of the “transformational progress our economy has made over the last four years”. He has rattled off his legislative achievements – the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Chips and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act – repeating that his presidency has delivered “the most significant investment in America since the New Deal”. To be fair, the American economy is doing well by most objective measures, and he did deliver some impressive legislative victories. But those accomplishments count for little to the two thirds of Americans that believes the economy is poor, or the six in ten people in a December AP-NORC poll who said they were concerned about being able to afford groceries.
So, too, the celebratory tone of Biden’s parting address to the State Department on 13 January – where he proclaimed that, “thanks to our administration, the United States is winning the worldwide competition”, and that he had “increased America’s power in every dimension” – was jarring given the grave foreign policy challenges he leaves behind. All departing presidents try to burnish their political legacy, and few are inclined to wallow in their failures. But by refusing to engage even legitimate criticisms of his foreign policy record, such as the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan, or the incremental provision of military aid to Ukraine, and the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, Biden sounded tone deaf, even arrogant.
“I thought Biden’s foreign policy speech at the State Department was really rather pathetic,” said Robert Manning, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington who has served in senior roles at the State Department and National Intelligence Council. “It sounded almost like a campaign speech. There was no depth or reflection, and there was no acknowledgement that they screwed up on Afghanistan.”
The US withdrawal in August 2021 and the rapid Taliban takeover left US allies scrambling to evacuate their own personnel as the Afghan army melted away, and came at a tragic cost. Thirteen US troops and at least 170 Afghan civilians were killed in a terrorist attack at the airport in Kabul on 27 August. The images of desperate Afghans clinging to the undercarriage of departing US aircraft that summer will be an indelible stain on the Biden administration’s record. Manning told me Biden deserves credit for ending America’s longest war, an act that had eluded his predecessors, and delivering on an agreement he inherited from the Trump administration, but he believes Biden is wrong to insist that the ensuing chaos was unavoidable. “The fact that they disregarded the risks that were being communicated to them, and no one was fired, no one was held accountable, despite everything that happened, I think that was a serious blow to Biden’s administration.”
The shambolic withdrawal, which prompted comparisons to the Fall of Saigon and the humiliating American retreat from Vietnam, was the first real crisis for the Biden administration, which had prided itself on its foreign policy expertise. Biden’s handling of the crisis was “absolutely central” in undermining his public image, said Kori Schake, director of foreign and defence policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and a former senior official in the departments of state and defence. “Support for President Biden dropped precipitously in the aftermath of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and never recovered, in part because both he and his leading advisers insisted they had made no mistakes,” Schake explained. “They’d campaigned on being the safe pair of hands after the chaos of the Trump administration, and yet they produced that humiliating disaster, so it discredited the national security team, in addition to the president.”
Six months later, when Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine – emboldened in the view of some analysts by the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the isolationist instincts of the country’s earlier “America first” turn under Trump – Biden played a crucial, early role in marshalling Western resolve and rushing military aid to Kyiv. The Biden administration took the unprecedented step of declassifying US intelligence ahead of the assault to convince sceptical allies of Putin’s intent. Perhaps the most triumphant moment in Biden’s foreign policy career came in Warsaw in February 2023: an enormous, American flag-waving crowd rallied to greet him after he returned from a trip to Kyiv, becoming the first US president to visit a warzone not controlled by US troops. “One year ago, the world was bracing for the fall of Kyiv,” Biden declared. “Well, I’ve just come from a visit to Kyiv and I can report: Kyiv stands strong! Kyiv stands proud. It stands tall. And most important, it stands free.”
Yet even as Biden proclaimed his emphatic support for Ukraine in public, the limitations his administration had placed on the supply and use of American weaponry were becoming clear. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was forced to lobby his Western partners for the provision of each new weapons’ system, and there were persistent complaints from Kyiv that the US, focused on the risk of direct confrontation with Russia, was providing just enough support to enable the Ukrainian military not to lose the war, but not enough to have a chance of victory. The giddy early predictions from some Western analysts of an impending Russian defeat soon gave way to pessimism about Ukraine’s prospects and growing calls from the American right to abandon Kyiv and its unwinnable war.
As the conflict ground on, Biden failed to rally bipartisan support for Ukraine at home. Having arrived in office promising to deliver a “foreign policy for the middle class” – an idea credited to his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, according to which foreign policy would be governed not by lofty, abstract ideals but by the impact on the lives of Americans – Biden never quite managed to make a compelling as to for why Ukraine’s fate and the future of European security should matter to Americans beyond the long-held values of freedom and democracy. Biden did not mention in his exultant State Department speech that he hands over power with the future of Ukraine hanging in the balance; the Russian military, now supported by North Korean troops, pushing ominously forwards on the battlefield; and the prospect of further US aid dependent on the whims of Trump and his apparent determination to end the conflict at any cost.
The single most consequential failure in the Biden team’s approach to foreign policy, Schake told me, was the “gap between their grandiose claims and what they were actually willing to risk or commit to achieve it”. On Ukraine, Biden spoke as though the future of Western democracy was on the line, but his actions and his administration’s failure to address long-running challenges in America’s defence industrial capacity indicated otherwise. Having declared China the “pacing challenge” for the US military, she noted, the defence budget under Biden did not even keep pace with inflation. He vowed to lead a valiant alliance of democracies against the autocratic threat from Beijing, then retreated into economic protectionism and barely concealed nationalism. “They want allies to reduce reliance on China, but they won’t develop an international economic policy that helps us and allies achieve that,” Schake said. “They talk allied solidarity but won’t offer market access or allow a trusted ally to buy a failing American company.” In his final weeks in office, Biden blocked the proposed takeover of US steel by the Japan’s Nippon Steel on national security grounds.
[See also: Donald Trump’s empire of ego]
Biden demonstrated remarkable, if misplaced, faith in his ability to influence events through his personal relationships with other leaders, some of whom he has known for decades. “There was talk about Biden’s personal connection with China’s leader Xi Jinping, dating back to the time when they were both vice-presidents being potentially useful for US-China relations, but I don’t think that was really the case,” said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the forthcoming book, The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing. “American leaders often like to make a lot out of personal chemistry, how they understand what makes a foreign counterpart tick,” he explained. “They often find out, though, that when push comes to shove, foreign leaders are likely to focus on what they feel is in their nation’s best interests, and what they think will be most likely to keep them in power.”
Biden did, arguably, succeed in stabilising relations with Xi, or at least temporarily halting their precipitous decline – the unexpected crisis over the Chinese spy balloon debacle in early 2023 notwithstanding – and both leaders expressed their desire to avert a new Cold War. But the Biden national security team kept in place many of the Trump-era tariffs, adding further, targeted controls on exports of advanced technology, and there was little progress in averting the looming confrontation between the two powers, which only looks set to accelerate under Trump.
But nowhere has Biden’s faith in the power of his personal diplomacy proved more damaging than in the Middle East. After Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, Biden’s avowed “Hug Bibi” strategy – according to which he would embrace Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly while attempting to influence him in private – spectacularly backfired. Not only did Biden apparently fail to exert any meaningful restraint on Netanyahu, but he made the US, and his administration in particular, seem complicit in the devastation of the Gaza Strip, and the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians that followed.
“I think Biden fundamentally didn’t understand what Israel is today,” Robert Manning said. “His image of Israel is Golda Meir [the Israeli prime minister when Biden first travelled there in 1973] and Shimon Peres [who served as prime minister in the 1980s and 1990s]. But now you have people in the cabinet who were considered marginalised nuts… and they hold the balance of power. I don’t think Biden has really grasped that this is the Israel he’s dealing with now, and that was a fundamental mistake.”
The number one rule in foreign policy, Manning explained, is to understand your leverage. Netanyahu assessed, correctly, that despite the increasingly stern warnings from Washington, the Biden administration was unlikely to exercise its leverage over Israel and cut off American weapons sales. And so, despite the harrowing news reports that followed – of children and babies in the Gaza Strip dying not just from air strikes, but from starvation and freezing temperatures – the supply of US weaponry kept coming. “In my time in government, I’ve never seen so much open dissent, so many State Department officials leaving, so many of Biden’s own political appointees protesting against it,” Manning said. “I think they got trapped, and they couldn’t quite figure out how to deal with it, so they ended up playing both arsonist and firefighter.”
All political leaders find themselves at the mercy of unexpected events. It is hardly fair to blame Biden, as Trump has attempted to do, for the extraordinary volatility that has characterised the last four years around the world. It is not his fault that large-scale wars have returned to Europe and the Middle East. Nor that his presidency coincided with a moment of profound flux in the international order, as the unquestionable American primacy that characterised the end of the Cold War gives way to a dangerous new era of great power rivalry that could yet upend the global balance of power. As Trump is about to discover, it is a lot easier to promise “peace through strength” on the campaign trail than it is to deliver in real life.
Biden deserves credit for his accomplishments, from his domestic legislation to his efforts to strengthen American alliances and multilateral security partnerships such as the Aukus nuclear submarine deal between the US, UK and Australia, and the Quad grouping of the US, India, Japan and Australia. He helped to bring about a historic rapprochement between Japan and South Korea, even if the latter has since descended into a worsening political crisis.
But his enduring flaw as president, beyond his inability to acknowledge his own decline, was that his foreign policy and his sense of America’s place in the world was largely premised on a world that no longer exists. His world-view is “rooted in the foreign policy of the formative period of his life: the Sixties and Seventies,” said Eliot Cohen. “Antipathy to Russia, but profound fear of escalation; a commitment to the old alliances; sympathy for and support of Israel; worries about quagmire commitments and hence a desire to cut loose of them [Afghanistan].”
If Biden had followed through on his 2020 pledge to be a “transitional” president, standing aside after one term as the “bridge” to the next generation of Democrats he once promised to be, then perhaps this would be a moment of triumph. He would be remembered as a president who overcame unimaginable personal tragedy, with the loss of his first wife and infant daughter in the Seventies and the death of his eldest son in 2015, and dedicated his life to public service, serving as vice-president to the nation’s first black president, and maybe then helping to elect the first female president.
Instead, his legacy is now in the hands of his successor. Perhaps, as has been the case for George W Bush, who left office with dismal approval ratings, the contrast with what comes next will prove salutary. Perhaps we will come to look back on Biden’s handling of the endless crises that buffeted his presidency as a paragon of statesmanship and stability compared with what follows under Trump. Perhaps some of his legislative victories will endure, and he will be hailed in the years to come for his focus on industrial policy, renewable energy, and returning advanced chip manufacturing to the US. Perhaps.
But it is more likely Trump will immediately set about reversing most of his achievements, dismantling his signature policies and undermining the alliances he worked so hard to rebuild. There might not be much of a legacy left. In that case, Biden will be remembered as an embodiment of fading American power and for his own folly in trying to run again for the presidency at the age of 82, long after his time had come and gone. He will be remembered as the man whose stubborn self-delusion ushered in another four years of Donald Trump, with all the cruelty and chaos that portends. If, that is, he is remembered much at all.
[See also: The myth of the liberal international order]
This post was originally published on here
