U.S. President Joe Biden addresses the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters on Sept. 24.Manuel Balce Ceneta/The Associated Press
As world leaders prepared to gather in New York for the United Nations General Assembly – the annual parade of UN speeches on the state of the world and geopolitical grandstanding – U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield remarked wistfully on the timing of this year’s event as the wars in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza rage on with no end in sight.
“It feels like we say this every year, but this UNGA could not come at a more critical and more challenging moment,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield mused last week as Israel began stepping up attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon. “The list of crises and conflicts that demand attention and action only seem to grow and grow.”
Her comments were not intended as a swipe at her boss. But they nevertheless underscored President Joe Biden’s complicated foreign-policy legacy as he prepares to exit the world stage. Mr. Biden’s handling of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza will define his presidency for decades to come, and barring a breakthrough soon, he will bequeath to his successor an intractable tangle of foreign-policy messes.
This is not how he envisioned his presidency. He came to office in 2021 with more foreign-policy experience than any U.S. commander-in-chief since George H.W. Bush. He set out to rebuild U.S. alliances that Donald Trump had denigrated during his chaotic four years in the White House. He sought to clear the decks to focus on the 21st-century challenge of winning the great-power competition with China.
Mr. Biden did make important progress in that regard, with the creation of the AUKUS alliance with Australia and Britain and the strengthening of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (”The Quad”) encompassing the U.S., India, Japan and Australia. But history is less likely to dwell on those accomplishments than on the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
In his fourth and final address to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Mr. Biden noted that the world was also facing multiple crises when he was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. The Cold War was raging; the Middle East was on the cusp of all-out conflict; the U.S. was mired in a years-long war in Vietnam.
“The United States and the world got through that moment,” Mr. Biden said. “Maybe because of all I have seen and all we have done together over the decades, I have hope. I know there is a way forward.”
That last line may have been a plug for his Vice-President, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, whose campaign slogan is A New Way Forward. Mr. Biden’s legacy could hinge on who succeeds him. Ms. Harris would likely continue with his foreign-policy approach; Mr. Trump would break sharply with it.
In a recent appraisal of the Biden Doctrine published in Foreign Affairs, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow Jessica T. Matthews credits Mr. Biden with “shifting the basis of American foreign policy from an unhealthy reliance on military intervention to the active pursuit of diplomacy backed by strength.” Yet, the most concrete example of the Biden Doctrine in action remains the disastrous 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan – hardly a feather in the President’s cap.
Ms. Matthews praises Mr. Biden’s “masterful” handling of the war in Ukraine, writing that he has “calibrated the sophistication of weapons Washington has provided against the curve of Russian violence, staying just behind rather than leading it.”
Yet, many military analysts argue that, by taking a deliberate approach to arming Ukraine, Mr. Biden is responsible for the war’s current stalemate. He still has not given the green light to use American ATACMS missiles to strike deep inside Russia, despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s persistent pleas.
On Gaza, Mr. Biden has been even less effective. Only days before Hamas carried out its brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel, his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, boasted that the Middle East “is quieter than it has been for decades.” But Hamas, aided by Iran, had been using the first half of Mr. Biden’s presidency to amass arms for the attack and the protracted war it knew would emerge as a result of it.
Rather than confronting Iran, Mr. Biden sought to engage the Islamist regime in Tehran by resuscitating talks to renew the 2015 nuclear deal that Mr. Trump had abrogated. That attempt at engagement was a failure. Mr. Biden’s Iran envoy, Robert Malley, is now the subject of an FBI investigation involving his handling of classified information, and Iran is closer to being able to produce a nuclear weapon.
Mr. Biden’s proposal for a ceasefire deal in Gaza has gone nowhere. The risk of a much bigger conflagration looms as Israel targets Hezbollah, and as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aims “to change the balance of power in the north.”
With only a few months left in his presidency, the Biden Doctrine does not look like it is headed for an esteemed place in history.