On Foreign Policy, Biden Leaves a Global Trail of Destruction
There is no ambiguity about President Joe Biden’s foreign policy record: it was bloody, and it was disastrous.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the recently announced cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, reportedly brokered by Donald Trump's incoming administration, at the White House on Wednesday. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
On the domestic front, Joe Biden’s record has been such a hodgepodge of contradictions that it’s difficult to properly rate it. There is no such ambiguity when it comes to his foreign policy, which was an abject disaster, both by the standards of any peace-loving person who wants a world with less war and chaos and on its own terms.
In theory, Biden and his team were trying to bring diplomacy “back at the center of our foreign policy” and to run a “foreign policy for the middle class,” one where US decisions on the world stage would revolve around whether or not they benefited ordinary working Americans, and not around the obscure priorities of Washington staffers and think-tankers pushing toy soldiers around a map. But old habits are hard to break.
Biden leaves office having mired the United States in two wars that didn’t exist when he entered, both of which have, several times, nearly escalated into wider conflagrations (one of them a nuclear-tinged one) where regime change has been the sometimes explicit goal, and both of which the United States avoided being pulled directly in by the closest of margins. His only innovation to this neocon-redux strategy has been to wage the wars indirectly, trying to dodge the political fallout of putting boots on the ground by feeding weapons and logistical and operational assistance to local client states to fight instead — and even then, not always, as in the case of Yemen, where the US-backed Saudi war ended only for the United States to start bombing the country directly, which it has been illegally doing for a year now.
Far from resuscitating diplomacy, this has been an administration shockingly hostile to it. Biden’s refusal to immediately reenter the Iran deal and instead use Donald Trump’s exit from it to try to wring more concessions from Tehran meant he never did revive the agreement, one of the signature accomplishments of what he loved to call the “Obama-Biden administration.” While the blame for recently strained US-China tensions goes two ways, the Biden White House’s bellicose posturing, its efforts to squeeze China’s economic development, and its deliberate testing of Beijing’s red line on Taiwan have all contributed to a lack of dialogue and made future conflict more likely.
In Ukraine, Biden’s administration, by its own admission, rejected preinvasion negotiations that could have averted Russia’s disastrous and criminal war, then embarked on a breathtakingly cynical policy: undermining early peace talks that were bearing fruit (something we know from numerous sources, including Ukrainian officials themselves) to prolong the war and trap Russia in an Afghanistan-style quagmire, all at a terrible cost for Ukraine.
But Gaza has been the nadir, where Biden and his team spent fifteen months putting on a public show of backing cease-fire negotiations while in reality giving the far-right Israeli government full military, diplomatic, and rhetorical cover to keep rejecting a deal and continue indefinitely slaughtering Gazan civilians.
How any of this benefits the middle class is unclear. In fact, it manifestly hasn’t. Both wars sent US gas prices spiking at various times, with Ukraine in particular a major contributor to the peak inflation of 2022 that helped sow the seeds of the Democrats’ election loss. Americans weren’t shy about their resentment at watching Biden do speeches in far-off places important to his foreign policy before visiting their communities or sending billions out the door for foreign wars while they languished, something that Biden’s insistence that he was funneling record amounts of taxpayer money to US weapons makers didn’t smooth over.
The administration’s hawkishness has boomeranged home in other ways. The migrant crisis that dogged Biden for his last year could have been avoided, or at least markedly alleviated, had he ended his predecessor’s brutal sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba. But in a vain attempt to keep Florida in play, Biden continued Trump’s heartless policy on both, again eschewing Barack Obama’s smarter policy of rapprochement. Together with meddling in Haiti that produced a bloody power vacuum, all of this sent a deluge of desperate people to the US border, and his approval ratings sliding further.
Collapse of the “Rules-Based Order”
Biden’s foreign policy doesn’t fare better when judged by more traditional metrics, in terms of advancing US interests and positioning Washington to hold on to global leadership in the face of a rising China. His foreign policy team has been doing the rounds the past few weeks insisting that they’ve left the United States in a stronger position, strengthened US alliances, and weakened their enemies. This is hard to take seriously.
Prolonging the Ukraine war ended up being a major strategic miscalculation, emptying US and European weapon reserves to the point that a congressional commission and various China hawks have raised the alarm over potential resources for a major war in the future. Biden’s historic furnishing of Israel’s “nihilistic regional murder spree,” to use one official’s words, hasn’t helped matters.
In fact, the Gaza genocide has turned out to be a world-historic self-inflicted blow, doing monumental, generational damage to US standing and its elites’ pretensions to global leadership that could eclipse the Iraq War’s. While Ukraine served as a US propaganda coup, for a time positioning the United States as the defender of the liberal world order from a cabal of revisionist authoritarian states, Gaza erased all that — a ghastly, visceral demonstration of the macabre possibilities of continued US hegemony.
What this has meant is a sharp rise in anti-Americanism and terrorist threats against the United States, and a swing in opinion toward China at the precise moment Washington is trying to “pivot” toward competing with it, including among key Southeast Asian countries. Meanwhile, Biden’s indulgence of Israel has led to what the United Nations has called “Israel’s assault on the foundations of international law,” with Gaza serving as both a figurative and literal war on the United Nations and the postwar global order.
The fact that this assault on decency and international rules came from the liberal, experienced president who endlessly boasted about defending both has made it far more damaging. For much of the world, Washington now looks like an irresponsible, dangerous leader and a fair-weather friend of the “rules-based order” it claims to champion. As a result, states around the world, including US neighbors and partners, are making a renewed, self-conscious push to speed up the transition to a multipolar world order where the United States no longer dominates, made all the more urgent by Biden’s trigger-happy sanctions policy.
It hasn’t been a great time to be a US ally in the Biden years either. Indefinitely cutting off cheap Russian gas has been catastrophic for NATO allies’ economies, particularly Germany, where soaring energy prices threw it into a recession and fueled deindustrialization — which the United States wasted no time in capitalizing on, luring a record $15.7 billion of investment from German firms. There and all across Europe, the soaring inflation these sanctions have produced has been an incumbent killer, destabilizing governments or sending them crashing to election defeats, often creating openings for far-right parties to take power.
One of the ironies of Biden’s foreign policy has been that, if you zoom out and squint a little, it looks as much like a war on his own European allies as it does on US adversaries. The upshot is Biden has the dubious honor of deserving credit for not just midwifing an ascendant far right at home but doing it all over Europe.
All of this swiftly canceled out what limited good he did early in office — most notably, defiantly withdrawing from the twenty-year-long war in Afghanistan in a shocking act of genuine political courage, especially from a man whose career was defined by a lack of it. But both this move and Biden’s ramping down of the “war on terror” were more than offset by his embroiling the country in several much more dangerous conflicts, as well as his petulant decision to starve the Afghan people over the Taliban’s takeover of the country.
Genocide Joe
But it’s impossible to talk about Biden’s foreign policy record without reserving a special space for Gaza. Even now, as countless experts and world bodies have weighed in, a lot of uninformed punditry holds that the “genocide” label and public attention on Gaza more generally is because it is some kind of fad or a reflection of young Americans’ irrational hatred of their own country.
The reality is that Biden’s war on Gaza is far more gruesome than almost every other obscene war we’ve seen this century and many we saw in the last — not just in terms of its civilian body count but of the demographic profile of the dead, as well as its scale of physical destruction, the rate of killing, its objective level of cruelty, and all of these metrics combined. You have to go back to World War II to find a comparable example of a place that has been so thoroughly bombed to rubble; other features, like the wiping out of entire families, five- and nine-year-olds making up the largest age cohort of those killed, or the creation of the new victim category of “wounded child, no surviving family” simply have no precedent.
And this is Biden’s war. As a former State Department official recently explained to 60 Minutes: “Most of the bombs come from America. Most of the technology comes from America. And all of the fighter jets, all of Israel’s fixed-wing fleet comes from America,” so that “there is a linkage between every single bomb that is dropped in Gaza and the US.”
To keep the weapons flowing, Biden and his inner circle have serially violated US laws, ignoring or overruling the objections of appalled lower-level officials and presenting a dishonest, distorted picture of Israeli behavior to avoid having to cut off military aid. It’s now a very real question whether the administration was ever genuinely working toward a cease-fire, or was simply using it as a way to buy time for Israel to continue destroying Gaza.
The origins of Biden’s supposedly superhuman empathy are meant to date back to the sudden death of his wife and young daughter in a car accident. Yet this horrific tragedy that marked him for life is now something he has ended his career deliberately inflicting on many thousands of other families in Gaza.
Once a Hawk, Always a Hawk
Considering his entire foreign policy record, could Joe Biden’s career have ended any other way?
Biden spent his prime as a politician dressing his fellow Democrats down for not being willing enough to wage war, before proceeding to back virtually every US conflict there was. He didn’t just vote for the Iraq War — a war he believes likely caused his son’s death — but played a leading role in selling it to the public. He was maybe Israel’s most reliable lackey in Congress, a more enthusiastic backer of Israel’s savage 1982 assault on Lebanon than Ronald Reagan, and a politician who shocked even Israel’s hard-right prime minister Menachem Begin with his willingness to justify the indiscriminate killing of women and children.
What it’s amounted to is a presidency that has left the country significantly weaker on the world stage, its people less secure, and a deep stain on the US conscience.