I voted for US President Joe Biden in 2020, and I supported Vice President Kamala Harris last November despite my reservations about this administration’s handling of foreign policy. As Biden makes his final bow on the global stage, how successful have he and his team been? As expected, Biden claimed in his closing remarks on foreign policy legacy that they had done a great job. My judgment, however, is quite different.
At the most general level, the Biden administration sought to turn back time to an earlier period of benign American global leadership. Instead of “America First,” the United States would resume its self-proclaimed role as the so-called leader of the free world, aligned with its democratic partners against the rise of autocracy.
Transatlantic friendships would be renewed, alliances in Asia strengthened, and the United States would place liberal values such as human rights at the “center” of its foreign policy. Washington would support key global institutions, lead efforts to halt climate change, rejoin the agreement that successfully halted Iran’s nuclear program, and engage its many allies to contain great powers and rivals like China and Russia. Increased military spending and aggressive measures to preserve technological superiority would extend American supremacy far into the future.
Of course, Biden did not embrace the full version of the “liberal hegemony” that guided US foreign policy strategy from the end of the Cold War until then-President Donald Trump crossed the threshold of the White House in 2017. Namely, Biden continued Trump’s retreat from globalization: he maintained Trump’s tariffs, used export controls and other economic sanctions even more vigorously, and embraced national industrial policies to revive manufacturing jobs (which did not happen) and ensure American dominance in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and other advanced technologies.
However, in a global context, Biden's approach fit well with the mainstream elitist consensus that had guided American foreign policy for decades. The policy was led by an experienced team that shared the same worldview, while progressives and foreign policy realists were marginalized.
How did they do? To be fair, there are some notable successes in the results recorded.
Strengthened partnerships in Asia, a bold and correct withdrawal from Afghanistan
Most American allies in Europe greeted Biden’s inauguration in 2021 with obvious relief. Both he and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken were ardent Atlanticists, and they quickly took steps to reassure allies in Europe that the United States remained firmly committed to their security.
Europe’s positive response was not a surprise. Having the US as the main protector is a major advantage for the continent. This position has brought two benefits. First, it has helped to quickly coordinate the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Second, it has convinced key allies to embrace the protectionist elements of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act, despite their costs.
The administration also strengthened U.S. partnerships in Asia, countering China's rise. The measures included greater access to bases in the Philippines. They also organized a meeting of the leaders of South Korea and Japan at Camp David. This led to a new trilateral security agreement. They also strengthened ties with Australia through the AUKUS initiative.
Biden's team has slowed China's progress in key technological areas. The long-term impact of these measures remains uncertain. However, they have achieved their goals without worsening US-China relations. Relations have remained competitive but not openly hostile.
China's demographic and economic mistakes also helped. Regional fears of Chinese influence played a role. The administration has not developed a meaningful economic strategy for Asia. But, given protectionist policies at home, that would be a difficult task.
Overall, managing relations in Asia is probably Biden's greatest foreign policy success.
In the end, Biden was unfairly criticized for withdrawing from Afghanistan. It was a brave and right decision. The withdrawal was bound to be chaotic because the Afghan government was unstable. Staying longer would not have changed the final outcome.
Biden paid a political price in the short term, but his decision was largely forgotten by 2024 and played almost no role in the recent elections. While no one can be happy with what happened in Afghanistan after the US withdrawal, it is increasingly clear that the US never had a clear strategy and could not have won that war. Biden deserves credit for recognizing that fact and for having the courage to act on it.
Unfortunately, these successes need to be weighed against several more serious failures.
The war in Ukraine could have been avoided
The first failure is the war in Ukraine. The administration often highlights all the aid given to Ukraine and the sanctions imposed on Russia, but advocates of this approach often ignore the enormous burden that Ukraine has borne and the damage the war has done to the rest of Europe.
It is important to recognize that the war did not come about suddenly, but was partly provoked by Washington’s actions. Russia bears full responsibility for starting an illegal war, but Biden and his team are not without blame. First of all, they failed to recognize that their policies made war inevitable. In particular, they remained firmly committed to the endless expansion of NATO and the rapprochement of Ukraine with Western security structures, including NATO.
They continued this risky policy even though Russian leaders, not least President Vladimir Putin, made it clear that they saw it as an existential threat and were prepared to use force to eliminate it. Faced with the threat of war, the Biden administration made only half-hearted efforts to find a diplomatic solution and avoid conflict.
When the war began, the administration made the mistake of not trying to stop the conflict as soon as possible. They believed that Russia's armed forces were incompetent and that "unprecedented" sanctions would destroy their economy and force Putin to change course, which were overly optimistic expectations.
Because of these miscalculations, the administration did little to support early attempts to stop the war, and may even have helped to thwart those efforts. It also failed to explore options for a ceasefire when Ukraine’s chances briefly improved in the fall of 2022 (as advised by Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), nor did it make clear to Ukrainian leaders that launching a major offensive against Russian defenses was doomed to failure.
Unfortunately, the war is likely to end in a significant defeat for Ukraine and its Western allies. While U.S. and NATO officials insist that solidarity within the alliance has never been stronger, their upbeat tone ignores the significant damage the war has done to European security and politics. The conflict has imposed significant economic costs on most European governments (many now face severe budget pressures), raised energy prices that have further reduced European competitiveness, fueled the resurgence of right-wing extremists, and deepened divisions within Europe itself. It has also diverted attention and resources that could have been a counterweight to China.
Yes, Russia has also paid a huge price, but it is not in the interests of the United States or Europe for Moscow to grow closer to Beijing and seek additional opportunities to weaken the West. Europe, the United States, and especially Ukraine, would be far better off if the war had never broken out, and President Biden’s administration bears significant blame for the policies that made war more likely.
Debacle in the Middle East
The second disaster, of course, concerns the Middle East, where all presidential dreams seem to be going to die. Biden’s key mistake was to abandon his campaign promises and continue the flawed policies he inherited from Trump. He did not rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran, as he had promised, which led to Tehran continuing to enrich uranium to near bomb-grade levels and strengthened the position of hardliners in that country.
The Biden administration has also ignored questions about the future of the Palestinian people, as Trump did, focusing its efforts on a failed attempt to convince Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. This approach has reinforced Palestinian fears that they will be permanently marginalized and contributed to Hamas leaders’ decision to launch their deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The Biden administration’s misreading of the situation became painfully obvious when National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared that the region was “more peaceful than it has been in two decades” just eight days before the Hamas attack.
Since then, Biden and his team have supported Israel at every turn, even as Israel ignored their demands for minimal restraint and waged a relentless and indiscriminate military campaign that has killed at least 46.000 Palestinians, perhaps many more. The campaign has rendered much of Gaza uninhabitable, destroyed all universities and nearly all hospitals, killed hundreds of journalists, and inflicted immense suffering and lasting trauma on more than 2 million civilians.
No reasonable person would deny that Israel had the right to respond after October 7, but its campaign of revenge was indefensible from both a strategic and moral standpoint. Among other things, this relentless violence failed to achieve its stated goal of eliminating Hamas or freeing the remaining hostages. The Biden administration provided the bombs and diplomatic support that made it possible.
Let’s take a step back and think about what that means. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Criminal Court (ICC), several independent humanitarian organizations, and many experts on genocide have concluded that Israel has committed significant war crimes and that there is “reasonable suspicion” that it is carrying out genocide, with the full support of the United States. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has described the situation in Gaza as a “moral scandal.” Videos of the horror are readily available on social media.
Instead of ending support for Israel and condemning its disproportionate response, these self-proclaimed defenders of the “rules-based order” have vetoed several United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages, and instead have begun attacking the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). They have made no serious attempt to stop the escalating violence against Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank. These actions have led to the resignations of some government officials in protest, and appear to have seriously damaged morale in the State Department and other institutions.
In his farewell speech at the State Department on January 13, 2025, Biden suggested that this policy had yielded results. Hamas and Hezbollah were severely weakened, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had fallen, Iran had suffered a serious blow, and the risk of needing to launch an air campaign to destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure had been reduced. In this view, the ends justify the means.
Such a defense is morally empty and strategically shortsighted. The normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia has been delayed, and a new wave of jihadist terrorism may be on the horizon. Hamas and Hezbollah are weakened, but not destroyed; the Houthis in Yemen remain undeterred; and the Palestinian aspiration for a state or political rights in a “greater Israel” will not disappear. Iran’s leaders are increasingly inclined to conclude that nuclear weapons are the best way to avoid the fate of Muammar al-Gaddafi and Assad. If that happens, the Middle East will see another war it does not need, oil prices will soar, and the United States could be dragged into another costly debacle. Even if the indelible moral stain is ignored, neither of these outcomes is in the United States’ interests.
Double standards undermined the moral authority of the US
It should be remembered that the administration’s actions during the war between Israel and Hamas were not dictated by some dire strategic necessity; they were a conscious political decision. We all understand that governments will sometimes compromise their moral principles when faced with an existential threat, but the situation in Gaza posed no danger to the United States, and Washington could have refused to support Israel’s genocide without any threat to its own security or prosperity.
Biden and Blinken acted differently either because they feared the political influence 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 undermined the legitimacy of the existing order and sapped the United States’ declining moral authority. From now on, when Chinese diplomats try to convince other countries that Western ideas about human rights are hypocritical nonsense, the war between Israel and Hamas will be their main argument. Biden likes to say that the United States leads “by the force of its own example,” but in this case, he has set an example that we should hope others will not follow.
Biden is a self-proclaimed Zionist, but his unwavering support for Netanyahu’s actions has not been good for Israel either. The Israeli prime minister and former defense minister now face arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court, a “confession” they share with Putin, and that stain will not be erased. Messianic extremists in Israel have been emboldened, rather than contained, deepening divisions between secular and religious Israelis and increasing pressure to annex the West Bank.
If Israel pursues this goal, the norm against territorial conquest, established after World War II, will be further weakened, and other leaders will be encouraged to appropriate territories they desire. Such a move would also erase any distinction between the West Bank and Israel itself, ending the debate over whether it is an apartheid state. A new wave of ethnic cleansing could easily ensue, with horrific humanitarian consequences and dangerous implications for neighboring states like Jordan. I find it difficult to see how any of this would be in Israel’s interest.
Rules are becoming less important
Finally, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, wars that Biden’s policies helped to provoke, have consumed enormous amounts of time and attention, making it difficult to focus on issues that may be of greater long-term importance. Efforts to prepare for future pandemics have been neglected; progress on climate change has fallen far short of what is needed; and the administration’s failure to offer a credible immigration policy cost Harris’ campaign dearly last November.
Africa has been particularly neglected despite its growing importance: Over the past four years, Blinken has visited Israel 16 times (population: just under 10 million) and Ukraine seven times (population: 35,6 million), but has only visited Africa, a continent of approximately 1,5 billion people, four times.
When the administration took office, its main goal was to strengthen the “rules-based order” and demonstrate the superiority of democracy over autocracy. However, Biden and Blinken did not hesitate to break the rules when it suited them and actively undermined several institutions (e.g., the World Trade Organization, the ICC, the ICJ) that sought to enforce them.
Other countries can no longer blame this behavior on a “misfit exception” like Trump; they will rightly see him as an inevitable element of America’s approach to the world. Meanwhile, democracy continues to retreat around the world, despite the Biden administration’s bombastic “democracy summits,” and a man whose commitment to strong democratic institutions is highly questionable returns to the White House next week.
Herein lies the sad irony. Despite some real achievements, Biden’s mismanagement of the situations in Ukraine and the Middle East has done enormous and perhaps fatal damage to the “rules-based order” he claimed to strengthen. The failure to consistently uphold some key global norms has made it easier for the next administration to abandon them altogether, and many other countries will gladly follow suit.
It didn't have to be this way, but the legacy of Joe Biden's foreign policy will be a world that is less rules-based, less prosperous, and significantly more dangerous.
The author is a columnist for Foreign Policy, from which the article was taken, and a professor of international relations at Harvard University.
translation: S. STRUGAR
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