At one of his public remarks after his election, US president Joe Biden said on February 4, 2021, “America is back… we will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again, not to meet yesterday’s challenges, but today’s and tomorrow’s.”
Today, as he contemplates a difficult election and calls to step aside to make way for a younger candidate, it is worth looking back at the substance of Biden’s speech. In defining the place of the US in the global order Biden placed a heavy emphasis on US alliances, Russia and China were at the top of the challenges he thought the US faced, and developing countries were largely missing, with the exception of Burma (Myanmar), Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Judging by the standards of his speech, Biden has done exceptionally well. In particular, the US has strengthened and resurrected NATO from the grand failures of the Iraq war — to which key NATO countries such as France and Germany disagreed — and Afghanistan, where NATO was deployed for twenty years for little obvious good. Much of this, including the accession of Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024, is related to Russia’s chaotic and costly invasion of Ukraine. Biden did exactly as he had outlined in his 2021 speech — confronting Vladimir Putin, raising the costs of the invasion, and keeping the alliance together.
While the longer outcome of the Russia-Ukraine conflict is yet to be determined, for US security and economic interests the defence of Europe and the shoring up of the transatlantic alliance are existential goals.
Likewise, Biden has confronted China forcefully. As with Russia, he has been helped by the missteps of his adversary, and Xi Jinping’s missteps in pursuit of a “Zero-Covid” policy and an aggressive domestic policy that seems to have slowed down Chinese growth have helped Biden. But Biden has also done a bit of heavy lifting. Even though his Build Back Better series of legislations were undercut by the (nominally) Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, the resulting American Rescue Plan Act and Inflation Reduction Act strengthened the US economy and gave a critically needed boost to strengthening infrastructure and supporting new technology sectors, particularly in electric vehicles. Added to this, the “superconductor war” launched by Biden has sharply curtailed China’s ambitions, while strengthening US lead (in the short-term) in cutting-edge technologies, particularly in machine learning.
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And yet, if Biden has done so well, why is he increasingly being dismissed as an out-of-touch doddering old man unfit to lead the US for the next four years?
Much of this is due to the second part of Biden’s objectives, those geared to the developing world. The US has been able to do nothing at all about Myanmar. Its efforts to end the entanglement of the Saudi-Yemen war, while important, have left a security vacuum in West Asia where the Saudi-Iranian contestation continues. But the biggest failure of Biden’s presidency, the reason he is now sometimes referred to as “Genocide Joe”, is due to the country and conflict not even mentioned in his 2021 speech: Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.
All of these issues are interlinked. Biden’s successes on NATO and confronting Russia and China, are all based on past strengths and institutions. His failure to manage Israel is also, as Amir Tibon argues, primarily because he is “out-of-date on Israel and [Israeli PM] Netanyahu”. In fact, the greatest diplomatic defeat that the US has faced in recent terms is when South Africa brought the genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice, and the ICJ ruled almost unanimously that there were grounds to the case. The US also tried to pressure the International Criminal Court, on Netanyahu’s behalf, to not issue warrants against Israeli leaders, and when it did, threw a tantrum. This had no real effect, and only served to highlight US hypocrisy with regards to the ICC, which the Biden administration had praised when it had issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin.
It is also with developing countries that the cracks are most obvious with Biden’s primary objectives in confronting Russia and China. This week Narendra Modi of India is embraced by Putin and conferred the Order of St Andrew, and Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh is in Beijing lining up deals with China.
Historically, the US electorate – and arguably US diplomacy – has had little interest in navigating and understanding the interests of the developing world. With the economic weight and military might concentrated among developed countries, US foreign policy has concentrated on maintaining those alliances, while trying to impose its ‘solutions’ on the rest of the world. Biden’s Feb 2021 speech spoke to this vision of the US, and this is what he wanted to restore, when he said, “America is back.”
The economic rise – and thus strategic importance and autonomy – of developing countries was totally ignored. As the US faces another crucial election it desperately needs to come out of the illusions of its past, without which it is ill-prepared to meet either today’s challenges, or tomorrow’s.
Omair Ahmad is an author and journalist.
