Joe Biden is two weeks away from riding into the sunset and enjoying the rest of his life in retirement.
With the calendar approaching Inauguration Day, Biden administration officials are doing what other administration officials have done countless times throughout history—bragging about their accomplishments. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has sat down with journalists from the Financial Times and The New York Times to make the case. Biden, like all of his predecessors, cares a great deal about his legacy and wants to be remembered as a man of action during an extraordinary time in world history. As he told USA Today this week, "I hope that history says that I came in and I had a plan how to restore the economy and reestablish America's leadership in the world. That was my hope."
So how did he do?
No president gets everything right. Perfect records are hard to come by. Biden's is one of muddling through crises, reacting to unforeseen events, and being trapped by its own biases and assumptions.
In terms of successes and failures, the war in Ukraine was a wash. On the positive side of the ledger, Biden deserves immense credit for cobbling a Western coalition together on the fly even before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of his smaller neighbor. The U.S. intelligence community's decision to declassify information on Russian troop movements and war plans months before the bombs started falling was a clever and effective way to get Europe's attention about the risk of war returning to the continent. This was no small feat; after the Cold War, Europe had grown accustomed to viewing Russia less as a menace to its national security and more as an irritant that occasionally did despicable things (like invade Georgia in 2008, annex Crimea in 2014, and bail out a Syrian dictator in 2015). When Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine, Biden did an admirable job marshaling support for Kyiv, creating a 53-country bloc to coordinate weapons shipments to the Ukrainian army in the hope Russian forces could be pushed back (or at least stalled).
Biden was understandably tough on Moscow, but he was petrified of getting tough on Ukraine. To many in the U.S. foreign policy community, giving the Ukrainians carte-blanch was viewed as morally justifiable—why pressure a victim whose sovereignty was just violated? Biden's "we will support Ukraine for as long as it takes" position sounded strong and resolute, but it also likely gave Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the confidence that, regardless of what Ukraine did, Washington would be there as an insurance policy. While historians will eventually figure this out in the future, it's logical to assume that Biden's rhetoric, in addition to the tens of billions of dollars given to Ukraine, impacted how Zelensky chose to fight the war. Some of those decisions, like the 2023 counteroffensive and the 2024 offensive in Kursk, Russia, have weakened Ukraine on the battlefield and therefore hurt its position when negotiations commence.
With respect to the war in Gaza, there isn't much to say that's positive. The Biden administration rightly defended Israel's right to act in self-defense when Hamas burst across the border on Oct. 7, 2023, and conducted the worst attack on the state of Israel in its history. But, much like Ukraine, Biden was highly cautious about putting his foot down—outside of anonymous leaks to the press—when the situation on the ground deteriorated markedly. Israel's offensive in Gaza has now killed more than 45,000 Palestinians; Gaza itself is a man-made disaster zone of epic proportions; and the Israeli army continues to fight in some of the same neighborhoods that it cleared months earlier. The U.S. position, in turn, was two-faced; Biden administration officials raised alarms about the humanitarian impact of Israel's war strategy one day but authorized billions of dollars in military aid to Israel the next. In the end, Biden is leaving a mess for Donald Trump.
The one thing Biden got right—withdrawing from Afghanistan. Sure, this policy was ultimately Trump's creation courtesy of the February 2020 agreement he signed with the Taliban, which also outlined a series of counterterrorism commitments the group was required to fulfill. But Biden could have thrown this deal into the garbage and kept U.S. forces in Afghanistan if he really wanted to. The fact that he went through with the drawdown in the face of such heated opposition among the foreign policy elite in Washington shouldn't be discounted. Biden had truth on his side—after two decades of sunk-costs, there was nothing the U.S military could have done to turn Afghanistan around. The only alternative to withdrawal was defending a pathetically inept and corrupt government in Kabul until the sun exploded, which was really no alternative at all.
This is a rough first cut of Biden's foreign policy legacy. It could have been better. But it could have also been worse.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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