Speaking from the Oval Office last month as he explained his decision not to seek re-election, President Biden boasted about his accomplishments. One of them, he suggested, was presiding over an era of peace.
“I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” Mr. Biden declared to the nation.
But while America is no longer waging a large-scale ground war like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, for much of his tenure Mr. Biden has seemed like a wartime leader.
Since pulling the last American troops out of Afghanistan three years ago, Mr. Biden has spent much of his presidency mobilizing public opinion and military might against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and playing a deeply engaged role in supporting Israel in its war in Gaza, and against Iran and the groups it backs.
“War will be a key part of Biden’s legacy,” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “What’s hard to wrap one’s head around is that, although the United States is not directly involved in the wars in Ukraine or Gaza, the risks of large-scale conflict have become higher over the course of Biden’s presidency.”
The implications for Mr. Biden’s successor — either former President Donald J. Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris — could be huge.
Mr. Biden’s presidency has some ominous echoes of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s later years in office, Mr. Wertheim noticed. In 1940 and 1941, the outbreak of World War II dominated national politics even though Roosevelt initially kept America out of the conflict. But Roosevelt gradually escalated U.S. involvement by serving as “the arsenal of democracy” — a phrase Mr. Biden invoked in an October speech making the case for arming Ukraine and Israel.
By 1943, the United States was at war on three continents.
Mr. Biden has not actually kept America out of combat entirely since leaving Afghanistan. U.S. forces have repeatedly bombed Houthi militants in Yemen since Oct. 7, in response to Houthi attacks on global shipping, and have struck Iranian proxy forces in Iraq and Syria. One U.S. strike was retaliation for a drone attack that killed three American troops at a base in Jordan. This week, a rocket attack on a U.S. air base in Iraq by Iranian-backed fighters wounded several American soldiers.
Mr. Biden has even ordered American troops to act on Israel’s behalf. In April, U.S. planes downed many of the hundreds of missiles and drones launched by Iran in a major attack on Israel. Anticipating a similar attack this month, in response to Israel’s assassination of a Hamas leader in Tehran, Mr. Biden has again positioned warships and fighter jets to defend against another potential Iranian attack on Israel.
To his critics, Mr. Biden is conveniently airbrushing his record. “What is the ongoing effort to protect shipping against Houthi attack, if not a combat operation?” said Peter Feaver, a National Security Council official during the George W. Bush presidency.
People who hear Mr. Biden speak about ending war — he also said, inaccurately, during his June debate with Mr. Trump that he was not presiding over “any troops dying anywhere in the world” — are right to feel as though something does not add up, Mr. Feaver added.
“You might say, ‘Wait a second — this does not feel like the U.S. is out of war,’” he said. “That’s because this is the most dangerous geostrategic moment since the early 1980s.”
Sensing opportunity, Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Biden — and Ms. Harris — of endangering America’s security.
In contrast to both, Mr. Trump casts himself as a peacemaker who can swiftly end the war in Ukraine and bring calm to the Middle East, though analysts say that is highly unlikely.
“You are closer to a third world war right now than at any time since the Second World War,” Mr. Trump told reporters in late July. “You’ve never been so close, because we have incompetent people running our country.”
“If we win, it’ll be very simple,” he added. “It’s all going to work out and very quickly. If we don’t, you’re going to end up with major wars in the Middle East, and maybe a third world war.”
The wartime mood in Washington is a far cry from Mr. Biden’s vision as a candidate in 2020, when he pledged to move beyond the post-9/11 “forever wars” that sapped America’s strength and, he said, distracted Washington from the rise of China.
Mr. Biden spoke with pride when he withdrew the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021. “We’ve been a nation too long at war,” he said at the time. “If you’re 20 years old today, you have never known an America at peace.”
But any sense of peace did not last long.
Six months after the last U.S. soldier flew out of Kabul, Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Warning that the international order was at stake, Mr. Biden poured money and weapons into Ukraine. “America stands up to bullies,” he said.
Mr. Biden firmly ruled out sending troops to fight Russia, but he deployed thousands of soldiers to Eastern Europe. A home front of sorts emerged, as Americans showed solidarity with Ukraine.
“Twice in my lifetime Americans have hoisted flags outside their homes,” Mr. Wertheim said. “The American flag after 9/11 — and the Ukrainian flag after February 2022.”
While cable television carried endless footage of tank battles and demolished Ukrainian apartment blocks, pundits argued about whether to provide Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets and long-range missiles. America’s arms industry shifted into a higher gear to meet Kyiv’s enormous need for weapons.
The White House itself even organized for war: When Mr. Biden needed a new press secretary in 2022, he made the unusual choice of selecting one to handle domestic matters and another one, a longtime Pentagon official, to field the news media’s detailed military questions.
Kremlin officials said they considered themselves in “an indirect war” with the United States and suggested that the conflict could spiral into a nuclear war. In mid-2022, Mr. Biden warned that America “faced the prospect of Armageddon” for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Then came the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which plunged the White House into a near-constant state of crisis.
As Mr. Biden declined to cut off U.S. arms shipments to Israel amid soaring civilian casualties in Gaza, the biggest domestic antiwar protests since the Iraq war erupted. In scenes reminiscent of the Vietnam War era, students stormed college campus buildings, while activists camped outside the home of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.
Many protesters spoke as though Mr. Biden was managing the war in Gaza: “Genocide Joe! How many kids have you killed today?” one heckler shouted during the president’s appearance in Virginia in January.
While Mr. Biden clearly did not welcome the conflicts in Ukraine or Gaza, he has sometimes spoken of them in Churchillian terms. In an Oval Office address in October, he called for a large aid package to Ukraine and Israel, saying that America stood at “an inflection point in history — one of those moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come.”
Mr. Biden has even highlighted his personal derring-do under potential fire. In his October speech, the noted that he had returned that morning from a trip to Israel, adding that he was the first American president to travel there “during a war.” He also offered a dramatic account of his visit to Kyiv earlier that year, including a 10-hour ride to Kyiv on a train with blacked-out windows, and boasted that he was the first American president “to enter a war zone not controlled by the United States military since President Lincoln.”
The Biden campaign would even produce an advertisement based on that trip. “In the middle of a war zone, Joe Biden showed the world what America is made of,” its narrator said.
It was clear that Mr. Biden’s campaign viewed his leadership during something resembling wartime as a political strength. “I’m running the world,” he told the ABC News host George Stephanopoulos in July, as he fought to remain the Democratic presidential nominee. He noted that he had just been on the phone with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and that he was “taking on” the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Biden’s calculus may be shifting to his legacy, and his ability to resolve conflict. He is now pressing Mr. Netanyahu to conclude a cease-fire agreement with Hamas to end the war in Gaza. He hopes that can unlock his larger plan for a formalized alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which would be seen as a historic breakthrough.
A late burst of peacemaking could be invaluable for Mr. Biden’s place in the history books.
But Mr. Wertheim said, “There does seem to be a general sense that the world is out of control, there’s chaos and that the American president isn’t supposed to let that happen,” however unfair the expectation may be.
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