Rozina Sabur
Deputy US Editor
24 September 2024 9:38pm
Joe Biden has used his valedictory address to the global stage to defend his foreign policy over the last four years.
The president said he had taken office at “another moment of crisis and uncertainty”, with the scars of the Jan 6 riots and the Covid-19 pandemic still etched on the country’s psyche.
Since then, he said, “Covid no longer controls our lives”, and America has returned to lead the world stage. But it was hardly a victory lap.
As he stares down the final months of his presidency, Mr Biden is on track to leave office with two major wars raging and a civil war in Sudan unleashing a disastrous humanitarian crisis.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s incursion into Gaza have commanded much of the president’s attention over the last four years.
“At my direction, America stepped into the breach,” Mr Biden said, and “ensured the survival of Ukraine”.
Vladimir Putin may well have been taken aback by the swift and staunch support for Kyiv his invasion triggered.
As Mr Biden noted, Nato members and allies in “50-plus nations” rallied to the cause.
Nato’s military alliance has even swelled its ranks with two new members joining in response to Russian aggression.
Yet continued support for Ukraine is in great doubt, nowhere more so than in the US, where Donald Trump’s potential return to power could doom a significant portion of the flow of arms to the front line.
The Republican ex-president has refused to say whether he wants Kyiv to prevail and signalled he would pursue a negotiated peace that would involve considerable territorial concessions to Moscow.
On Tuesday, he told a rally in Georgia that the US needed to get out of Ukraine. “I’ll get it negotiated, I’ll get out. We gotta get out,” he said.
Mr Biden, who has long prided himself on his policy nous, admitted he was leaving the presidency in the belief that “we’re in another inflection point in our history”.
“There is so much more I want to get done,” the 81-year-old said of his decision to end his re-election bid, but “some things are more important than staying in power”.
As he made the case for his foreign policy, Mr Biden said Ukraine’s allies “cannot grow weary”.
The comments earned an ovation from the UN assembly members he was addressing.
But they were less unanimous in their response to America’s role in the other major global conflict: Israel’s war in Gaza.
The Biden administration has upset the majority of the chamber’s member states by failing in previous efforts to secure a pause in the fighting.
The president repeated his call for a ceasefire deal and extolled the need for a two-state solution, phrases he repeats so often that they now sound perfunctory.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has rebuffed his US counterpart’s entreaties for almost a year. Hamas’s negotiators are as unwieldy as ever. The terror group has rejected the latest ceasefire proposal.
Mr Biden’s own aides privately admitted a deal appears unattainable. Indeed, peace has never seemed more elusive in the region.
Washington’s efforts to convince Israel and Hezbollah not to open another front in the conflict appear increasingly futile.
As Mr Biden spoke in New York, Mr Netanyahu released a video vowing to continue striking Lebanon.
Mr Biden’s final speech to the UN as president marks part of a wider push to burnish his legacy at home and abroad.
His aim in the final months of his presidency, in the words of one adviser, is to ensure his achievements are “irreversible”.
But rather than putting “a stake in the ground for the future”, as Ben LaBolt, the White House director of communications, put it, Mr Biden’s foreign policy has never seemed further off course.
The post Joe Biden talks up legacy — but his foreign policy approach has never seemed further off course appeared first on The Telegraph.
