On their farewell tours, President Biden and his top foreign policy aides have boasted of how their administration has strengthened U.S. alliances during a period of rising global crises.
It was a signature achievement, they say, given the tense relations of the first Trump administration.
Mr. Biden basked in his final meetings with friendly leaders among the Group of 20 nations in Brazil last month.
A week later, outside Rome, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken attended his last gathering of top diplomats from the Group of 7 advanced economies, all U.S. allies, and noted that the group had strengthened ties with countries around the globe.
“We’ve transformed the group into a steering committee for the world’s leading democracies.,” he said.
But America’s alliances and partnerships under Mr. Biden’s stewardship have been complicated. Key partners have acted counter to the values that Mr. Biden has espoused, notably democracy, rule of law and human rights.
In some cases, those countries have undermined the power and standing of the United States in the world.
“This is surely one of the hallmarks of Biden’s foreign policy — fulsome and sometimes unconditional backing for imperfect partners who expose the United States to escalation risks, financial burdens and reputational harm,” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Serious problems emerged with leaders in Afghanistan, Israel, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates. In each case, Mr. Biden and his aides were caught by surprise and then stayed quiet when those leaders failed in their roles or rejected policy suggestions and diplomatic efforts by the Americans. U.S. officials often justify their choices by saying they cannot alienate partners they need to counterbalance Russia, Iran, North Korea and especially China.
Mr. Biden’s unwavering public support of an Israel led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as it wages a deadly war against Hamas in Gaza has been especially costly in terms of American and global public opinion.
President-elect Donald J. Trump has boasted that he will bring stability to a world that he says is out of control. But in this multipolar era, nations act with much less regard for the United States than they did in the brief moment of American triumphalism after the Cold War.
And Mr. Trump’s approach to alliances during his first administration strained those relations, while his withdrawal from important international agreements and his use of tariffs created turmoil.
Mr. Biden’s first crisis involving a partner nation was in Afghanistan in 2021, as he was carrying out a withdrawal of U.S. troops that Mr. Trump had arranged. Mr. Biden agreed with that strategy, and most Americans supported it. Biden administration officials had initially assessed that the government of President Ashraf Ghani could hold off the Taliban for more than a year after the American withdrawal.
Their faith was misplaced: The Afghan military crumbled during a Taliban offensive in the summer of 2021, and Mr. Ghani fled. The U.S. pullout ended in chaos and bloodshed.
This month, another allied leader hailed by Mr. Biden, President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, declared martial law, the first time in that country in decades. Protesters immediately flooded the streets of the democratic nation, and the legislature voted to overturn the declaration.
The Biden administration expressed concern but refrained from denouncing Mr. Yoon, a conservative, despite the fact that his move echoed Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after Mr. Biden’s election victory in 2020.
Mr. Biden had invested heavily in Mr. Yoon, feting him at a state dinner in Washington last year. The tuxedo-clad Mr. Yoon sang “American Pie” to a rapt crowd. Mr. Biden even chose South Korea to host one of his pet projects, the Summit for Democracy, an initiative aimed at promoting global democratic resilience. Mr. Yoon presided over the third iteration in Seoul in March.
Fast forward to Dec. 14: The South Korean legislature voted to impeach Mr. Yoon after his failed power grab, removing a leader whom Mr. Biden had cultivated.
“The problem is that the recent turmoil in some U.S. allies just highlights that democracies are imperfect at the same time as Biden made democracy the guiding light of his foreign — and one could argue domestic — policy,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan research group.
“The problem really is one of messaging — and of hypocrisy,” she added. “Biden’s Summit for Democracy became such a contentious issue because many U.S. allies or partners aren’t full democracies. We all know that, but highlighting it as the center of your foreign policy just makes you look either hypocritical or naïve.”
This month, a bipartisan group of senators urged Mr. Biden to take action against the United Arab Emirates, another U.S. partner, and other foreign powers that have fueled the devastating war in Sudan by shipping arms to combatants. The White House replied with a letter saying the Emirates had been a “humanitarian contributor” throughout the war and that it had told U.S. officials it was no longer supplying weapons.
Senators have also questioned Mr. Biden’s recent courtship of Saudi Arabia, which he had once vowed to make a “pariah” for its human rights abuses.
No foreign policy issue has been more divisive for Mr. Biden than his support for Israel throughout its war in Gaza. Ms. Ashford said the administration’s hypocrisy was exposed by “the split-screen much of the world sees on Gaza and Ukraine — with an administration who says one conflict is an unacceptable war crime, and the other self-defense.”
The Israeli military, supplied with American weapons, has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians and destroyed most of Gaza, according to officials in the strip and satellite images. Mr. Biden has tried to persuade Mr. Netanyahu to moderate some of his actions and has even used curse words to describe the Israeli leader privately. But his administration has never withheld substantial amounts of arms.
Critics say Mr. Biden failed to use the only real leverage he had to shape Israel’s actions, and so Mr. Netanyahu ignored him.
“He has stood by Israel unconditionally, even as Israel has done the same things that Russia did in Ukraine,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont. “The damage that Biden has done to the rules-based order, we have not even begun to imagine the extent of that damage yet.”
Mr. Duss added that Mr. Biden had “done more damage to the foundations of international law than Trump did.” Because Mr. Biden, unlike Mr. Trump, was seen for decades as a champion of an American-led global order — “a high priest in the church” — his actions in particular showed that international rules “are hollow,” Mr. Duss said.
Mr. Biden and his aides argue that Israel has the right to self-defense, and they point out that Hamas and its partners started the war by killing about 1,200 Israelis and taking more than 250 hostages during the terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.
It has been easier for the Biden administration to defend giving military aid to Ukraine to repel the full-scale Russian invasion that began in February 2022. And for the most part, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has kept military operations within the limits set by Washington.
If anything, Mr. Biden has been criticized in this instance for not trusting a partner enough and placing too many limits. That has forced Mr. Zelensky to lobby Washington over and over to lift certain restraints as Russian forces have continued their onslaught.
Mr. Biden also had success in pushing a broad effort among U.S. allies in Europe and Asia to organize military aid to Ukraine and economic sanctions against Russia in early 2022.
Yet, nearly three years into the war, the partnerships are falling short.
European countries are unable or unwilling to tightly enforce sanctions against Russia. Other U.S. partners, notably India and Gulf Arab nations, are importing Russian oil in record volumes, financing Russia’s war machine. And most notably, the major democracies of Europe have failed to increase arms production to a level that would be able to make up for any future curtailing of U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
That is especially problematic given that Mr. Trump and some of his named aides have expressed deep skepticism of the American weapons pipeline to Ukraine.
The partnerships that Mr. Biden promoted not only during his presidency but throughout his political career could prove unable to withstand new challenges during a second Trump administration.
But recent events have shown that the alliances were always shakier and more contentious than the vision painted by Mr. Biden and other proponents in Washington.
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