Joe Biden has now left office, but the fight over the meaning of his Middle East policies is only just beginning.
Biden’s defenders argue that he left the incoming Trump administration with the strongest American position in the region in decades—and that his decision to back Israel to the hilt following the Hamas attacks was hard but ultimately strategically correct. Biden’s detractors within the Democratic Party argue that he caused irreparable harm to America’s interests and undermined international norms by what they see as his unquestioning support for Israel regardless of a steadily mounting civilian death toll.
Both sides’ arguments have their merits—and which of them ends up winning the debate matters, because the Trump administration and administrations to come will set their policies based in some part on how Biden’s foreign policy is remembered.
Undeniably, the Trump administration inherits a region that looks dramatically different—in a way that favors U.S. interests—from the one that Donald Trump left in 2021. America’s principal adversaries in the region—Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, and Hamas—are all in retreat.
Iran in particular has suffered humiliating losses over the past six months, mainly but not exclusively at the hands of the U.S.-backed Israel Defense Forces. For more than four decades, Iran had worked to construct a “Shia crescent” of aligned forces that stretched from its territory through Iraq and into Lebanon to squeeze Israel and its majority Sunni Muslim neighbors.
This would-be Iranian empire has collapsed. The regime of the Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, and his father before him, is gone after half a century in power. Israel has eliminated much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership and has otherwise battered the group beyond recognition. Aides to President Biden swept into Lebanon while bombs were still falling to negotiate a cease-fire and shepherd a political process. In a rare diplomatic triumph for the administration, those efforts helped Lebanon usher in a new president and prime minister, both of whom Hezbollah would surely have blocked were that group still powerful enough to do so. Biden’s aides also deserve credit for working closely with Trump’s team to win a cease-fire in Gaza during the administration’s waning days.
Iran’s regional power has long rested on three pillars: support to militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah; conventional missiles and other weapons; and an incipient nuclear program. Other than Yemen’s Houthis, Iran’s proxies have been humbled. So, too, has its conventional military posture, as Israel and its partners, including the United States, swatted Iran’s missiles aside not once but twice in 2024. Only Iran’s nuclear program remains (more on that in a bit).
But Iran isn’t the only U.S. rival on the retreat in the Middle East. Russia, bled dry by the war in Ukraine and unwilling (and likely unable) to intervene again on Assad’s behalf, finds its treasured warm-water port in Syria now at risk, because the new government in Damascus is anxious to expel foreign militaries from its territory.
Some of Biden’s aides have been telling their colleagues and journalists that the position in which they are leaving the region vindicates the president’s decision—backed by his closest aides but disputed by many other advisers—to support Israel to the fullest extent since the horrific October 7 attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups. Sources in the administration have told me that, as they see it, no U.S. president will have inherited such favorable terrain in the globally strategic region since Bill Clinton came into office in 1993.
These claims infuriate the president’s many critics in the Democratic Party. They argue that Biden and his team, through their policies in the Middle East, have done incalculable damage to America and its image across the globe, and that any strategic gains will ultimately be proved ephemeral as Hamas and Hezbollah rearm and reassert themselves in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively. Pointing to tens of thousands of dead Palestinian and Lebanese civilians—and the use of American weapons in killing them—they claim that Biden undermined international norms to a greater extent than Trump did in his first term. These critics are largely unpersuaded by and impatient with American and Israeli arguments that Hamas alone necessitated this level of carnage by using human shields, or that a high civilian death toll was inevitable in densely urban terrain. The Department of State under Antony Blinken, they complain, had no evident problem assessing war crimes in other jurisdictions yet never seemed to have enough evidence to do so in the Palestinian territories.
Some of Biden’s Democratic critics are particularly despondent that Trump—never a huge fan of Israel’s wars, which don’t play very well on television—was able to seize the mantle of peacemaker, forcefully directing Israel to arrive at a cease-fire agreement before even taking office. Many Americans have embraced isolationism after the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some progressives worry that the Democratic Party anachronistically remains “the party of war.” Other critics—and I include myself here—argue that largely ceding all major questions of policy and strategy to Israel in 2023 and 2024 was an unforgivable choice for the world’s only superpower to have made.
The Biden administration will not be remembered for injecting much fresh thinking into American foreign policy. Almost all of Biden’s senior aides were also senior aides to President Barack Obama, and many of the most senior stayed the full four years rather than making room for younger talents. Whether the next Democratic administration similarly staffs itself with alumni from the Biden administration will largely depend on which assessment of the president’s policies prevails within the party.
My biggest worry about the next four years is that a weakened Iran will seek solace and protection in the acquisition of nuclear weapons. A new nuclear era in the Middle East could erase many of the past year’s strategic gains. The Trump administration can try to degrade or slow Iran’s nuclear development through military action, but the only way to stave it off altogether is through a process of diplomatic engagement, similar to the much-hated Iran deal of 2015. Trump, ever the pragmatist, might confound his more hawkish aides by reaching out to Iran in its moment of weakness and his moment of strength. He would be wise to do so.
*Sources: Samuel Corum/Getty; Ilia Yefimovich / picture alliance / Getty; Ashraf Amra / Anadolu Agency / Getty.
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