Joe Barnes
in Washington
02 October 2024 9:06pm
When Joe Biden leaves the White House in January the war in Ukraine will be a month short of its third anniversary.
There is no telling what levels the crisis in the Middle East could have reached by then, with Israel defending itself on three fronts.
And then there is the potential threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a key US ally, looming large, with warnings Beijing could attempt to seize the island by 2027.
That is quite the in-tray for a president who shot to power on a promise to restore the United States as a foreign policy power to leave to his successor.
“America is back,” Mr Biden declared in his first major foreign policy speech a month after his inauguration in January 2021.
In the first two years of his presidency, the expert consensus was that he had presided over the most transformative phases in US foreign policy history.
Mr Biden had the monumental task of healing the scars of Donald Trump’s veiled threats to withdraw the US from Nato and the former president’s collapse of the Iran nuclear deal.
It was no mean feat that the man departing from the White House was able to stabilise what had become a dangerous position in the eyes of Washington’s closest allies.
“But he was not able to advance the ball much down the field,” Brett Bruen, a former diplomat in the Obama White House and now president of the Global Situation Room, said.
“And in a number of cases, he made some dumb moves that turned the ball over to adversaries.”
There was the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending 20 years of war but handing power and vast amounts of military resources to the Taliban.
Less than six months later, Russia invaded neighbouring Ukraine, sparking the largest armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
Mr Biden entered office wanting a “stable and predictable” relationship with Moscow in order to focus on China, Washington’s main adversary.
He will leave with what Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s former secretary-general, has described as an authoritarian power axis of China, Iran and North Korea unified behind Moscow’s war effort.
The president has talked a good game, promising to help deliver Ukraine a victory, and has ultimately handed over more weaponry to Kyiv than any of its other Western allies.
Critics argue this support came with plenty of brash and bold statements, but never a genuine plan to end the war or the willingness to deliver the weapons necessary to finish the job.
And then there is the perceived mishandling of the crisis in the Middle East, with Mr Biden unable to convince Israel to come to the table to end its invasions of Gaza and Lebanon.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, publicly denounced Washington’s plan for a 21-day ceasefire with Hezbollah shortly before launching a ground assault into Lebanon targeting the terror group.
Mr Biden had issued similar warnings to Vladimir Putin, who ultimately ignored threats of Western reprisals and invaded Ukraine anyway.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, even prolonged his trip to America to hold talks with Donald Trump, in a sign that the current leader is just a bystander to events.
Had the US president and his army of aides overestimated their country’s once-great standing in the world when making their demands?
“It comes down to a group of advisers who make too many assumptions, who approach these global issues with an overabundance of arrogance and who still believe that a strong statement from Washington will send reverberations throughout the corridors of power, which is simply no longer the case,” Mr Bruen said.
Mr Trump, and his running mate, JD Vance, have used foreign policy as a key attack line, claiming these wars had only broken out after the Republican candidate had been voted out of office.
The challenge for them, or Kamala Harris, will be to build teams that can formulate a plan, one that is likely going to be less ambitious and contains a hint of pragmatism, to end the war in Ukraine and stabilise the Middle East.
Not until then will any US president be able to focus on facing down the ever-growing threat posed by China.
The post Joe Biden leaves his successor a foreign policy disaster to clean up appeared first on The Telegraph.
