Biden’s foreign policy legacy
Source: By Hemant Adlakha: The Indian Express
Joe Biden entered the White House with two extraordinary qualifications that no other US president had had in the past 70 years — nearly 50 years of experience in government, and over a decade on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Yet, he is leaving behind a foreign policy legacy — perhaps also a first for a US President — of almost zero diplomacy.
Following four turbulent years of the Trump presidency, when Joe Biden won the office of the US president in 2020, a phrase that spread fast was “adults are back in the room.” But today, a veteran diplomat leaves behind a world that is fundamentally more unsafe and unsound over the last four years.
In evaluating the US foreign policy under President Biden, while it is a struggle to find positives, critics are ironically enumerating a whole list of ‘achievements’:
Uniting China and Russia like never before;
Uniting Hamas and Hezbollah;
Worsening confrontation between the Global South and the West; and so on.
Biden helped bring China and Russia together
Arguably, the relative decline of US power since the early 1990s, and the simultaneous rise of China on one hand and the hardening of the “illiberal” bloc of countries informally led by Russia on the other hand, created an opportunity for China and Russia to band together against the US-led Western geopolitical order. In the words of John Feffer, the director of think tank Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), “This involves a debilitating anxiety within the ‘globalist’ elite in Washington about the ability of the United States to remain primus inter pares (first among equals) within the liberal international order.”
It is this that led successive US administrations, from the Barack Obama presidency to the Trump era to Biden’s four years, to try and contain the Chinese “dragon” through trade and tariff wars, and curb Russia through the NATO eastward expansion.
Trump, when in office, had followed policies consistent with his predecessors. However, his rhetoric has been loudly ‘America first’, where he puts little value on the USA’s perceived role as the global policeman of liberal ideals. As evident in the recent election campaign, Trump’s approach to many international conflicts is that the “United States does not have a dog in that fight.”
In his trademark bragging style, Trump told a large audience in a live interview on 31 October 2024, “It was Biden who united them [Russia and China]. I want to break them up. I have the ability to break them up.”
Larry C Johnson, CEO and co-founder of the US business firm Berg Associates and international relations expert, said: “Prior to the start of Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’ nobody really thought of it… that Russia and China will be collaborating in such intense way…now look at them!”
The bloodshed in Middle East
It was Biden’s flawed strategy in Israel that emboldened Benjamin Netanyahu to carry out the bloodshed in Gaza, many believe. If Biden had a plan to rein in the Israeli PM, it failed completely, and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s frequent visits to Israel definitely left Washington looking complicit. In fact, the joke in Washington’s elite political circles is that the solitary achievement of Biden diplomacy is the “frequent flyer miles earned by Blinken”.
On a more serious note, experts are concluding that ironically, the “greatest threat to US strategy in the Middle East hasn’t come from Iran, but from its closest ally – Israel.”
On a different but related note, the result of the American bungling in the Middle East has been a “historic” unity of Sunni and Shia communities. Larry Johnson, quoted above, who is also a former CIA analyst, noted: “Biden has helped remove the separation between Sunni and Shia. Biden made Hamas and Hezbollah come together to oppose Israel.”
Trump, meanwhile, has reportedly told Netanyahu — as reported by The Times of Israel — that he “wants the Gaza war over by the time he enters office.”
NATO and China
In July 2023, the 75th NATO leaders’ summit was hailed as Biden’s “signature achievement” on largely two counts: for the alliances’ powerful resurgence and expansion since the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Finland and Sweden becoming two new members); and Biden leading the alliance in responding quickly and comprehensively to the war in Ukraine, without getting into a direct conflict with Russia.
However, a year on, critics point out that the NATO expansion has made the world far more unstable, and possibly crossed a red line for Russia. Some even say that US-Russia relations may never recover. Trump, on the other hand, has said he will “end the Ukraine war in 24 hours”, though without elaborating on how.
When Biden assumed office, sections in China had called him a “Cold War warrior”. As he demits, he seems to have proven this sobriquet right. In the over four-and-a-half decades since China and the US established diplomatic relations, he remains the first US President to not have been hosted by Beijing.
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