Biden to kick off last week in office with speech on foreign policy legacy
Biden’s address will be one of two major speeches as he prepares to end a half-century in government
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Your support makes all the difference.President Joe Biden will begin his last week in the White House with a major address aimed at summing up what he considers his administration’s critical work on restoring American alliances and leadership that he will deliver at the State Department Monday.
A senior administration official described what he viewed as the bleak situation the United States faced on the world stage as Biden grabbed the reins of government from the outgoing Trump administration, during which U.S. alliances “had been badly damaged” by the then former president (now president-elect) Donald Trump’s decision to walk away from “agreements that made America safer.”
“Our adversaries were gaining strength. And the nation and the world were in the midst of a global pandemic,” the official added.
Biden aims to “describe how we reclaimed America’s global leadership as a force of stability, put our adversaries in a position of weakness, effectively navigated turbulence around the world and made America stronger,” the official said.
He added that Biden will highlight how he helped “reinvigorate” the NATO alliance, which expanded to 32 members in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and that he “stood with Israel” after the 2023 terror attacks.
The remarks will be just one of several events the administration has planned to mark Biden’s final week in office, after which he’ll close out more than a half-century in public service by attending Trump’s second inauguration to mark the peaceful transfer of power he was denied four years ago when Trump attempted to overturn his 2020 election loss.
The president’s final foreign policy speech was initially set to be delivered as a bookend to Biden’s final trip aboard as president, a visit to Rome that was scuttled to allow him to oversee the federal response to the wildfires that have devastated Los Angeles and the surrounding area.
It’s unclear to what extent he’ll discuss America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he ordered in August 2021. That move, which ended America’s longest war, was largely viewed as a disaster that sent Biden’s approval ratings plummeting, from which he never recovered, particularly after 13 U.S. Marines lost their lives in a bombing at Kabul International Airport.
According to a White House source who spoke to The Independent on condition of anonymity, Biden will also deliver a more comprehensive farewell address later in the week to reflect on his 50-plus years in national politics, beginning with his improbable victory in the 1972 Delaware Senate race as a 29-year-old unknown, leading to three decades in the upper chamber, then the vice presidency under Barack Obama, and ultimately the presidency.
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