Joe Biden’s foreign policy legacy looks even worse in the rear-view mirror

Four years may not be so very long in the great sweep of history, but it is still hard to remember which hopes and fears gripped the world – especially in Europe – as the United States prepared to vote for its president last time around.

The immediate fear was of another four years of unpredictable America-Firster Donald Trump, which could, it was thought, result in the United States abandoning (or at least, scaling back) its defence shield for Europe – while perhaps trying again for a rapprochement with Russia.

The hope was that a victory for Joe Biden would return not only an experienced foreign policy hand to the White House, but an Atlanticist of the old school who would recommit the US to the security of Europe and restore a sense of US-led order.

Well, Europe got what it wanted. Joe Biden became president, deep sighs of relief could be heard from London to Tallinn and there was cheerful talk of the professionals being back in charge. The world seemed set for four years in which anxiety about a new age of US isolationism, trade wars and risk-taking could be laid to rest. And – as seen from London – the UK-US special relationship would pick up where it had left off.

As the US enters the last lap of this year’s election, those 2020 hopes invite the classic contrast between “how it started” and “how it’s going”.

What then appeared assets from the European perspective – a safe pair of hands and cast-iron support for Nato – have turned out to be less stabilising than expected. It could even be argued that Biden’s set views and traditional Atlanticist outlook made his administration less nimble and inventive in the foreign policy arena than it needed to be.

His difficulties arguably began with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in his first summer in the White House. US and UK intelligence underestimated the speed of the Taliban advance. While Germany mobilised its contacts in central Asia to facilitate evacuations, the US and the UK were left replaying the humiliating flight from Saigon – but on a much bigger scale. Allies and hardware were abandoned; the US lost 13 marines in a terrorist attack at Kabul airport. This was failure writ large.

Through the autumn of that year, tensions mounted between Russia and Ukraine. Elaborate Western attempts to deter Russia came to nought – and on 24 February 2022, Russia transformed its decade-long war in the east of Ukraine into the first all-out invasion of another independent country since the Second World War. Ukraine’s resolve to fight left the US and Europe with little choice but to support Ukraine and the Western orientation it was defending. The war goes on, although victory for Ukraine now looks elusive.

There is no end in sight either to the multiple conflicts that have now erupted in the Middle East, following the Hamas massacre of Israelis on 7 October 2023. There was no way that Israel was not going to respond but the scale and intensity of that response, and its repercussions, have gone far beyond most expectations.

Together, these conflicts hardly make for a positive foreign record. A costly 20-year engagement in Afghanistan ending in an ignominious withdrawal, the Taliban back in control and social progress reversed. The first all-out war in Europe for 80 years, which neither the US nor its European Nato allies have been able – or had the will – to win. And what has grown into a multiple conflict in the Middle East, destabilising Lebanon and threatening a direct conflict between Israel and Iran.

Add to this the extent to which these embroilments have distracted the US from what Congress and many Americans regard as the chief threat to the US – China – the risk that some see to Taiwan if Beijing observes US weakness elsewhere, and the very practical question about how far US involvement on two fronts – in Europe and the Middle East – might call into question its capacity to open a third, Pacific, front.

Now it is only fair to say that Joe Biden leaves an economic record at home that is not bad – and may yet help his vice-president, Kamala Harris, win this election. But a US president is inevitably seen, and judged, also as a leader with global reach – and he has failed to exercise the power commensurate with that role, reinforcing an impression of US decline.

It might also be asked how far any of what has gone wrong can reasonably be laid at his door. It can be argued that Biden was bounced into what he might have regarded as a premature Afghan withdrawal by Trump’s deal with the Taliban. Ending the war, on the other hand, was popular in the US; Biden had time to organise operations and square dissenting (including UK) allies. An efficient and dignified withdrawal this was not.

Could another president have prevented the Ukraine war and the Russian invasion that precipitated it? Trump certainly believes he could, and we shall see what the now – I would argue unjustly – discredited Angela Merkel says in her imminent memoirs.

Personally, I think it could have been avoided, even at the eleventh hour, had the US taken a less dismissive approach towards Russia’s security qualms, as expressed in diplomatic demarches to the US and Nato in December 2021. The war might also have been stopped, with far less detriment to Ukraine than is likely now, had the US supported the negotiations in Belarus and Istanbul in the first months of the war.

As for the Middle East, the Biden administration may reasonably claim that it could have done nothing either to prevent the Hamas attacks or to rein in Israel’s initial response. A Machiavellian might even blame Trump for stoking Palestinian discontent by negotiating the Abraham Accords, under which several Gulf states recognised Israel, essentially ignoring the Palestinians.

But the conflict, as it unfolded, left the US continually one or more steps behind developments, at odds with most international opinion, and – as it seemed – either unable or unwilling to influence its ally, Israel, towards a ceasefire. Could another president have done better? Maybe not one as steeped in the US-Israel relationship as Biden.

Arguments about where responsibility lies for Biden’s undoubted foreign policy failures will doubtless continue for a very long time, and Trump’s claims that he would have done better will remain hypothetical, even if he wins the election and revisits – as he will have to – some or all of these conflicts.

That the election is taking place with the US engaged, albeit mostly at one remove, in two conflicts in different parts of the world also leaves risks for the transition. Could any of the combatants decide to exploit these weeks when the US is essentially between leaders? Might Biden risk some dramatic intervention in an effort to solve one or other, or both, for the sake of his legacy?

That is hard to envisage, given both the risks of so doing and the convention that outgoing presidents do nothing that would tie their successor’s hands. Then again, might Kamala Harris, if she wins, take over the reins de facto before the inauguration, and what might that change?

All these questions will remain even after the election is decided. But there is one certainty; improbable as it might have seemed four years ago, Joe Biden bequeathes a foreign policy landscape that is even more problematic for the United States than the one he inherited.