President Joe Biden’s legacy as an architect of the international order may be his most consequential one. While his domestic policy vision began with ambition, his efforts largely failed to change the policy landscape fundamentally, and much of his agenda either did not make it into law or is likely to be reversed. At the same time, Biden leaves the global arena significantly different than he found it — and in ways that are likely to endure. The decisions he made regarding war, peace and diplomacy will not only shape his successor’s policy options but will have long-lasting effects on the United States’ global stature and its relationships with its allies and adversaries.
Unfortunately, Biden’s foreign policy legacy is largely a dark one. Biden promised to end the chaos of Trump’s America First outlook, but his own presidency was often marked by incompetent execution, a hearty appetite for war, neglect of diplomacy and disregard for the basic principles of human rights and justice.
In some respects, his foreign policy record demonstrates a lurch to the right for the Democratic Party.
This was somewhat counterintuitive: Biden governed to the left of expectations on the economy, showing an increased interest in fairness and constraining corporate power compared to the Obama era. But in some respects, his foreign policy record demonstrates a lurch to the right for the Democratic Party. The disconnect between his domestic economic policies and his administration’s activity abroad illustrates how stewardship of American empire operates on its own distinct axis.
Here’s a brief overview of Biden’s engagement with some of the most pressing geopolitical issues of our time and how they reflect a set of values that no progressive should feel good about.
Afghans deserved better
Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan after two decades of war was arguably his greatest foreign policy achievement. He deserves credit for ending a pointless and brutal war that should never have drifted into a nation-building project in the first place — and for sticking by his guns even as legacy media raked him over the coals for it. Yet it is striking that Biden’s most dramatic departure from the beltway consensus on foreign policy — and his most clearly “anti-war” decision as president — was the execution of an agreement brokered by his predecessor, Donald Trump. Biden and Trump should share credit for helping put an end to a “forever war.”
Crucially, though, Biden’s most commendable foreign policy decision was plagued with problems. While the withdrawal was always going to be chaotic, the Biden administration failed to take commonsense steps to protect the many vulnerable Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. at great personal risk. And instead of doing the right thing and assisting Afghans after decades of occupation, the Biden administration subsequently punished a destitute, war-ravaged country with harsh sanctions.
Biden could have saved the Iran deal. He didn’t.
Biden campaigned on a promise to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal that President Barack Obama had signed and from which Trump had withdrawn. Biden could have rejoined the Iran nuclear deal by executive order as soon as he entered office, as many arms control advocates and 150 House Democratic lawmakers wanted him to. Instead, Biden upheld Trump’s maximum-pressure strategy and wasted time trying to negotiate a new, more aggressive deal to satisfy the far more onerous demands of Israel and Saudi Arabia, each of which considers Iran to be their archnemesis in the region. In the summer of 2021, hard-liners were elected in Iran, which set the stage for what became dead-end negotiations, with both Iran and the U.S. unable to establish sufficient trust to settle on a new deal.
“Biden abandoned a successful approach and went back to conventional Democratic centrist thinking, which had made zero gains on the Iran front,” Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, explained in an interview. The upshot is that Iran is edging toward nuclear weapons capability. Biden needlessly fumbled an opportunity to re-establish a measure of stability in the Middle East and reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation.
Biden should’ve been open to talking to Russia
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden’s policy of assistance to Ukraine was successful in helping Ukraine protect most of its territory, which was a virtuous accomplishment. But it’s long been clear that Ukraine would be unable to expel Russia entirely from its territory, which is the goal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pushed for throughout most of the war. As early as December 2022, then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley predicted that kicking Russia entirely out of Ukraine was improbable and floated the idea of “a political solution.” That was prescient. Russia still holds about a fifth of Ukrainian territory, has an insurmountable resource advantage over Ukraine, and has been making territorial gains for years.
But Biden’s position was to remain deferential to Zelenskyy’s goals, and consequently he did not pursue high-level negotiations with Russia. “It was unwise to let the absence of communication continue after the initial negotiations broke down in the spring of 2022,” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow with at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in an interview. “That would mean that a taboo around negotiations would develop — as it did.”
Would keeping high-level negotiations going alongside the war have ended it? Not necessarily. But the point of talking is to probe for openings, to establish what each party is most concerned about and which issues they’re willing to compromise on, and to advance the arduous process of developing a framework for a potential peace deal to minimize the number of lives lost.
Biden never explored that possibility, and now Ukraine might end up worse off for it. Trump has signaled that he’s interested in finding a diplomatic solution to the war, but given his past positions on reducing aid for Ukraine and his lack of interest in the United States’ commitments to NATO, there’s a significant chance that any deal he pushes for would not be the strongest Ukraine could have secured.
Biden’s support for the brutalization of Gaza was indefensible
After Hamas’ war crimes against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Biden pledged unconditional support for Israel’s retaliatory military operation in Gaza. Even as Israel conducted an operation that premier human rights observers and and genocide scholars around the world have deemed a genocide, the Biden administration refused to use the United States’ extraordinary leverage over Israel to pressure it to stop its indiscriminate siege on the people of Gaza. Instead, Biden armed Israel aggressively and provided it with diplomatic cover at the United Nations.
Despite Biden’s talk of working “tirelessly around the clock” to secure a ceasefire, it was only after Trump’s reported pressure on Israel that it agreed to a ceasefire deal on terms that had been on the table since the summer.
The cost of the war in Gaza — in terms of civilian lives lost and an entire society razed to the ground — is as unfathomable as it is unconscionable. It has also shattered any remaining credibility the U.S. had in the global arena that it stands for a “rules-based order” or that it cares about international law.
Democrats are now more associated with war than Republicans
The disconnect between the way the Democratic establishment talks about justice at home and justice abroad is jarring. Trump’s 2024 election win sparked a debate within the Democratic Party about what’s to be done about its failures to deliver the goods for ordinary working-class Americans. But there is far less debate about the party’s shunning of common sense diplomacy, its eagerness to blindly prop up endless war in support of allies, and its disregard for human rights.
Trump is far from anti-war, but Biden’s presidency allowed Trump to claim the lane. The Democrats need to rethink what it means to stand for peace and stability in the international arena.
