The World Is Leaving Biden Behind
In his valedictory speech at the United Nations, the president declared that the center was holding. But things are falling apart faster than he can keep up.
U.S. President Joe Biden waves as he leaves the stage during
the United Nations General Assembly at the U.N. headquarters in New
York City on Sept. 24. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
It wasn’t an especially warm goodbye on either side of the podium.
U.S. President Joe Biden, making his valedictory speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, drew a mild laugh when he talked of his half-century in public service and delivered his now-tired joke about his age. (“I know I look like I’m only 40,” he said.) But that was it for the merriment: Biden then droned on dully about the global challenges ahead, and the U.N. delegates responded with a mere smattering of applause, even when he spoke of defending Ukraine and ending the war in the Middle East. When he defended his withdrawal from Afghanistan, there was dead silence.
No doubt the most memorable moment of Biden’s speech came toward the end when he alluded to his decision not to run for another term at age 81 and declared: “My fellow leaders, let us never forget some things are more important than staying in power.” Biden received sustained applause for that line—which was rather ironic since so many of the countries represented in the hall are now led by autocrats desperately trying to stay in power no matter the cost.
But then, as the president was ushered off the stage—both the actual stage in Turtle Bay and, simultaneously, the world stage—something else was clear: The failing global system that Biden had hoped to reclaim and revitalize as president has largely passed him by. It’s not just that, with four months left as president, Biden has little chance of resolving the bloody conflicts now raging—one of which grows hotter by the day as Israel attacks Hezbollah in Lebanon while U.S. diplomats have all but given up on restraining it. “Biden may love diplomacy, but diplomacy doesn’t love him back,” Walter Russell Mead wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Monday.
No, it’s more that the United Nations itself—and everything it once represented—is fast becoming as irrelevant as the League of Nations once was. With the United States on one side and Russia and China joined at the hip on the other—in other words, three of the five veto-bearing members of the U.N. Security Council—the U.N. is once again a football of the major powers, a forum for confrontation and endless stalemate. The situation is reminiscent of the height of the Cold War when the Soviet Union simply vetoed nearly everything in sight (with a few key exceptions, such as the Marshall Plan and the Korean War resolution—Soviet delegates were absent both days—and minor truce oversight missions in places such as Cyprus).
As for the General Assembly, the body once apotheosized as the Parliament of Man is more than ever a place paralyzed by regional politics, the speechifying and petty clubbiness of smaller nations—and often anti-Israel invective. Once this was symbolized most infamously by an Arab-railroaded resolution in 1975 identifying Zionism with racism. On Tuesday, the same sentiments were made manifest by the world leader who followed Biden up to the podium, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who delivered a rant comparing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his “mass murder network” to Adolf Hitler. Erdogan also inveighed against the Security Council and its five permanent members, saying, “The world is bigger than five.”
In his own speech, Biden sought to compare today’s rocky global situation to when he was first elected a U.S. senator at 29 and the Vietnam War and the Cold War were still ongoing. “The United States and the world got through that moment,” he said. “It wasn’t easy or simple or without significant setbacks. But we would go on to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons … through arms control and then go on to bring the Cold War itself to an end. Israel and Egypt went to war but then forged a historic peace. We ended the war in Vietnam.”
“I’ve seen a remarkable sweep of history,” Biden declared, saying that he leaves public life as optimistic as when he entered it. Biden then quoted William Butler Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming,” saying that even with today’s chaos things are better than during the World War I period when “mere anarchy” was “loosed upon the world” and “the center” could not hold.
“I see a critical distinction,” Biden said. “In our time, the center has held.” He noted that under his leadership, the world has “turned the page” on the worst pandemic in a century and defended the U.N. Charter in Ukraine and that the United States has made the largest investment in climate and clean energy in history—all to “make sure that the forces holding us together are stronger than those that are pulling us apart.”
That remains to be seen because, at the moment, things seem to be falling apart faster than Biden and his team can keep up with them.
“This was a legacy speech,” said Stephen Schlesinger, the author of Act of Creation, a book about the founding of the U.N. “Biden emphasized how his administration has vigorously displayed its commitments to the U.N. Charter, most importantly by helping Ukraine defend against Russia’s cruel and illegal invasion of that nation. As a traditional liberal Democratic president, Biden also checked off a list of his primary priorities in the organization—on global health, food insecurity, drought, trade and technology, norms on cyberspace, a global minimum tax on corporations, an Indo-Pacific security framework, supply chains, debt forgiveness, human rights and terrorism.”