Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Legacy
By Gordon Gray - January 29, 2025
Gallows
humor pervaded the State Department in the run-up to the 2000
presidential election. Informed speculation was that Richard Holbrooke
and Joe Biden topped Al Gore’s list to succeed Madeline Albright should
he be elected president. In that case, the jokes went, there either
wouldn't be any staff meetings under go-it-alone Holbrooke, or they
would never end under the loquacious Senator from Delaware.
Notwithstanding
Biden’s enjoyment of the sound of his own voice, honed by 36 years in
the Senate, he deserves credit for never espousing a “Biden Doctrine” in
foreign policy. Such so-called presidential doctrines are catnip to
those of us who teach courses on U.S. foreign policy, but rarely stand
the test of time.
How, then, should we view Biden’s foreign
policy legacy? At best, he leaves the Oval Office with a mixed record.
Looking back at Biden’s five decades in public service, his
misjudgments about Israel and Iraq will color any historian’s review of
his foreign policy record, just as the Iranian hostage crisis tarnished
Jimmy Carter’s reputation.
Biden’s travel to Israel just eleven
days after the October 7 terror attacks reflected his longstanding
affection for Israel. He fondly recalled his 1973 meeting with Prime
Minister Golda Meir – on his first foreign trip as a young,
newly-elected Senator – as “one of the most consequential meetings I’ve
ever had in my life.” His visit to Israel succeeded in demonstrating
U.S. solidarity with an understandably traumatized Israeli public and
won their widespread approval.
But the visit – and Biden’s
unconditional support for Israel since then – failed in other key
respects. First, he could never persuade Prime Minister Netanyahu to
identify clear objectives, assess honestly whether they were being met,
and avoid the perils of revenge. Second, despite Biden’s urging (during
the visit and repeatedly over the fifteen months since), Netanyahu
ignored his requests to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian
assistance to Gaza.
As New York Times columnist Nicholas
Kristof observed one year after the October 7 attacks, Biden kept
“getting rolled” by Netanyahu and “instead of midwifing the landmark
Middle East peace that he hoped for, Biden became the arms supplier for
the leveling of Gaza.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told
Politico in mid-January that Netanyahu only agreed to the deal “because
he’s afraid of Trump.” Netanyahu, on the other hand, clearly did not
fear Biden, who was repeatedly unwilling to enforce his redlines after
Israel violated them.
Most importantly for long-term U.S.
national security interests world-wide, however, Biden’s October 25,
2023 comment that he had “no notion that the Palestinians are telling
the truth about how many people are killed” in Gaza fed the perception
that the United States valued Israeli lives far more than Palestinian
ones. That empathy gap, increased U.S. military assistance to Israel,
and the October 7 attacks in the first place contributed to what
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius recently described as damage to
“the credibility of America’s idea of [a] rules-based international
order.” The counter-argument – that Donald Trump is not any more
sympathetic to Palestinians and that he has shown absolutely no interest
whatsoever in preserving the rules-based international order that has
benefited the United States so greatly since the end of the Second World
War – does not carry any weight with the rest of the world.
Biden’s
misjudgments about Iraq were no better. In 1991, he voted against
authorizing U.S. military force to enforce UN Security Council
Resolution 678 and liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s brutal
occupation. Seven years later, Biden (perhaps over-correcting) voted
for the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change U.S. policy and
helped set the stage for the U.S. invasion.
As chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), Biden coordinated closely
with the Bush 43 administration on making the case to invade Iraq. He
opened a July 31, 2002 SFRC hearing by endorsing Bush 43’s policy hook,
line, and sinker, saying “President Bush is right to be concerned about
Saddam Hussein's relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and
the possibility that he may use them or share
them with terrorists.” Ten weeks later, Biden voted to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Five
years later – when the war effort he had supported foundered – Biden
tabled a proposal many likened to a de facto partition of Iraq into
three autonomous areas, asserting on April 24, 2007 that the idea that
the Iraqi people would rally behind a strong central government was
“fundamentally and fatally flawed." In fact – and contrary to
conventional wisdom at the time – Iraq was not artificially created 100
years ago, as Bartle Bull so convincingly documents in Land Between the
Rivers, his magisterial account of Iraq’s 5,000-year history.
Iraq’s
invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 may
seem like ancient history to those attuned to the U.S. electoral cycle.
But Biden’s single biggest decision on Iraq while president is equally
misguided. Experts such as retired General Joseph Votel (who headed the
U.S. Special Operations Command and then U.S. Central Command) and
Middle East Institute Senior Fellow Charles Lister, for example, have
explained the dangers of Biden’s decision to withdraw the anti-ISIS
coalition from Iraq over the next two years. As they wrote in The
Washington Post in September, ISIS attacks have intensified and become
more sophisticated, and “U.S. forces remain integral to many essential
functions of an effective Iraq-based effort against the Islamic State.”
History
is seldom kind to one-term presidents such as Joe Biden, George H.W.
Bush, and Jimmy Carter. Biden and Bush 41 had the additional burden of
serving as vice president to once-in-a-generation gifted orators who
were transformational two-term presidents. Carter’s and Bush 41’s stock
among historians has risen in the decades since they left office, and
scholarly opinion of Biden is likely to follow suit.
Moreover,
Biden had many significant accomplishments at home and abroad during his
single term in office. As a Washington Post retrospective on Biden’s
presidency noted, these include bringing the country out of the
pandemic, avoiding a recession many thought was inevitable, and his
foresight and leadership in marshalling European support to defend
Ukraine following Putin’s brutal invasion in February 2022.
In
his 2014 memoir, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates praised
Biden’s integrity and likeability but went on to say that “he has been
wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue
over the past four decades.” That assessment is overly harsh, but
Biden’s Middle East record will forever mar his legacy.
Gordon
Gray is the Kuwait Professor of Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Affairs at
George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
He was a career Foreign Service officer whose assignments included
Deputy Commandant of the National War College, Ambassador to Tunisia,
Senior Advisor to the Ambassador to Iraq, and Deputy Assistant Secretary
of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Follow him on Bluesky:
@AmbGordonGray.bsky.social