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In a week when the US bade a sad farewell to Jimmy Carter, presidential legacies came under particular scrutiny. Yet few presidents are widely remembered beyond their lifetimes, their “historic” achievements even less so. In the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D Roosevelt, John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon make the truly memorable list. Most of the rest are mere school-book names and dates.
Joe Biden’s standing in this unprepossessing pantheon is now being assessed, as he prepares to depart the White House on 20 January. Like his 44 predecessors, he reportedly frets about his “place in history”. All presidents do this. It smacks of vanity. They give valedictory lectures, endow foundations, build libraries, write memoirs. They confuse fame with continuing relevance.
So what did Biden achieve and will it endure? His domestic successes are impressive. He revived a pandemic-stricken economy, created 16m jobs, boosted wages, new businesses and infrastructure spending, reduced the murder rate and curbed illegal immigration. His Inflation Reduction Act slashed healthcare costs and included $400bn to tackle the climate crisis. Stock markets are booming.
Hardly the national “disaster” his successor, Donald Trump, decries. Yet Biden was his own worst enemy. He pooh-poohed the impact on voters of high inflation. In denial about his physical and mental decline, he sought a second term after implying, in 2020, that he would not. He insisted that he could beat Trump, despite his dreadful poll numbers, then grudgingly gave Kamala Harris a hospital pass. Now he is a hiatus in the era of Trump. Trump may very possibly squander the economic gains of the past four years. In foreign policy, too, he could make many problems worse. The difference is that, in international affairs, Biden’s legacy borders on abysmal.
For a man styling himself a foreign policy expert, Biden’s overall performance has been dismaying. It began in Afghanistan in 2021, where he accelerated a shameful retreat that Trump had begun. The result was a huge betrayal: of the longsuffering Afghan people and of the US, British and Nato soldiers who paid with their lives during 20 years of conflict. Biden foolishly dismissed the likelihood of a total Taliban takeover. At home, his approval ratings slumped and never recovered.
Biden’s blundering continued over Ukraine. US intelligence correctly predicted Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion, though it seriously overestimated Russian capabilities. If Biden had privately warned Putin in January 2022 that Nato would view any attack as a threat to Europe’s collective security (which it was and is) – and that, in such circumstances, the alliance would defend Ukraine – does anyone really believe Putin would have gone ahead?
But Biden, lending unwarranted weight to Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling, looked on as the invasion proceeded, then began an infuriating drip-feed of just-too-late military assistance. Nearly three years later, with tens of thousands of civilians dead and wounded, a country destroyed, and hundreds of billions of dollars in US and European aid spent, Russia is gaining ground while Ukraine slowly bleeds to death.
Biden’s gullibility and excessive caution combined to magnify an arguably even greater calamity after the 7 October 2023 Hamas terrorist atrocities. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s unscrupulous prime minister, repeatedly ran circles round him. Exploiting Biden’s strong pro-Israel loyalties, Netanyahu embarked on what the UN, international courts and human rights organisations fear is a deliberate campaign of extinction against Gaza’s Palestinians.
He repeatedly ignored Biden’s red lines, for example on Rafah and humanitarian aid, while simultaneously benefiting from record deliveries of US weapons. He defiantly extended the war into Lebanon and Syria, and drew US forces into direct confrontation with Iran. Netanyahu and his far-right allies remain the biggest obstacle to the Gaza ceasefire-hostage deal that the White House craves. He took Biden for a fool. Worse, he made the US a party to genocide.
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Biden pledged to revive the west’s nuclear deal with Iran, and got precisely nowhere. He dithered as North Korea’s nuclear missile arsenal grew. He vilified Mohammed bin Salman over Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, then shook the Saudi crown prince’s hand and asked for his help with oil supplies.
Biden’s ideological approach rested on three pillars, all decrepit. One was his 2020 campaign wheeze that foreign policy should serve America’s “middle class”. This was an incoherent bid to persuade voters that US global engagement, as opposed to Trump’s populist isolationism, was in their interest. They mostly didn’t buy it. A second pillar was the contentious claim that postwar US global hegemony is not fading, though it evidently is. Biden proclaimed: “America is back!”. Except, four years later, and despite what the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, hails as “strategic renewal”, it isn’t – and Trump is. Biden’s simplistic us-and-them third pillar – that the US leads an existential, worldwide struggle between democracy and authoritarianism – unwittingly widened that same schism. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Brics countries and the “global south” increasingly combine to challenge the western-dominated rules-based order.
Biden got plenty right. He restored transatlantic relations and rallied an enlarged Nato. He strengthened Asia-Pacific alliances to contain aggressive Chinese expansionism and befriended India. He backed climate action. His tragedy is that he got the job too late. As a cold war leader, he would have been in his element. When he finally won the Oval Office, the former Delaware senator, first elected in 1972, found a world changed beyond recognition.
Biden thought the Taliban would keep their word. He genuinely worried about nuclear war with Russia, but treacherous Putin plays by different rules. He believed Netanyahu wanted peace. Such naivety will not soon be forgotten or forgiven. In truth, “Honest Joe” Biden trusted people. His lasting legacy, in this post-Carter age, is bitter proof that they – the politicians at least – cannot be trusted at all.
