Biden’s dangerous foreign policy
In the twilight of his failed presidency, Joe Biden is making clear that his core identity is as a foreign policy hawk. It seems that he followed the tragic pathway of an earlier democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in pursuing interminable wars. Biden didn’t just support Ukraine and Israel with vast funds and weapons supplies, his administration repeatedly resisted calls for negotiations and ceasefires.
Recently, Biden has been focused mainly on foreign affairs, with the exception of pushing through a few more progressive judicial nominees recently. Biden continues to be adamant in sending military aid to Israel, even getting political allies such as Jewish senate majority leader Chuck Schumer to lobby against far-left senator Bernie Sanders’s efforts to block sales of weapons to Israel. The Biden administration also vetoed a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire, again a marked contrast to Obama, who in December 2016 refused to veto a UN resolution critical of Israel settlements. Biden has shown that he won’t lift even the smallest finger to oppose the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
On Ukraine as well, Biden continues to be an ultra-hawk. The Biden administration recently announced its decision to allow Ukraine to use American anti-personnel mines. The move contradicts not just Biden’s past opposition to the use of such weapons, but also his vow to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition for president-elect Donald Trump. Coming on top of the administration’s decision to permit Ukraine to fire U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles into Russia and its declaration that it is rushing as much U.S. aid and arms to Kyiv as possible, the Biden administration is breaking the long-standing custom between administrations to not make situations worse between the election and the inaugural.
Biden’s escalation in Ukraine comes at a strange time. The war is going badly for Ukraine, with war weariness among the population evidenced both in public opinion polls and intensifying resistance to conscription. After more than two years of grinding conflict, Ukrainians are increasingly weary of the war with Russia. In Gallup’s latest surveys of Ukraine, conducted in August and October 2024, an average of 52% of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible.
Further, any American foreign policy analysts who had previously advocated robustly arming Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression are now acknowledging that the time to negotiate has come. Given this reality, Ukraine will need to make extremely difficult decisions about what, precisely, it values. There is little serious debate that Ukraine will need to exchange territory for peace. The important question is what else Ukraine will need to concede.
The proper course is to push the incoming Trump administration to negotiate a settlement that genuinely secures Ukrainian sovereignty, even if it means giving up some of the maximalist goals that pro-Ukrainian advocates have previously had. One could argue that Biden has given Ukraine enough arms to fight but not enough to win, which is the worst of both worlds. Biden’s obsession with NATO eastward expansion has come with an enormous price tag. This has led Ukraine to massive loss of life for no clear purpose.
Negotiations now would indeed be welcome, but it is worth noting that the best time for Ukraine to negotiate was the spring of 2022, when the Russian army was on the ropes and the best possible deal could have been secured. By some reports, the U.S. and its NATO allies scuttled that negotiation. Why is Biden escalating now when it is too late? Perhaps he hopes to trap the incoming Trump administration into a quagmire. It is also possible that, like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War, Biden is using aggression to fend off the end of the war and create a decent interval between the time he leaves office and the ultimate collapse of the American effort. Or Biden, if he is even in charge, might be trying to secure a legacy of a tough global statesman. In reality, Biden is a dangerous foreign policy president.
Biden did not well in domestic policy with problems like inflation, debt, immigration, government waste, high crimes to mention a few, but foreign policy was Joe Biden’s great weakness as a president, even though it was something he delusionally and wrongly took great pride in. As Biden leaves office, the U.S. must come to terms with his failure and craft a new foreign policy.