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title: "Joe Biden's Foreign Policy Legacy: The Tarnished Record of America's 46th President"
description: "On the twentieth of January, 2025, Joe Biden ceased to be President of the United States. After four years defined by domestic turmoil, geopolitical hardship, and personal controversy, the eighty-two-year-old from Pennsylvania passed from his time as the most powerful man on Earth into the very beginning of his time in the history books. He left behind a divisive and complicated legacy: a polarized nation, a world that looked to be on the brink of a new great-power cold war, and a White House that had now passed into the hands of the most bitter political opponent he ever faced.\n\nThis is not an accounting of the personal trials of Joe Biden. It is not about laptops, vaccines, debt ceilings, gerontocracy, or how coming generations will remember America's forty-sixth president. Instead, it points a laser focus on Biden's impact around the world, from the quagmires of the Middle East and Central Asia, to the battlefields of Eastern Europe, to the rising threat of the Chinese dragon, and beyond. The aim is to examine his foreign policy in all its nuance and complexity: its notable successes, its remarkable failures, and its profound ramifications across the globe.\n\nIt is neither an easy nor a kind exercise, but it is a necessary one, as one ultra-powerful man leaves a legacy the world may reckon with for decades to come. Taken in its entirety, Biden's record abroad is a story of limited but understandable ambition, followed by a long run of half-measures, missed opportunities, and occasional major failures.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n- The 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal was inherited from a Trump-Taliban deal, but Biden compounded it with a self-imposed, symbolic deadline and a refusal to adapt as the Taliban surged, culminating in the fall of Kabul, a suicide bombing that killed 13 American troops and 169 Afghan civilians, and an airlift that evacuated over 122,000 people.\n- In Ukraine, Biden led on intelligence-sharing and weapons supply, making the United States by far the largest military donor, yet a pattern of delays and denied capabilities left Kyiv with \"enough not to lose, but not enough to win.\"\n- After October 7, 2023, Biden met most of his own stated goals for Israel through $17.9 billion in military aid and intense diplomacy, but at the cost of facilitating mass displacement and death in Gaza and presiding over a failed Red Sea coalition in Yemen.\n- Biden designated the UAE a \"major defense partner\" even as Abu Dhabi helped Iran and Russia evade sanctions, drilled with China's air force, and armed factions in Sudan and Libya that directly opposed US policy.\n- On China, Biden's quiet alliance-building, including a 2023 Japan-South Korea detente and the AUKUS pact, and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 may prove more consequential than headline moments like the spy-balloon shootdown.\n- Closer to home, a years-long effort to organize an outside intervention in collapsing Haiti produced only a 400-officer Kenyan deployment, while in Africa the $55 billion summit pledge and the $4 billion Lobito Corridor failed to reverse waning Western influence.\n- Biden's deepest failure may be his inability to keep America on the course he set, leaving much of his geopolitical legacy exposed to rapid reversal by his successor.\n\n## The Afghanistan Withdrawal\n\nIn any discussion of Biden's record abroad, there is no other place to start than America's exit from Afghanistan. When the withdrawal concluded on the thirtieth of August, 2021, the United States had been at war there for just short of twenty years. The conflict had become the geopolitical center of the long War on Terror, and by the time of the withdrawal it had left some seventy thousand civilians, over 120,000 combined US-backed Afghan fighters and Taliban insurgents, and 2,420 American troops dead, alongside more than a thousand deaths sustained by other members of America's coalition.\n\nTo Biden's limited credit, the decision to leave at that moment was not his idea. It was an albatross hung around his neck by the man who was then his predecessor and has since become his successor: Donald Trump. In 2020, the United States under Trump signed a deal with the Taliban to begin a withdrawal to be completed in 2021. Trump likely planned to finish the pull-out himself, assuming a second consecutive term. When Biden took office early that year, he found a diminished force of about 2,500 remaining American troops, supplemented by roughly 18,000 contractors.\n\nBut even though Biden did not choose to inherit the withdrawal, he handled it in a way that recurs throughout his record: limited changes, half-measures, and unforced errors, where comprehensive change and full commitment would likely have served the world better. By April 2021, Biden had indicated that a withdrawal on the rushed May timeline Trump had left him would not be possible. That came amid US intelligence concerns that Afghanistan's government might be too fragile to hold, and reports that Biden was considering keeping troops in the country until at least November. Instead of reshaping America's approach to reflect realities on the ground, he announced a self-imposed, entirely symbolic deadline: September 11, twenty years after the attacks that drew America into the War on Terror.\n\nAs the White House pushed toward its arbitrary date, and American troops fell back to the strictly defensive posture set out by Trump's Taliban deal, the insurgents surged their rate of attacks nationwide. They launched a large-scale disinformation campaign, which the United States hardly attempted to counter, claiming that Washington had already ceded large portions of the country. Morale among Afghan government troops plummeted through the floor. By May, the Taliban was pushing forward in a nationwide offensive, a sequence of events that should have drawn a change of plans. None came. American troops left the critical Bagram Air Base overnight without notifying the Afghan government, leaving behind substantial kit for the Taliban to eventually capture and standing clear for looters. By mid-July the Taliban was poised to take much of the country and looked capable of challenging for the capital. Again Biden chose not to adapt; instead he accelerated the departure date by nearly two weeks. By the end of July, half of Afghanistan was under Taliban control, and on August 15, 2021, Kabul fell.\n\nIt was an incredible failure of US military intelligence, and there is no sugarcoating it for Biden either. The decision not to turn American troops around from their retreat to force a hasty defense of Kabul was probably the less costly one, but by then US forces in Afghanistan were at the mercy of conditions Biden had either failed to change when he had the chance or, worse, had himself created. What followed was a desperate airlift from Hamid Karzai International Airport, with thousands of Americans and citizens of allied nations trying to escape, and thousands of Afghan interpreters and other perceived collaborators facing mortal danger if they could not get out.\n\nThe airlift itself combined admirable successes with horrific failures. Very quickly, the United States led an effort to establish round-the-clock overwatch of Afghan airspace, locking down the area over Kabul and forming a safe corridor for departing aircraft. The world witnessed the full might of American logistics, with over 122,000 people airlifted over the course of the operation, and Washington negotiated with the Taliban to keep the insurgents from overrunning the airport directly. But especially in the first days, the operation created conditions for a crush of desperate Afghans to risk their lives trying to board planes, at times falling to their deaths after clinging to wheels or fuselage. The Americans could not move fast enough to extract thousands of interpreters and other allies. And on August 26, a suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic State killed thirteen American troops and 169 Afghan civilians at one of the gates into the evacuation zone.\n\nFor Biden, the entire affair was an unmitigated disaster, made worse by the fact that, in retrospect, the parts that went well cannot even be attributed to him. America's ability to lock down the skies, and the logistics capacity that moved so many people so fast, were going to be available regardless of who occupied the Oval Office. If Biden can claim any credit for success there, it is credit for getting out of the way and letting the experts do their jobs. It is Biden and his high-level decision-makers, however, who failed to address the conditions that produced the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, the capture of Kabul, the mayhem of the early airlift, and the bombing that claimed 181 lives. They are the ones the US State Department was referring to in 2023, when its comprehensive Afghanistan After Action Review report found that \"there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow.\"\n\nIn fairness, even the catastrophic conclusion the world witnessed could have been worse. One suicide bombing could have been ten, or a hundred, and there was no guarantee the Taliban would stop at the airport gates. But the avoidance of an even more devastating outcome does not excuse the compounding failures of leadership that created the conditions for such a desperate retreat. Many people in the United States and other coalition nations deserve credit for the withdrawal's positive aspects; very little of it can rightfully go to Biden. If anything, those who prevented a true worst-case scenario deserve even more credit, for doing their work despite the conditions he created.\n\n## The War in Ukraine\n\nFrom Afghanistan comes the second great foreign policy crisis of the Biden administration: Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. If you want a measure of how Ukrainians felt about his handling of the war, look no further than the mood in Kyiv on the eve of America's 2024 election. According to The Economist, \"Many senior (Ukrainian) officials were hoping for a Donald Trump victory.\"\n\nThe general consensus among supporters of Kyiv was that the administration's strategy was self-deterring to the point of uselessness. As important weapons shipments were delayed and key capabilities were denied, the recurring complaint became that the White House was giving Ukraine \"enough not to lose, but not enough to win.\" The administration's conduct in the run-up to the invasion has likewise been used as a stick to beat the forty-sixth president. In a pre-election essay, Trump's pick for national security advisor, Mike Waltz, pointedly wrote: \"When Russia massed forces on Ukraine's borders in 2022, President Biden could have deterred the Russian leader by threatening catastrophic consequences. Instead, he reassured him, ruling out a military response and suggesting acceptance of a 'minor incursion'. Mr. Putin then launched the biggest conflict in Europe since the second world war.\"\n\nGiven all this, one might be tempted to write off Biden's entire Ukraine policy as an abject failure, an expensive exercise in letting Kyiv lose slowly and at great cost. Yet the truth is more complex. More than perhaps any other arena, Ukraine showed the administration at both its best and its worst: determined to lead, while simultaneously hesitant about the direction of travel and unwilling to fully commit.\n\nStart with the determined leadership. Even before Russian armor surged across the border on February 24, 2022, the administration took the unprecedented step of releasing intelligence on the Kremlin's intentions, sweeping away the fog of disinformation Putin was trying to conjure. When the bombs began falling on Kyiv, the White House, along with the United Kingdom, led the way in supplying weapons. At a time when Germany was being mocked for promising to send Ukraine \"5,000 helmets\" as a gesture of solidarity, Washington was sending anti-tank missiles.\n\nBy April, the first tranche of funding, to the tune of $13.6 billion, had been released. By the middle of 2023, Congress and the White House had collectively authorized an additional $100 billion. According to the Kiel Institute, the United States remains by far the biggest supplier of military aid to Ukraine, even if Europe has collectively sent more money once humanitarian support is included. Then came the provision of key capabilities. The arrival of HIMARS in the summer of 2022 was a genuine game-changer, scrambling Russian supply lines and disrupting command and control for weeks. And it was US intelligence that allowed Kyiv to pull off some of its biggest surprises, such as the sinking of the Moskva, the first Russian flagship lost in combat since 1905. To these the administration would doubtless add discouraging the Kremlin from detonating a tactical nuclear weapon in the autumn of 2022, when Russian lines briefly seemed in danger of collapse.\n\nAnd yet there is another side, one that may even cancel out these early successes. The negative view of Biden's Ukraine policy is that it was nothing but half-measures, a set of attempts to generate the desired outcome without making the commitments necessary to achieve it. Take the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023. While there are many reasons it failed, a big one was the lack of necessary equipment. In a major report, Britain's Royal United Services Institute highlighted the shortfall of air defense provided to the Ukrainians, as well as Kyiv being donated only a \"fraction\" of the de-mining vehicles such an operation would require.\n\nOr consider the long-delayed authorization for Kyiv to fire ATACMS into Russian territory. As many have pointed out, that delay allowed the Russians to prepare and move their assets out of range, so a decision that could have given Ukraine a brief, devastating edge had it come earlier instead had limited effect on the wider war. There was also the Pentagon's failure to agree a contract with Elon Musk over the use of Starlink prior to 2023, which left the administration with no recourse when Musk suddenly switched off coverage right before a major naval drone attack against Russia's warships. And there were the military transfers the White House failed to send before the election, despite already being authorized by Congress to do so.\n\nUltimately, the best way to judge Biden's Ukraine policy is by the results. On the one hand, Kyiv is still standing. The Russian army has lost ungodly sums of men, money, and equipment to occupy not even twenty percent of Ukrainian soil, and none of this would have been possible without American military aid. On the other hand, some of Ukraine's most productive land is now under Moscow's domination. As talk turns to peace negotiations, Kyiv seems to hold the weaker hand. While Ukraine's European backers must shoulder some of the blame, there is no doubt that a full-throated commitment from the administration in mid-2022 could have left Kyiv in a much stronger place.\n\nOne can argue over whether it would have been politically possible for Biden to pass, say, a $200 billion supplemental and flood Ukraine with weapons, or whether Europeans would have listened had he tried to browbeat them into moving their industries onto a war footing around the time of the Kharkiv counteroffensive. But the fact remains that the administration did not really try. Instead, Biden went for half-measures. And so today there is a war that seems to be ending in neither a great Russian victory nor a Kremlin humiliation: a halfway outcome unlikely to satisfy anyone. Could things have been worse? Undoubtedly. But they could also have been better. That, in the end, may be the epitaph of Joe Biden's entire Ukraine policy.\n\n## The Middle East Crisis\n\nFrom Ukraine, the focus turns to the Middle East, where the four-year Biden presidency looked, at least for a while, as if it might end up a success story. His first two and a half years in office were defined by what the Middle East Institute, in a report delivered in late September 2023, described as \"anything but the Middle East.\" In those days, the assessment was broadly accurate. Biden had spent his time attempting what his advisors called a \"back to basics\" strategy: dealing with the region, its actors, and their interests as they were, rather than embarking on some massive change initiative doomed to fail. Columnist Steven A. Cook, writing for Foreign Policy in early 2022, described the approach as \"ruthless pragmatism,\" an attempt to advance geopolitical goals by working quietly with a range of partners rather than through performative condemnations or visionary appeals.\n\nThose years were marked by a broad stalemate in the Syrian Civil War, a drawdown of hostilities in Yemen and Libya, and a reduction in the pace of Hamas attacks from Gaza toward Israel. Biden stood quietly by and let adversary Iran bring itself to the brink of ruin amid mass protests stemming from the death of Mahsa Amini. Close US ally Saudi Arabia secured a normalization deal with Tehran, offering a potentially generational opportunity to de-escalate the Iran-America adversarial posture. The Saudis were even on a path toward normalization with Israel, a move that, combined with Saudi-Iranian normalization, could have brought the region a level of deconfliction that is practically unheard of.\n\nThat, of course, did not happen. The massive Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023, set off a large-scale conflict with Israel, America's closest ally in the region. Israeli-Saudi normalization was taken off the table, perhaps as an intended result of the attack, and the United States quickly swung into a defensive posture around Jerusalem, sending all manner of military assets to deter any larger explosion. While some outlets, including The New York Times, reported that Israel had detailed advance knowledge of the attack and chose to dismiss it more than a year before it took place, it is unclear how much US intelligence would have known or how that may have shaped Biden's decision-making. What is clear is that October 7 placed Biden firmly on Israel's side in the ensuing hostilities.\n\nHis conduct can be judged through two lenses: whether he achieved the goals he set, and what the real-world implications of those decisions were. In the wake of the attacks, his list of objectives was short and clear. The central message to Israel, from his address afterward, was unambiguous: \"As long as the United States stands, and we will stand forever, we will not let you ever be alone.\" Biden committed to direct action in defense of Israel, to supporting its defense, to making further attacks impossible, and to ensuring the return of the hostages Hamas had taken into Gaza.\n\nOn those points, the record is mixed. Biden did take meaningful steps to ensure Israel's stability, providing $17.9 billion in military aid through the end of 2024 and a further $8 billion in a final package of approved purchases. His Pentagon placed substantial military assets in and around Israel, facilitated the sharing of in-depth intelligence with Jerusalem, and used diplomatic leverage to keep hostilities between Israel and Iran from escalating to all-out war. Those acts also made further attacks on Israel far less likely. On hostages his record is weaker: the United States helped broker a 2023 ceasefire that saw the release of fifty hostages, but his attempts to negotiate a broader deal were unsuccessful thereafter. Remarkably, the prospect of Israel-Saudi normalization appears to still be on the table.\n\nThen there is the other side of the coin: not Biden's fulfillment of his objectives, but the repercussions of his choices on the broader Middle East. Since the Israel-Hamas war began, Biden presided over a close alliance with a nation accused of everything from collective punishment to weaponized starvation to outright genocide in its treatment of the people of Gaza. About ninety percent of Gaza's pre-war population has been displaced, tens of thousands have died, and much of the territory has either been narrowly dodging famine for months or has begun to succumb. That is in no small part a result of Biden's policies: sending the bombs and munitions Israel has used to carry out airstrikes, and providing near-complete diplomatic cover in front of international bodies like the United Nations that might otherwise have pressured Israel. Regardless of what one thinks of the situation, and regardless of the fact that Hamas and the Israeli government are ultimately responsible for the state of affairs, it is Biden who facilitated Israel throughout. In an additional blow to his legacy at home, his failure to engage members of his own political coalition over Gaza may have been a major contributor to his party's electoral loss.\n\nElsewhere in the region, the story is largely the same. Biden declined to stop Israel from a massive airstrike campaign and ground invasion in Lebanon, watching as Israel used US-supplied munitions before eventually helping to broker a ceasefire. In Yemen, the administration came to the defense of Israel and of maritime shipping amid attacks by the Houthis, though the US-led Red Sea coalition, Operation Prosperity Guardian, could be charitably described as underwhelming and more accurately as a failure. As a final verdict on Biden in the Middle East, the man himself might describe his work favorably: from normalization efforts to pragmatic politics to the support of Israel, he broadly got what he wanted. The rest of the world's recollection of his impact, however, might be another story entirely.\n\n## The Embrace of the Emirates\n\nGiven how much of Biden's presidency was defined by events in the Middle East, it is odd that relatively little attention has been paid to his tight embrace of the United Arab Emirates. In the fall of 2024, Biden designated the UAE a \"major defense partner\" of the United States, opening up numerous perks for Abu Dhabi, from intelligence sharing to weapons transfers. As Reuters noted of the upgrade, \"India is the only other country to have been designated as such.\"\n\nIn some ways this was to be expected. The UAE has long been a close American ally, hosting 5,000 US military personnel, plus aircraft and warships, at Al Dhafra Air Base and Jebel Ali deep-water port. It also follows Washington's lead on Israel, becoming one of the first signatories to the Abraham Accords in 2020. In other ways, though, the administration's embrace of Abu Dhabi could not be odder. Throughout Biden's presidency, the UAE and its ruler, Mohamed bin Zayed, repeatedly pursued goals at direct odds with US foreign policy.\n\nAt the less egregious end, this included helping entities tied to the Iranian and Russian governments bypass sanctions. The Economist wrote in 2023 that \"Iranian oil is often exchanged at sea off the emirate of Fujairah, blended with other crude and sold on. After traders in Geneva began shunning Russian crude, Dubai became the place to finance and trade shipments.\" More vexing still, it included the UAE air force conducting joint exercises in Xinjiang with its Chinese counterpart. Given that the UAE operates Western aircraft, like the French Mirage 2000, that are vital to Taiwan's defenses, the International Institute for Strategic Studies wrote that the joint exercise \"raises the issue of Chinese access to Western military-aircraft.\"\n\nBut perhaps the area where the UAE most tried to thwart American goals involved wars on the African continent, where Abu Dhabi spent years fueling conflicts it is explicit American policy to stop. None stands out quite like Sudan, where the conflict has produced apocalyptic conditions: an estimated 150,000 dead, 12 million refugees, and the flattening of entire cities by the warring SAF and RSF. Less remarked upon are the United States' attempts to stop the conflict through negotiations. Officially, the UAE was a partner in those talks. Unofficially, UAE cargo planes were secretly undertaking massive weapons transfers to the RSF, fueling both the conflict and what appears to be another genocide in Darfur. The reasons for Abu Dhabi backing the RSF are legion, from securing a potential port on the Red Sea to gaining access to Sudan's vast gold reserves. But the point is not whether one could construct a realpolitik case for the intervention; it is that the intervention directly contradicted Washington's interests. As US Special Envoy to Sudan Tom Perriello told The Washington Post, \"Having a country that is sinking into not just violence and instability but potentially a failed state is something that creates enormous risks.\"\n\nIt is a similar story with the UAE's long-running weapons transfers to Libyan warlord General Khalifa Haftar, transfers that helped arm the party not just opposing the US-backed government but openly aligned with American foes like Russia. As a result of behavior like this, the United Arab Emirates spent the last four years acting as a kind of spoiler for US foreign policy. Yet the administration's answer was to continuously upgrade the defense relationship between Washington and Abu Dhabi. There are clear strategic reasons for keeping the UAE close. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs of deepening relations with such an unreliable ally is something only history will be able to judge.\n\n## The Pivot to China\n\nIf there is one thing about Joe Biden that even non-Americans who do not follow politics know, it is that the forty-sixth president was old. Less remarked upon is that he was also incredibly old-fashioned in his foreign policy outlook. Despite serving as Obama's vice president during the famous \"Pivot to Asia,\" the Biden White House seemed to operate more like something out of the Cold War or the Bush era, fixated on the Middle East and Eastern Europe at the expense of all else.\n\nYet note the phrase \"seemed to.\" While Biden's entire political obituary could probably be reduced to the words \"Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza,\" there was a great deal of drama around his administration's approach to China, some of it behind the scenes, some out in the open, but all of it perhaps helping set the stage for the defining conflict of the twenty-first century. The more spectacular moments are easy to recall: the shooting down of the Chinese spy balloon in the first weeks of 2023, and the freeze in relations that followed, along with the multiple times Biden broke with longstanding US policy by suggesting he would go to war to defend Taiwan.\n\nIt is the quieter work, though, that will likely have the longer-term impact, most of it falling into two buckets: economic preparation and strengthening alliances. In the second bucket sits the administration's greatest coup in Asia: arranging a 2023 detente between longtime enemies South Korea and Japan to act as a bulwark against Chinese aggression. While political chaos in Seoul now threatens to undermine those gains, a coordinated response among these longstanding American allies will be key in any future showdown with Beijing. Along similar lines, the White House pledged money and military protection to the Philippines, which went from being largely pro-China under previous leader Rodrigo Duterte to heavily pro-American under current leader Bongbong Marcos. Although the payoff of expanded access to Filipino military bases never quite materialized, the hope is that Manila is now better equipped to stop Chinese adventurism in its waters.\n\nFurther south came the cementing of the AUKUS partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom, intended to provide Canberra with nuclear-powered attack submarines. The flipside is that it involved secretly tanking a separate deal between Australia and France, infuriating a major NATO ally, while committing the Pentagon to a project that recent Congressional research suggests could be an expensive failure. But the administration was not purely focused on building alliances against Beijing. In the economic arena, it both expanded Trump-era tariffs and passed legislation designed to future-proof the United States in key sectors. The biggest of these was perhaps the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which the Council on Foreign Relations explains \"is intended to lure microchip manufacturing back to the United States after several decades of individual companies offshoring the technology.\"\n\nThe value of Taiwan's semiconductor industry, and the global damage that could be done should it be captured or destroyed in a war with China, is well understood by anyone following war and geopolitics. The CHIPS Act was meant to guard against this by creating an American manufacturing base to rival Taiwan's. But despite enormous investment, it is still too early to tell how successful the effort will be. Fifteen years from now, people may look back on the Act as a stroke of genius, or it may simply be forgotten, a nice idea that did not go far enough.\n\nThat, in fact, is how one could characterize a lot of Biden's economic policy toward China. Despite considerable outward success, The Economist opined in mid-2023 that the administration's policies were \"bringing neither resilience nor security. Supply chains have become more tangled and opaque as they have adapted to the new rules. And, if you look closely, it becomes clear that America's reliance on Chinese critical inputs remains.\" Overall, the jury remains out on Biden's attempts to contain China while avoiding war. Should a confrontation eventually come, future historians will look back on some of these efforts and reclassify them as either necessary steps to assure victory or weak, confused policies that failed to stop catastrophe. For now, the only thing one can say for certain is that the story of the Biden administration's approach to China is still being written.\n\n## The Push for Intervention in Haiti\n\nBecause his presidency will be remembered for crises in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, it can be a surprise to recall that one major foreign policy challenge took place much closer to home: a mere thousand kilometers from Florida. In the summer of 2021, barely a month before the fall of Kabul, the president of Haiti was assassinated. The killing sparked the beginning of a society-wide collapse fueled by growing gang violence. By October 2022, the Haitian government was publicly calling for an armed intervention to restore order. So began the tortured story of perhaps the administration's most protracted failure.\n\nFrom the outset, Biden ruled out sending American troops, reasoning that previous US-led interventions, in 1915, 1994, and 2004, had been deeply unpopular. But rather than wash his hands of the matter, he tried to use diplomatic muscle to convince another nation to take on the task of pacifying Haiti's gangs. And what a task it was. By 2023, Haiti's murder rate was on par with that of Ecuador, a nation that would soon declare itself in a state of \"internal armed conflict.\" Eighty percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, had fallen under gang control. As CBC explained to Canadian audiences, fighting such irregular forces in a dense urban environment was \"exactly the kind (of mission) that professional militaries try to avoid.\"\n\nCanada is worth mentioning because, for a long time, it was Biden's first choice to lead an intervention. As 2023 ground on, CBC reported a campaign of \"direct and heavy U.S. pressure on Canada.\" Normally one might expect Ottawa to fold before the full force of Washington's diplomatic might, but not this time. The Canadian government refused to budge. Officially, the reason was that outside interventions in Haiti had not worked before. But Chief of the Defence Staff Wayne Eyre was fairly open in admitting that his nation simply did not have the capacity for such a mission, not while also maintaining its NATO commitments in Eastern Europe.\n\nSo the search began for another country to take the lead. At one point it looked as if the administration might get Brazil to commit, only for the plan to fall through. Haiti's old colonial master, France, agreed to send money but little else. The United Nations, still burned by the scandals that had accompanied its own intervention, did not want to step up. By 2024, Haiti had become a constant, gnawing distraction for the White House, never quite evolving into a crisis on par with Ukraine or Gaza, but never receding far enough from the headlines to be safely ignored, not while the threat loomed of Haitian refugees fleeing the violence en masse in boats bound for Florida.\n\nEventually, the administration secured a commitment from Kenya to lead a policing mission to restore order, in return for designation as a \"major non-NATO ally.\" Nairobi would join several African and Caribbean nations in deploying 2,500 officers to Haiti, while the United States would bankroll everything to the tune of $300 million. Yet the intervention never got off the ground. Only 400 underequipped officers were ever deployed. Unable to make a dent in the gangs' control, they instead became witnesses to Haiti's collapse. According to Action Aid, more than 5,000 people were murdered in Haiti in the most recent year, a staggering number in a nation of just 11.7 million. Massacres wiped out villages. As the Council on Foreign Relations notes, almost five million Haitians are now on the verge of starvation.\n\nIs any of this Joe Biden's fault? No. The forty-sixth president could easily have turned a blind eye to Haiti's collapse, and that he tried to do something without dragging the United States into another quagmire is to his credit. But the fact remains that backing an intervention to restore order in Haiti became one of the administration's foreign policy goals. That it proved unable to convince allies such as Canada or Brazil to take the lead can therefore only be called a failure.\n\n## The Struggle for Africa's Resources\n\nFinally, the focus turns to Africa, and to Biden's performance in what has been the quietest and most underappreciated global competition of the last four years. From China's evolving Belt and Road Initiative, to Russia's deployment of Wagner troops to prop up vulnerable regimes, to initiatives by Turkey, the UAE, and others, the effort to secure diplomatic or direct control over Africa's resources has been an incredibly important undercurrent of global affairs. In this realm Biden started strong, holding a summit with forty-nine African leaders in Washington in 2022 and broadly attempting to re-engage with the continent after four years of insults and disengagement under Donald Trump. During that summit, Biden committed $55 billion to Africa for a three-year development push and vowed to bolster ongoing projects such as the Power Africa and Prosper Africa initiatives. He laid out plans to invest in critical ports, engage with African free trade, and more, all in an effort to catch America up to the substantial progress China and Russia have made on the continent, where the two major powers have locked down key relationships and, more importantly, secured access to its wealth of resources.\n\nAt the tail end of Biden's presidency, most of those promises had not quite been realized. Oddly enough for an American chief executive, the waning days of the administration were marked by a trip to Angola, a visit all about the same scramble for resources that had drawn Biden's focus to the continent in the first place. While there, he visited the port town of Lobito, the linchpin of a project known as the Lobito Corridor. The corridor became the crown jewel of Biden's Africa policy: a rail and infrastructure initiative that soaked up $4 billion and refurbished a railway carrying cobalt, copper, and other rare and precious materials from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As his earlier candid admissions had indicated, the Lobito Corridor was a microcosm of his approach to the entire continent, a recognition that resource extraction is a game the United States cannot afford to be left out of.\n\nBut the actual impact of the Lobito Corridor and Biden's other African initiatives remains underwhelming. While Biden did increase the pace of resource extraction from the heart of Africa, he did little to meaningfully improve the conditions under which that extraction is carried out, in impoverished and dangerous communities documented to have endured large-scale suffering to bring about the world's digital revolution. Nor did he turn the tide of waning American and European influence, particularly that of France, in nations that have asked France to leave and promptly allowed Russia to move into the void. Biden appears either not to have picked up on, or to have failed to act on, problems ranging from Wagner operations to extractive and heavy-handed UAE action to the apocalyptic situations in Sudan, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. And although the Lobito Corridor is a nice poster piece, it is ultimately not enough of an investment to truly counter China's growing influence. Thus Biden's legacy in Africa goes the same way as elsewhere: half-measures, ideas not quite followed by decisive action, and results far less impressive than what America might have achieved.\n\n## Biden in Retrospect\n\nStepping back from the conflict-by-conflict tour, the broader shape of Joe Biden's legacy comes into view, in dimensions that cannot be captured by moving from one crisis to the next. In the diplomatic sphere, his general approach was one of reorientation toward a more pragmatic, less aspirational view of the world, treating other nations as self-interested actors rather than loyalists or antagonists to a broader American cause. That approach had its successes: drawing Saudi Arabia and Israel closer, bringing South Korea and Japan into dialogue, tightening a web around China that involved India, Australia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and others, and making real attempts to shape the future of the NATO alliance.\n\nIn the process, however, Biden showed a far higher tolerance for pushing, defiance, and at times outright manipulation by other nations, including US allies. From Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel refusing to heed Biden's words of caution over Gaza, to nations like Turkey and the UAE drawing implicit US tolerance for initiatives many of Biden's own supporters would have disdained, to Vladimir Putin's continued use of brinksmanship and threats of escalation to maintain his status quo in Ukraine, Biden's diplomacy was often caught a step behind. Worse, it produced results that frequently ran counter to his own interests. As America grew more comfortable with pragmatic, non-ideological dealmaking, so did its adversaries grow comfortable announcing they would do the same. Russia significantly expanded its paramilitary presence across Africa and drew supposed no-limits support from China. Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey each turned into kingmakers in their respective spheres. North Korean troops appeared on the front lines in Kursk, a move that should be stunning but instead feels no less transactional than any other foreign-policy move of the last four years. The problem is not that Biden chose to play the wrong game; it is that he chose to play it despite not being any better at it than Russia, China, or anyone else, and perhaps playing it slightly worse. Much of his geopolitical gains, moreover, could be undone fairly quickly depending on what his successor chooses to do.\n\nThen there is America's own military-industrial complex, the thing that upholds America's role in the world by force, even when the world will not uphold America by choice. Here there is some good news, starting with the administration's multibillion-dollar 2024 initiative to expand semiconductor manufacturing capability in the United States. These chips are indispensable for twenty-first-century defense and industry and were previously produced mostly in Taiwan, a major strategic vulnerability. The United States also worked to secure the supply of critical resources, as with the Lobito Corridor. But Biden took significant hits here too. China recently banned the export of several rare-earth metals to the United States, a potentially major setback for America's defense industry. US defense initiatives at the Pentagon faced significant trouble under his management. America's Next Generation Air Dominance program, its bid to field a sixth-generation fighter aircraft, was put on hold in October 2024, just two months before China revealed what looks to be multiple super-advanced fighter types that have already flown. Other initiatives, like much-needed upgrades to America's intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal, ran into major trouble, while procurement of everything from F-35s to air-defense systems to aircraft carriers was delayed.\n\nFinally there is Biden's record in great-power competition, where he can again boast a few successes: a productive and ongoing reorientation toward rising China, a tightening of geopolitical ties in the Indo-Pacific, and a proxy partner in Ukraine that survived far longer against Russia than anyone expected. Yet here too his successes are nowhere near as complete as they might have been. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea form a much more overt geopolitical axis today than they did four years ago, while rising powers like India and Brazil have been content to play both sides rather than coming into the fold alongside the United States and Europe. In building a network of territories around China, Biden risked a functional surrender of sea areas where China's claims are disputed, while in failing to push enough support to Ukraine to let it succeed, he laid the terms for what will be a deeply unfavorable peace settlement under Trump. His improvements to NATO were substantial, but also short-term, and it now appears they were not enough.\n\nIt is here that we arrive at what may go down as the greatest foreign-policy failure of the Biden era: not a specific war or negotiation, but his inability to keep America on the course he set for it. His job, as a person who presumably believed that what he was doing was right, was to ensure that his approach could continue into the future. In reality, a combination of questionable decisions in foreign and domestic policy, a failure to clear the way in time to properly anoint a successor, and a failure to sacrifice or scapegoat his personal legacy in order to save the broader vision ultimately ensured that his approach to geopolitics would not continue as he laid it out. Instead, the United States has now passed into the control of Biden's geopolitical polar opposite, and much of what he would count, rightly or wrongly, as his achievements abroad are likely to be undone.\n\nThere are plenty of voices, most of them Biden's political allies, working to explain why America's forty-sixth president deserves to be remembered as a great leader in geopolitics. This assessment cannot join them. In retrospect, Joe Biden's foreign policy legacy is one of limited but understandable ambition, followed by a series of half-measures, missed or underutilized opportunities, and occasional major failures. It was not a pretty picture, and while only a few dimensions rise to the level of abject failure, similarly few qualify as unqualified success. The vast majority were a combination of partial victory and acute disappointment, and as the American people decided, that combination simply was not good enough.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### Did Joe Biden decide to withdraw from Afghanistan?\n\nNo. The decision to leave Afghanistan in 2021 originated with a 2020 deal between the Trump administration and the Taliban, which Biden inherited along with about 2,500 remaining American troops and roughly 18,000 contractors. His own contributions were a self-imposed September 11 deadline and a refusal to adapt the plan as conditions deteriorated, culminating in the fall of Kabul, a suicide bombing that killed thirteen American troops and 169 Afghan civilians, and an airlift that evacuated over 122,000 people.\n\n### How much military aid did the United States authorize for Ukraine under Biden, and what were the results?\n\nThe first tranche of $13.6 billion was released by April 2022, and by the middle of 2023 Congress and the White House had collectively authorized an additional $100 billion. According to the Kiel Institute, the United States remained by far the biggest supplier of military aid to Ukraine. Yet critics argued the administration gave Kyiv \"enough not to lose, but not enough to win,\" citing delays on key capabilities like ATACMS and insufficient de-mining equipment for the 2023 counteroffensive.\n\n### What were Biden's stated goals for Israel after October 7, 2023, and how far did he succeed?\n\nBiden committed to direct action in defense of Israel, supporting its defense, making further attacks impossible, and ensuring the return of hostages. He provided $17.9 billion in military aid through the end of 2024 plus a further $8 billion package, and used diplomatic leverage to keep the Israel-Iran exchange from escalating to all-out war. His hostage diplomacy secured a 2023 ceasefire that freed fifty hostages but failed to produce a broader deal, while his facilitation of Israel's campaign contributed to mass displacement and tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza.\n\n### Why was the United States' embrace of the UAE controversial under Biden?\n\nBiden designated the UAE a \"major defense partner,\" a status otherwise held only by India, even as Abu Dhabi pursued goals at odds with US policy: helping Iranian and Russian entities bypass sanctions, conducting joint air exercises with China in Xinjiang using Western aircraft, and secretly transferring weapons to the RSF in Sudan and to warlord Khalifa Haftar in Libya. The administration justified the relationship by pointing to the UAE's strategic importance as a counterweight to Iran and a host for roughly 5,000 US military personnel.\n\n### What happened with Biden's effort to organize an intervention in Haiti?\n\nAfter ruling out American troops, Biden spent years trying to convince another nation to lead an intervention, pressuring Canada — which refused citing capacity limits — and pursuing Brazil, France, and the United Nations without success. He eventually secured a Kenyan-led mission, designating Kenya a \"major non-NATO ally\" and funding it with $300 million, but only 400 underequipped officers ever deployed. Unable to make a dent in the gangs' control, the mission became a witness to Haiti's collapse rather than a solution to it.\n\n\n## Sources\n1. <https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/08/17/a-year-later-a-look-back-at-public-opinion-about-the-u-s-military-exit-from-afghanistan/>\n2. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68612367>\n3. <https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/icymi-the-long-shadow-of-bidens-afghan-withdrawal-debacle/>\n4. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-the-biden-administrations-report-on-the-afghanistan-withdrawal-gets-wrong/>\n5. <https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/afghanistan-after-us-withdrawal-five-conclusions/>\n6. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/whats-happening-in-afghanistan-one-year-after-the-u-s-withdrawal/>\n7. <https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/2-years-withdrawal-afghanistan-continues-cast-pall-biden/story?id=102837216>\n8. <https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/politics/state-deparment-afghanistan-withdrawal-report/index.html>\n9. <https://www.npr.org/2024/08/27/nx-s1-5090061/the-chaotic-u-s-exit-from-afghanistan-in-2021-had-stems-from-four-administrations>\n10. <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blinken-testifies-afghanistan-withdrawal-house-foreign-affairs-committee/>\n11. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/30/us-afghanistan-war-military-pullout-report-biden-trump>\n12. <https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-afghanistan-al-qaida-ayman-zawahri-f00d745cb7cf00e3ada60017401f6784>\n13. <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-biden-can-salvage-middle-east-peace-and-his-legacy>\n14. <https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/bidens-middle-east-moonshot>\n15. <https://www.mei.edu/publications/treading-cautiously-shifting-sands-assessment-bidens-middle-east-policy-approach-2021-2023>\n16. <https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-biden-administration-and-the-middle-east-in-2023/>\n17. <https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/growing-pains-promise-and-reality-bidens-middle-east-policy>\n18. <https://www.usip.org/publications/2022/07/five-takeaways-bidens-visit-middle-east>\n19. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/middle-eastern-autocrats-embarrassed-biden-at-will/>\n20. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/around-the-halls-brookings-experts-on-bidens-performance-in-the-middle-east/>\n21. <https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/07/biden-middle-east-saudi-arabia-syria-yemen-strategy/>\n22. <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html>\n23. <https://apnews.com/article/new-york-times-hamas-attack-israel-gaza-6088cad78f5e4153d671fe9b5b819308>\n24. <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/saudi-iranian-relations-restored-remain-tense>\n25. <https://mepc.org/commentaries/impact-iranian-saudi-normalization/>\n26. <https://carnegieendowment.org/middle-east/diwan/2024/10/no-to-a-saudi-israeli-deal?lang=en>\n27. <https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/saudi-israeli-normalization-persists-amid-gaza-war/>\n28. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-saudi-arabia-closer-normalisation-deal-report>\n29. <https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/israel-saudi-arabia-iran-trump/>\n30. <https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/10/18/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-october-7th-terrorist-attacks-and-the-resilience-of-the-state-of-israel-and-its-people-tel-aviv-israel/>\n31. <https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-speaks-oct-7-commitment-hostages-home-hanukkah/story?id=116851278>\n32. <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/us/politics/us-weapons-israel.html>\n33. <https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/congress-notified-biden-administration-planned-8-billion-weapons-117330328>\n34. <https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts>\n35. <https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-marks-americas-contribution-african-infrastucture-angola-visit-rcna182865>\n36. 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<https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bidens-meager-1-us-defense-budget-increase-buys-fewer-ships-jets-2024-03-11/>\n47. <https://www.airandspaceforces.com/navy-next-gen-fighter-ngad-pause/>\n48. <https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-bans-exports-gallium-germanium-antimony-us-2024-12-03/>\n49. <https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/11/07/why-volodymyr-zelensky-may-welcome-donald-trumps-victory>\n50. <https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/11/02/china-is-the-big-winner-from-bidens-foreign-policy-say-michael-waltz-and-matthew-kroenig>\n51. <https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/19/russia-ukraine-us-intelligence-diplomacy-invasion-anniversary/>\n52. <https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/27/germanys-offer-to-send-5000-helmets-to-ukraine-provokes-outrage.html>\n53. <https://www.csis.org/analysis/past-present-and-future-us-assistance-ukraine-deep-dive-data>\n54. <https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/>\n55. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61343044>\n56. <https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/09/politics/us-prepared-rigorously-potential-russian-nuclear-strike-ukraine/index.html>\n57. <https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/preliminary-lessons-ukraines-offensive-operations-2022-23>\n58. <https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4193788-musk-acknowledges-he-turned-off-starlink-internet-access-last-year-during-ukraine-attack-on-russia-military/>\n59. <https://www.economist.com/briefing/2023/11/23/the-messier-the-world-gets-the-more-the-uae-seems-to-thrive>\n60. <https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harris-plans-raise-gaza-ceasefire-deal-meetings-with-uae-leader-2024-09-23/>\n61. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/15/sudan-war-weapons-uae-iran/>\n62. <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/world/africa/sudan-war-united-arab-emirates-chad.html>\n63. <https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/military-balance/2024/07/more-than-a-mirage-uae-combat-aircraft-in-china/>\n64. <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/world/americas/haiti-canada-us.html>\n65. <https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20221027-us-to-push-for-multinational-haiti-intervention-force-in-canada-talks>\n66. <https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/11/haiti-crisis-biden-canada-00066234>\n67. <https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/haiti-canada-biden-trudeau-1.6788656>\n68. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/25/haitians-wary-as-kenyan-police-arrive-on-latest-us-backed-mission>\n69. <https://apnews.com/article/biden-ruto-kenya-state-visit-debt-africa-e27be0b4a8c4bd54e4a30b3c5a9c1e34>\n70. <https://www.cfr.org/blog/rescuing-haiti-gang-rule>\n71. <https://actionaid.org/opinions/2024/2024-was-deadliest-year-haitis-recent-history-we-cannot-let-haiti-fatigue-set>\n72. <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/politics/chinese-spy-balloon-shot-down.html>\n73. <https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/06/05/asia-pacific/politics/biden-defend-taiwan-china/>\n74. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66543514>\n75. <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/world/asia/us-philippines-military-aid-china.html>\n76. <https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2023/03/the-aukus-submarine-deal-highlights-a-tectonic-shift-in-the-us-australia-alliance?lang=en>\n77. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/18/aukus-submarine-deal-us-australia-cost-blowouts>\n78. <https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-chips-act>\n79. <https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/08/10/joe-bidens-china-strategy-is-not-working>\n\n<!-- youtube:Cx02BR0Fs88 -->"
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<!-- aeo:section start="lede" -->
On the twentieth of January, 2025, Joe Biden ceased to be President of the United States. After four years defined by domestic turmoil, geopolitical hardship, and personal controversy, the eighty-two-year-old from Pennsylvania passed from his time as the most powerful man on Earth into the very beginning of his time in the history books. He left behind a divisive and complicated legacy: a polarized nation, a world that looked to be on the brink of a new great-power cold war, and a White House that had now passed into the hands of the most bitter political opponent he ever faced.

This is not an accounting of the personal trials of Joe Biden. It is not about laptops, vaccines, debt ceilings, gerontocracy, or how coming generations will remember America's forty-sixth president. Instead, it points a laser focus on Biden's impact around the world, from the quagmires of the Middle East and Central Asia, to the battlefields of Eastern Europe, to the rising threat of the Chinese dragon, and beyond. The aim is to examine his foreign policy in all its nuance and complexity: its notable successes, its remarkable failures, and its profound ramifications across the globe.

It is neither an easy nor a kind exercise, but it is a necessary one, as one ultra-powerful man leaves a legacy the world may reckon with for decades to come. Taken in its entirety, Biden's record abroad is a story of limited but understandable ambition, followed by a long run of half-measures, missed opportunities, and occasional major failures.

<!-- aeo:section end="lede" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="key-takeaways" -->
## Key Takeaways
- The 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal was inherited from a Trump-Taliban deal, but Biden compounded it with a self-imposed, symbolic deadline and a refusal to adapt as the Taliban surged, culminating in the fall of Kabul, a suicide bombing that killed 13 American troops and 169 Afghan civilians, and an airlift that evacuated over 122,000 people.
- In Ukraine, Biden led on intelligence-sharing and weapons supply, making the United States by far the largest military donor, yet a pattern of delays and denied capabilities left Kyiv with "enough not to lose, but not enough to win."
- After October 7, 2023, Biden met most of his own stated goals for Israel through $17.9 billion in military aid and intense diplomacy, but at the cost of facilitating mass displacement and death in Gaza and presiding over a failed Red Sea coalition in Yemen.
- Biden designated the UAE a "major defense partner" even as Abu Dhabi helped Iran and Russia evade sanctions, drilled with China's air force, and armed factions in Sudan and Libya that directly opposed US policy.
- On China, Biden's quiet alliance-building, including a 2023 Japan-South Korea detente and the AUKUS pact, and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 may prove more consequential than headline moments like the spy-balloon shootdown.
- Closer to home, a years-long effort to organize an outside intervention in collapsing Haiti produced only a 400-officer Kenyan deployment, while in Africa the $55 billion summit pledge and the $4 billion Lobito Corridor failed to reverse waning Western influence.
- Biden's deepest failure may be his inability to keep America on the course he set, leaving much of his geopolitical legacy exposed to rapid reversal by his successor.

<!-- aeo:section end="key-takeaways" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-afghanistan-withdrawal" -->
## The Afghanistan Withdrawal

In any discussion of Biden's record abroad, there is no other place to start than America's exit from Afghanistan. When the withdrawal concluded on the thirtieth of August, 2021, the United States had been at war there for just short of twenty years. The conflict had become the geopolitical center of the long War on Terror, and by the time of the withdrawal it had left some seventy thousand civilians, over 120,000 combined US-backed Afghan fighters and Taliban insurgents, and 2,420 American troops dead, alongside more than a thousand deaths sustained by other members of America's coalition.

To Biden's limited credit, the decision to leave at that moment was not his idea. It was an albatross hung around his neck by the man who was then his predecessor and has since become his successor: Donald Trump. In 2020, the United States under Trump signed a deal with the Taliban to begin a withdrawal to be completed in 2021. Trump likely planned to finish the pull-out himself, assuming a second consecutive term. When Biden took office early that year, he found a diminished force of about 2,500 remaining American troops, supplemented by roughly 18,000 contractors.

But even though Biden did not choose to inherit the withdrawal, he handled it in a way that recurs throughout his record: limited changes, half-measures, and unforced errors, where comprehensive change and full commitment would likely have served the world better. By April 2021, Biden had indicated that a withdrawal on the rushed May timeline Trump had left him would not be possible. That came amid US intelligence concerns that Afghanistan's government might be too fragile to hold, and reports that Biden was considering keeping troops in the country until at least November. Instead of reshaping America's approach to reflect realities on the ground, he announced a self-imposed, entirely symbolic deadline: September 11, twenty years after the attacks that drew America into the War on Terror.

As the White House pushed toward its arbitrary date, and American troops fell back to the strictly defensive posture set out by Trump's Taliban deal, the insurgents surged their rate of attacks nationwide. They launched a large-scale disinformation campaign, which the United States hardly attempted to counter, claiming that Washington had already ceded large portions of the country. Morale among Afghan government troops plummeted through the floor. By May, the Taliban was pushing forward in a nationwide offensive, a sequence of events that should have drawn a change of plans. None came. American troops left the critical Bagram Air Base overnight without notifying the Afghan government, leaving behind substantial kit for the Taliban to eventually capture and standing clear for looters. By mid-July the Taliban was poised to take much of the country and looked capable of challenging for the capital. Again Biden chose not to adapt; instead he accelerated the departure date by nearly two weeks. By the end of July, half of Afghanistan was under Taliban control, and on August 15, 2021, Kabul fell.

It was an incredible failure of US military intelligence, and there is no sugarcoating it for Biden either. The decision not to turn American troops around from their retreat to force a hasty defense of Kabul was probably the less costly one, but by then US forces in Afghanistan were at the mercy of conditions Biden had either failed to change when he had the chance or, worse, had himself created. What followed was a desperate airlift from Hamid Karzai International Airport, with thousands of Americans and citizens of allied nations trying to escape, and thousands of Afghan interpreters and other perceived collaborators facing mortal danger if they could not get out.

The airlift itself combined admirable successes with horrific failures. Very quickly, the United States led an effort to establish round-the-clock overwatch of Afghan airspace, locking down the area over Kabul and forming a safe corridor for departing aircraft. The world witnessed the full might of American logistics, with over 122,000 people airlifted over the course of the operation, and Washington negotiated with the Taliban to keep the insurgents from overrunning the airport directly. But especially in the first days, the operation created conditions for a crush of desperate Afghans to risk their lives trying to board planes, at times falling to their deaths after clinging to wheels or fuselage. The Americans could not move fast enough to extract thousands of interpreters and other allies. And on August 26, a suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic State killed thirteen American troops and 169 Afghan civilians at one of the gates into the evacuation zone.

For Biden, the entire affair was an unmitigated disaster, made worse by the fact that, in retrospect, the parts that went well cannot even be attributed to him. America's ability to lock down the skies, and the logistics capacity that moved so many people so fast, were going to be available regardless of who occupied the Oval Office. If Biden can claim any credit for success there, it is credit for getting out of the way and letting the experts do their jobs. It is Biden and his high-level decision-makers, however, who failed to address the conditions that produced the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, the capture of Kabul, the mayhem of the early airlift, and the bombing that claimed 181 lives. They are the ones the US State Department was referring to in 2023, when its comprehensive Afghanistan After Action Review report found that "there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow."

In fairness, even the catastrophic conclusion the world witnessed could have been worse. One suicide bombing could have been ten, or a hundred, and there was no guarantee the Taliban would stop at the airport gates. But the avoidance of an even more devastating outcome does not excuse the compounding failures of leadership that created the conditions for such a desperate retreat. Many people in the United States and other coalition nations deserve credit for the withdrawal's positive aspects; very little of it can rightfully go to Biden. If anything, those who prevented a true worst-case scenario deserve even more credit, for doing their work despite the conditions he created.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-afghanistan-withdrawal" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-war-in-ukraine" -->
## The War in Ukraine

From Afghanistan comes the second great foreign policy crisis of the Biden administration: Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. If you want a measure of how Ukrainians felt about his handling of the war, look no further than the mood in Kyiv on the eve of America's 2024 election. According to The Economist, "Many senior (Ukrainian) officials were hoping for a Donald Trump victory."

The general consensus among supporters of Kyiv was that the administration's strategy was self-deterring to the point of uselessness. As important weapons shipments were delayed and key capabilities were denied, the recurring complaint became that the White House was giving Ukraine "enough not to lose, but not enough to win." The administration's conduct in the run-up to the invasion has likewise been used as a stick to beat the forty-sixth president. In a pre-election essay, Trump's pick for national security advisor, Mike Waltz, pointedly wrote: "When Russia massed forces on Ukraine's borders in 2022, President Biden could have deterred the Russian leader by threatening catastrophic consequences. Instead, he reassured him, ruling out a military response and suggesting acceptance of a 'minor incursion'. Mr. Putin then launched the biggest conflict in Europe since the second world war."

Given all this, one might be tempted to write off Biden's entire Ukraine policy as an abject failure, an expensive exercise in letting Kyiv lose slowly and at great cost. Yet the truth is more complex. More than perhaps any other arena, Ukraine showed the administration at both its best and its worst: determined to lead, while simultaneously hesitant about the direction of travel and unwilling to fully commit.

Start with the determined leadership. Even before Russian armor surged across the border on February 24, 2022, the administration took the unprecedented step of releasing intelligence on the Kremlin's intentions, sweeping away the fog of disinformation Putin was trying to conjure. When the bombs began falling on Kyiv, the White House, along with the United Kingdom, led the way in supplying weapons. At a time when Germany was being mocked for promising to send Ukraine "5,000 helmets" as a gesture of solidarity, Washington was sending anti-tank missiles.

By April, the first tranche of funding, to the tune of $13.6 billion, had been released. By the middle of 2023, Congress and the White House had collectively authorized an additional $100 billion. According to the Kiel Institute, the United States remains by far the biggest supplier of military aid to Ukraine, even if Europe has collectively sent more money once humanitarian support is included. Then came the provision of key capabilities. The arrival of HIMARS in the summer of 2022 was a genuine game-changer, scrambling Russian supply lines and disrupting command and control for weeks. And it was US intelligence that allowed Kyiv to pull off some of its biggest surprises, such as the sinking of the Moskva, the first Russian flagship lost in combat since 1905. To these the administration would doubtless add discouraging the Kremlin from detonating a tactical nuclear weapon in the autumn of 2022, when Russian lines briefly seemed in danger of collapse.

And yet there is another side, one that may even cancel out these early successes. The negative view of Biden's Ukraine policy is that it was nothing but half-measures, a set of attempts to generate the desired outcome without making the commitments necessary to achieve it. Take the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023. While there are many reasons it failed, a big one was the lack of necessary equipment. In a major report, Britain's Royal United Services Institute highlighted the shortfall of air defense provided to the Ukrainians, as well as Kyiv being donated only a "fraction" of the de-mining vehicles such an operation would require.

Or consider the long-delayed authorization for Kyiv to fire ATACMS into Russian territory. As many have pointed out, that delay allowed the Russians to prepare and move their assets out of range, so a decision that could have given Ukraine a brief, devastating edge had it come earlier instead had limited effect on the wider war. There was also the Pentagon's failure to agree a contract with Elon Musk over the use of Starlink prior to 2023, which left the administration with no recourse when Musk suddenly switched off coverage right before a major naval drone attack against Russia's warships. And there were the military transfers the White House failed to send before the election, despite already being authorized by Congress to do so.

Ultimately, the best way to judge Biden's Ukraine policy is by the results. On the one hand, Kyiv is still standing. The Russian army has lost ungodly sums of men, money, and equipment to occupy not even twenty percent of Ukrainian soil, and none of this would have been possible without American military aid. On the other hand, some of Ukraine's most productive land is now under Moscow's domination. As talk turns to peace negotiations, Kyiv seems to hold the weaker hand. While Ukraine's European backers must shoulder some of the blame, there is no doubt that a full-throated commitment from the administration in mid-2022 could have left Kyiv in a much stronger place.

One can argue over whether it would have been politically possible for Biden to pass, say, a $200 billion supplemental and flood Ukraine with weapons, or whether Europeans would have listened had he tried to browbeat them into moving their industries onto a war footing around the time of the Kharkiv counteroffensive. But the fact remains that the administration did not really try. Instead, Biden went for half-measures. And so today there is a war that seems to be ending in neither a great Russian victory nor a Kremlin humiliation: a halfway outcome unlikely to satisfy anyone. Could things have been worse? Undoubtedly. But they could also have been better. That, in the end, may be the epitaph of Joe Biden's entire Ukraine policy.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-war-in-ukraine" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-middle-east-crisis" -->
## The Middle East Crisis

From Ukraine, the focus turns to the Middle East, where the four-year Biden presidency looked, at least for a while, as if it might end up a success story. His first two and a half years in office were defined by what the Middle East Institute, in a report delivered in late September 2023, described as "anything but the Middle East." In those days, the assessment was broadly accurate. Biden had spent his time attempting what his advisors called a "back to basics" strategy: dealing with the region, its actors, and their interests as they were, rather than embarking on some massive change initiative doomed to fail. Columnist Steven A. Cook, writing for Foreign Policy in early 2022, described the approach as "ruthless pragmatism," an attempt to advance geopolitical goals by working quietly with a range of partners rather than through performative condemnations or visionary appeals.

Those years were marked by a broad stalemate in the Syrian Civil War, a drawdown of hostilities in Yemen and Libya, and a reduction in the pace of Hamas attacks from Gaza toward Israel. Biden stood quietly by and let adversary Iran bring itself to the brink of ruin amid mass protests stemming from the death of Mahsa Amini. Close US ally Saudi Arabia secured a normalization deal with Tehran, offering a potentially generational opportunity to de-escalate the Iran-America adversarial posture. The Saudis were even on a path toward normalization with Israel, a move that, combined with Saudi-Iranian normalization, could have brought the region a level of deconfliction that is practically unheard of.

That, of course, did not happen. The massive Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023, set off a large-scale conflict with Israel, America's closest ally in the region. Israeli-Saudi normalization was taken off the table, perhaps as an intended result of the attack, and the United States quickly swung into a defensive posture around Jerusalem, sending all manner of military assets to deter any larger explosion. While some outlets, including The New York Times, reported that Israel had detailed advance knowledge of the attack and chose to dismiss it more than a year before it took place, it is unclear how much US intelligence would have known or how that may have shaped Biden's decision-making. What is clear is that October 7 placed Biden firmly on Israel's side in the ensuing hostilities.

His conduct can be judged through two lenses: whether he achieved the goals he set, and what the real-world implications of those decisions were. In the wake of the attacks, his list of objectives was short and clear. The central message to Israel, from his address afterward, was unambiguous: "As long as the United States stands, and we will stand forever, we will not let you ever be alone." Biden committed to direct action in defense of Israel, to supporting its defense, to making further attacks impossible, and to ensuring the return of the hostages Hamas had taken into Gaza.

On those points, the record is mixed. Biden did take meaningful steps to ensure Israel's stability, providing $17.9 billion in military aid through the end of 2024 and a further $8 billion in a final package of approved purchases. His Pentagon placed substantial military assets in and around Israel, facilitated the sharing of in-depth intelligence with Jerusalem, and used diplomatic leverage to keep hostilities between Israel and Iran from escalating to all-out war. Those acts also made further attacks on Israel far less likely. On hostages his record is weaker: the United States helped broker a 2023 ceasefire that saw the release of fifty hostages, but his attempts to negotiate a broader deal were unsuccessful thereafter. Remarkably, the prospect of Israel-Saudi normalization appears to still be on the table.

Then there is the other side of the coin: not Biden's fulfillment of his objectives, but the repercussions of his choices on the broader Middle East. Since the Israel-Hamas war began, Biden presided over a close alliance with a nation accused of everything from collective punishment to weaponized starvation to outright genocide in its treatment of the people of Gaza. About ninety percent of Gaza's pre-war population has been displaced, tens of thousands have died, and much of the territory has either been narrowly dodging famine for months or has begun to succumb. That is in no small part a result of Biden's policies: sending the bombs and munitions Israel has used to carry out airstrikes, and providing near-complete diplomatic cover in front of international bodies like the United Nations that might otherwise have pressured Israel. Regardless of what one thinks of the situation, and regardless of the fact that Hamas and the Israeli government are ultimately responsible for the state of affairs, it is Biden who facilitated Israel throughout. In an additional blow to his legacy at home, his failure to engage members of his own political coalition over Gaza may have been a major contributor to his party's electoral loss.

Elsewhere in the region, the story is largely the same. Biden declined to stop Israel from a massive airstrike campaign and ground invasion in Lebanon, watching as Israel used US-supplied munitions before eventually helping to broker a ceasefire. In Yemen, the administration came to the defense of Israel and of maritime shipping amid attacks by the Houthis, though the US-led Red Sea coalition, Operation Prosperity Guardian, could be charitably described as underwhelming and more accurately as a failure. As a final verdict on Biden in the Middle East, the man himself might describe his work favorably: from normalization efforts to pragmatic politics to the support of Israel, he broadly got what he wanted. The rest of the world's recollection of his impact, however, might be another story entirely.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-middle-east-crisis" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-embrace-of-the-emirates" -->
## The Embrace of the Emirates

Given how much of Biden's presidency was defined by events in the Middle East, it is odd that relatively little attention has been paid to his tight embrace of the United Arab Emirates. In the fall of 2024, Biden designated the UAE a "major defense partner" of the United States, opening up numerous perks for Abu Dhabi, from intelligence sharing to weapons transfers. As Reuters noted of the upgrade, "India is the only other country to have been designated as such."

In some ways this was to be expected. The UAE has long been a close American ally, hosting 5,000 US military personnel, plus aircraft and warships, at Al Dhafra Air Base and Jebel Ali deep-water port. It also follows Washington's lead on Israel, becoming one of the first signatories to the Abraham Accords in 2020. In other ways, though, the administration's embrace of Abu Dhabi could not be odder. Throughout Biden's presidency, the UAE and its ruler, Mohamed bin Zayed, repeatedly pursued goals at direct odds with US foreign policy.

At the less egregious end, this included helping entities tied to the Iranian and Russian governments bypass sanctions. The Economist wrote in 2023 that "Iranian oil is often exchanged at sea off the emirate of Fujairah, blended with other crude and sold on. After traders in Geneva began shunning Russian crude, Dubai became the place to finance and trade shipments." More vexing still, it included the UAE air force conducting joint exercises in Xinjiang with its Chinese counterpart. Given that the UAE operates Western aircraft, like the French Mirage 2000, that are vital to Taiwan's defenses, the International Institute for Strategic Studies wrote that the joint exercise "raises the issue of Chinese access to Western military-aircraft."

But perhaps the area where the UAE most tried to thwart American goals involved wars on the African continent, where Abu Dhabi spent years fueling conflicts it is explicit American policy to stop. None stands out quite like Sudan, where the conflict has produced apocalyptic conditions: an estimated 150,000 dead, 12 million refugees, and the flattening of entire cities by the warring SAF and RSF. Less remarked upon are the United States' attempts to stop the conflict through negotiations. Officially, the UAE was a partner in those talks. Unofficially, UAE cargo planes were secretly undertaking massive weapons transfers to the RSF, fueling both the conflict and what appears to be another genocide in Darfur. The reasons for Abu Dhabi backing the RSF are legion, from securing a potential port on the Red Sea to gaining access to Sudan's vast gold reserves. But the point is not whether one could construct a realpolitik case for the intervention; it is that the intervention directly contradicted Washington's interests. As US Special Envoy to Sudan Tom Perriello told The Washington Post, "Having a country that is sinking into not just violence and instability but potentially a failed state is something that creates enormous risks."

It is a similar story with the UAE's long-running weapons transfers to Libyan warlord General Khalifa Haftar, transfers that helped arm the party not just opposing the US-backed government but openly aligned with American foes like Russia. As a result of behavior like this, the United Arab Emirates spent the last four years acting as a kind of spoiler for US foreign policy. Yet the administration's answer was to continuously upgrade the defense relationship between Washington and Abu Dhabi. There are clear strategic reasons for keeping the UAE close. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs of deepening relations with such an unreliable ally is something only history will be able to judge.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-embrace-of-the-emirates" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-pivot-to-china" -->
## The Pivot to China

If there is one thing about Joe Biden that even non-Americans who do not follow politics know, it is that the forty-sixth president was old. Less remarked upon is that he was also incredibly old-fashioned in his foreign policy outlook. Despite serving as Obama's vice president during the famous "Pivot to Asia," the Biden White House seemed to operate more like something out of the Cold War or the Bush era, fixated on the Middle East and Eastern Europe at the expense of all else.

Yet note the phrase "seemed to." While Biden's entire political obituary could probably be reduced to the words "Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza," there was a great deal of drama around his administration's approach to China, some of it behind the scenes, some out in the open, but all of it perhaps helping set the stage for the defining conflict of the twenty-first century. The more spectacular moments are easy to recall: the shooting down of the Chinese spy balloon in the first weeks of 2023, and the freeze in relations that followed, along with the multiple times Biden broke with longstanding US policy by suggesting he would go to war to defend Taiwan.

It is the quieter work, though, that will likely have the longer-term impact, most of it falling into two buckets: economic preparation and strengthening alliances. In the second bucket sits the administration's greatest coup in Asia: arranging a 2023 detente between longtime enemies South Korea and Japan to act as a bulwark against Chinese aggression. While political chaos in Seoul now threatens to undermine those gains, a coordinated response among these longstanding American allies will be key in any future showdown with Beijing. Along similar lines, the White House pledged money and military protection to the Philippines, which went from being largely pro-China under previous leader Rodrigo Duterte to heavily pro-American under current leader Bongbong Marcos. Although the payoff of expanded access to Filipino military bases never quite materialized, the hope is that Manila is now better equipped to stop Chinese adventurism in its waters.

Further south came the cementing of the AUKUS partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom, intended to provide Canberra with nuclear-powered attack submarines. The flipside is that it involved secretly tanking a separate deal between Australia and France, infuriating a major NATO ally, while committing the Pentagon to a project that recent Congressional research suggests could be an expensive failure. But the administration was not purely focused on building alliances against Beijing. In the economic arena, it both expanded Trump-era tariffs and passed legislation designed to future-proof the United States in key sectors. The biggest of these was perhaps the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which the Council on Foreign Relations explains "is intended to lure microchip manufacturing back to the United States after several decades of individual companies offshoring the technology."

The value of Taiwan's semiconductor industry, and the global damage that could be done should it be captured or destroyed in a war with China, is well understood by anyone following war and geopolitics. The CHIPS Act was meant to guard against this by creating an American manufacturing base to rival Taiwan's. But despite enormous investment, it is still too early to tell how successful the effort will be. Fifteen years from now, people may look back on the Act as a stroke of genius, or it may simply be forgotten, a nice idea that did not go far enough.

That, in fact, is how one could characterize a lot of Biden's economic policy toward China. Despite considerable outward success, The Economist opined in mid-2023 that the administration's policies were "bringing neither resilience nor security. Supply chains have become more tangled and opaque as they have adapted to the new rules. And, if you look closely, it becomes clear that America's reliance on Chinese critical inputs remains." Overall, the jury remains out on Biden's attempts to contain China while avoiding war. Should a confrontation eventually come, future historians will look back on some of these efforts and reclassify them as either necessary steps to assure victory or weak, confused policies that failed to stop catastrophe. For now, the only thing one can say for certain is that the story of the Biden administration's approach to China is still being written.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-pivot-to-china" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-push-for-intervention-in-haiti" -->
## The Push for Intervention in Haiti

Because his presidency will be remembered for crises in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, it can be a surprise to recall that one major foreign policy challenge took place much closer to home: a mere thousand kilometers from Florida. In the summer of 2021, barely a month before the fall of Kabul, the president of Haiti was assassinated. The killing sparked the beginning of a society-wide collapse fueled by growing gang violence. By October 2022, the Haitian government was publicly calling for an armed intervention to restore order. So began the tortured story of perhaps the administration's most protracted failure.

From the outset, Biden ruled out sending American troops, reasoning that previous US-led interventions, in 1915, 1994, and 2004, had been deeply unpopular. But rather than wash his hands of the matter, he tried to use diplomatic muscle to convince another nation to take on the task of pacifying Haiti's gangs. And what a task it was. By 2023, Haiti's murder rate was on par with that of Ecuador, a nation that would soon declare itself in a state of "internal armed conflict." Eighty percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, had fallen under gang control. As CBC explained to Canadian audiences, fighting such irregular forces in a dense urban environment was "exactly the kind (of mission) that professional militaries try to avoid."

Canada is worth mentioning because, for a long time, it was Biden's first choice to lead an intervention. As 2023 ground on, CBC reported a campaign of "direct and heavy U.S. pressure on Canada." Normally one might expect Ottawa to fold before the full force of Washington's diplomatic might, but not this time. The Canadian government refused to budge. Officially, the reason was that outside interventions in Haiti had not worked before. But Chief of the Defence Staff Wayne Eyre was fairly open in admitting that his nation simply did not have the capacity for such a mission, not while also maintaining its NATO commitments in Eastern Europe.

So the search began for another country to take the lead. At one point it looked as if the administration might get Brazil to commit, only for the plan to fall through. Haiti's old colonial master, France, agreed to send money but little else. The United Nations, still burned by the scandals that had accompanied its own intervention, did not want to step up. By 2024, Haiti had become a constant, gnawing distraction for the White House, never quite evolving into a crisis on par with Ukraine or Gaza, but never receding far enough from the headlines to be safely ignored, not while the threat loomed of Haitian refugees fleeing the violence en masse in boats bound for Florida.

Eventually, the administration secured a commitment from Kenya to lead a policing mission to restore order, in return for designation as a "major non-NATO ally." Nairobi would join several African and Caribbean nations in deploying 2,500 officers to Haiti, while the United States would bankroll everything to the tune of $300 million. Yet the intervention never got off the ground. Only 400 underequipped officers were ever deployed. Unable to make a dent in the gangs' control, they instead became witnesses to Haiti's collapse. According to Action Aid, more than 5,000 people were murdered in Haiti in the most recent year, a staggering number in a nation of just 11.7 million. Massacres wiped out villages. As the Council on Foreign Relations notes, almost five million Haitians are now on the verge of starvation.

Is any of this Joe Biden's fault? No. The forty-sixth president could easily have turned a blind eye to Haiti's collapse, and that he tried to do something without dragging the United States into another quagmire is to his credit. But the fact remains that backing an intervention to restore order in Haiti became one of the administration's foreign policy goals. That it proved unable to convince allies such as Canada or Brazil to take the lead can therefore only be called a failure.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-push-for-intervention-in-haiti" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-struggle-for-africa-s-resources" -->
## The Struggle for Africa's Resources

Finally, the focus turns to Africa, and to Biden's performance in what has been the quietest and most underappreciated global competition of the last four years. From China's evolving Belt and Road Initiative, to Russia's deployment of Wagner troops to prop up vulnerable regimes, to initiatives by Turkey, the UAE, and others, the effort to secure diplomatic or direct control over Africa's resources has been an incredibly important undercurrent of global affairs. In this realm Biden started strong, holding a summit with forty-nine African leaders in Washington in 2022 and broadly attempting to re-engage with the continent after four years of insults and disengagement under Donald Trump. During that summit, Biden committed $55 billion to Africa for a three-year development push and vowed to bolster ongoing projects such as the Power Africa and Prosper Africa initiatives. He laid out plans to invest in critical ports, engage with African free trade, and more, all in an effort to catch America up to the substantial progress China and Russia have made on the continent, where the two major powers have locked down key relationships and, more importantly, secured access to its wealth of resources.

At the tail end of Biden's presidency, most of those promises had not quite been realized. Oddly enough for an American chief executive, the waning days of the administration were marked by a trip to Angola, a visit all about the same scramble for resources that had drawn Biden's focus to the continent in the first place. While there, he visited the port town of Lobito, the linchpin of a project known as the Lobito Corridor. The corridor became the crown jewel of Biden's Africa policy: a rail and infrastructure initiative that soaked up $4 billion and refurbished a railway carrying cobalt, copper, and other rare and precious materials from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As his earlier candid admissions had indicated, the Lobito Corridor was a microcosm of his approach to the entire continent, a recognition that resource extraction is a game the United States cannot afford to be left out of.

But the actual impact of the Lobito Corridor and Biden's other African initiatives remains underwhelming. While Biden did increase the pace of resource extraction from the heart of Africa, he did little to meaningfully improve the conditions under which that extraction is carried out, in impoverished and dangerous communities documented to have endured large-scale suffering to bring about the world's digital revolution. Nor did he turn the tide of waning American and European influence, particularly that of France, in nations that have asked France to leave and promptly allowed Russia to move into the void. Biden appears either not to have picked up on, or to have failed to act on, problems ranging from Wagner operations to extractive and heavy-handed UAE action to the apocalyptic situations in Sudan, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. And although the Lobito Corridor is a nice poster piece, it is ultimately not enough of an investment to truly counter China's growing influence. Thus Biden's legacy in Africa goes the same way as elsewhere: half-measures, ideas not quite followed by decisive action, and results far less impressive than what America might have achieved.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-struggle-for-africa-s-resources" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="biden-in-retrospect" -->
## Biden in Retrospect

Stepping back from the conflict-by-conflict tour, the broader shape of Joe Biden's legacy comes into view, in dimensions that cannot be captured by moving from one crisis to the next. In the diplomatic sphere, his general approach was one of reorientation toward a more pragmatic, less aspirational view of the world, treating other nations as self-interested actors rather than loyalists or antagonists to a broader American cause. That approach had its successes: drawing Saudi Arabia and Israel closer, bringing South Korea and Japan into dialogue, tightening a web around China that involved India, Australia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and others, and making real attempts to shape the future of the NATO alliance.

In the process, however, Biden showed a far higher tolerance for pushing, defiance, and at times outright manipulation by other nations, including US allies. From Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel refusing to heed Biden's words of caution over Gaza, to nations like Turkey and the UAE drawing implicit US tolerance for initiatives many of Biden's own supporters would have disdained, to Vladimir Putin's continued use of brinksmanship and threats of escalation to maintain his status quo in Ukraine, Biden's diplomacy was often caught a step behind. Worse, it produced results that frequently ran counter to his own interests. As America grew more comfortable with pragmatic, non-ideological dealmaking, so did its adversaries grow comfortable announcing they would do the same. Russia significantly expanded its paramilitary presence across Africa and drew supposed no-limits support from China. Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey each turned into kingmakers in their respective spheres. North Korean troops appeared on the front lines in Kursk, a move that should be stunning but instead feels no less transactional than any other foreign-policy move of the last four years. The problem is not that Biden chose to play the wrong game; it is that he chose to play it despite not being any better at it than Russia, China, or anyone else, and perhaps playing it slightly worse. Much of his geopolitical gains, moreover, could be undone fairly quickly depending on what his successor chooses to do.

Then there is America's own military-industrial complex, the thing that upholds America's role in the world by force, even when the world will not uphold America by choice. Here there is some good news, starting with the administration's multibillion-dollar 2024 initiative to expand semiconductor manufacturing capability in the United States. These chips are indispensable for twenty-first-century defense and industry and were previously produced mostly in Taiwan, a major strategic vulnerability. The United States also worked to secure the supply of critical resources, as with the Lobito Corridor. But Biden took significant hits here too. China recently banned the export of several rare-earth metals to the United States, a potentially major setback for America's defense industry. US defense initiatives at the Pentagon faced significant trouble under his management. America's Next Generation Air Dominance program, its bid to field a sixth-generation fighter aircraft, was put on hold in October 2024, just two months before China revealed what looks to be multiple super-advanced fighter types that have already flown. Other initiatives, like much-needed upgrades to America's intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal, ran into major trouble, while procurement of everything from F-35s to air-defense systems to aircraft carriers was delayed.

Finally there is Biden's record in great-power competition, where he can again boast a few successes: a productive and ongoing reorientation toward rising China, a tightening of geopolitical ties in the Indo-Pacific, and a proxy partner in Ukraine that survived far longer against Russia than anyone expected. Yet here too his successes are nowhere near as complete as they might have been. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea form a much more overt geopolitical axis today than they did four years ago, while rising powers like India and Brazil have been content to play both sides rather than coming into the fold alongside the United States and Europe. In building a network of territories around China, Biden risked a functional surrender of sea areas where China's claims are disputed, while in failing to push enough support to Ukraine to let it succeed, he laid the terms for what will be a deeply unfavorable peace settlement under Trump. His improvements to NATO were substantial, but also short-term, and it now appears they were not enough.

It is here that we arrive at what may go down as the greatest foreign-policy failure of the Biden era: not a specific war or negotiation, but his inability to keep America on the course he set for it. His job, as a person who presumably believed that what he was doing was right, was to ensure that his approach could continue into the future. In reality, a combination of questionable decisions in foreign and domestic policy, a failure to clear the way in time to properly anoint a successor, and a failure to sacrifice or scapegoat his personal legacy in order to save the broader vision ultimately ensured that his approach to geopolitics would not continue as he laid it out. Instead, the United States has now passed into the control of Biden's geopolitical polar opposite, and much of what he would count, rightly or wrongly, as his achievements abroad are likely to be undone.

There are plenty of voices, most of them Biden's political allies, working to explain why America's forty-sixth president deserves to be remembered as a great leader in geopolitics. This assessment cannot join them. In retrospect, Joe Biden's foreign policy legacy is one of limited but understandable ambition, followed by a series of half-measures, missed or underutilized opportunities, and occasional major failures. It was not a pretty picture, and while only a few dimensions rise to the level of abject failure, similarly few qualify as unqualified success. The vast majority were a combination of partial victory and acute disappointment, and as the American people decided, that combination simply was not good enough.

<!-- aeo:section end="biden-in-retrospect" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="frequently-asked-questions" -->
## Frequently Asked Questions

### Did Joe Biden decide to withdraw from Afghanistan?

No. The decision to leave Afghanistan in 2021 originated with a 2020 deal between the Trump administration and the Taliban, which Biden inherited along with about 2,500 remaining American troops and roughly 18,000 contractors. His own contributions were a self-imposed September 11 deadline and a refusal to adapt the plan as conditions deteriorated, culminating in the fall of Kabul, a suicide bombing that killed thirteen American troops and 169 Afghan civilians, and an airlift that evacuated over 122,000 people.

### How much military aid did the United States authorize for Ukraine under Biden, and what were the results?

The first tranche of $13.6 billion was released by April 2022, and by the middle of 2023 Congress and the White House had collectively authorized an additional $100 billion. According to the Kiel Institute, the United States remained by far the biggest supplier of military aid to Ukraine. Yet critics argued the administration gave Kyiv "enough not to lose, but not enough to win," citing delays on key capabilities like ATACMS and insufficient de-mining equipment for the 2023 counteroffensive.

### What were Biden's stated goals for Israel after October 7, 2023, and how far did he succeed?

Biden committed to direct action in defense of Israel, supporting its defense, making further attacks impossible, and ensuring the return of hostages. He provided $17.9 billion in military aid through the end of 2024 plus a further $8 billion package, and used diplomatic leverage to keep the Israel-Iran exchange from escalating to all-out war. His hostage diplomacy secured a 2023 ceasefire that freed fifty hostages but failed to produce a broader deal, while his facilitation of Israel's campaign contributed to mass displacement and tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza.

### Why was the United States' embrace of the UAE controversial under Biden?

Biden designated the UAE a "major defense partner," a status otherwise held only by India, even as Abu Dhabi pursued goals at odds with US policy: helping Iranian and Russian entities bypass sanctions, conducting joint air exercises with China in Xinjiang using Western aircraft, and secretly transferring weapons to the RSF in Sudan and to warlord Khalifa Haftar in Libya. The administration justified the relationship by pointing to the UAE's strategic importance as a counterweight to Iran and a host for roughly 5,000 US military personnel.

### What happened with Biden's effort to organize an intervention in Haiti?

After ruling out American troops, Biden spent years trying to convince another nation to lead an intervention, pressuring Canada — which refused citing capacity limits — and pursuing Brazil, France, and the United Nations without success. He eventually secured a Kenyan-led mission, designating Kenya a "major non-NATO ally" and funding it with $300 million, but only 400 underequipped officers ever deployed. Unable to make a dent in the gangs' control, the mission became a witness to Haiti's collapse rather than a solution to it.


<!-- aeo:section end="frequently-asked-questions" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="sources" -->
## Sources
1. <https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/08/17/a-year-later-a-look-back-at-public-opinion-about-the-u-s-military-exit-from-afghanistan/>
2. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68612367>
3. <https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/icymi-the-long-shadow-of-bidens-afghan-withdrawal-debacle/>
4. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-the-biden-administrations-report-on-the-afghanistan-withdrawal-gets-wrong/>
5. <https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/afghanistan-after-us-withdrawal-five-conclusions/>
6. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/whats-happening-in-afghanistan-one-year-after-the-u-s-withdrawal/>
7. <https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/2-years-withdrawal-afghanistan-continues-cast-pall-biden/story?id=102837216>
8. <https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/politics/state-deparment-afghanistan-withdrawal-report/index.html>
9. <https://www.npr.org/2024/08/27/nx-s1-5090061/the-chaotic-u-s-exit-from-afghanistan-in-2021-had-stems-from-four-administrations>
10. <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blinken-testifies-afghanistan-withdrawal-house-foreign-affairs-committee/>
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