The NPR Politics Podcast - Joe Biden's Foreign Policy Legacy

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

As president, Biden sought to restore faith in the United States' abilities as a world leader, but was tested by a number of significant crises and wars abroad — and by opposition at home.This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, national security correspondent Greg Myre, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.The podcast is produced by Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at autographcollection.com. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Greg Myrie and I cover national security. And I'm Mara Eliason, senior national political correspondent.

And today on the show, we're going to look back at President Biden's foreign policy record. Mara, I want to start with a big picture thought here. Former President Donald Trump's first term marked a very clear shift in American foreign policy. He said the US was spending way too much to help defend allies and the policy should move to what we now know as quote America first policy. When Biden won in 2020, he tried to rebuild and add to those alliances. Did he succeed? I think in large part he did, although the story of Biden's foreign policy I think in large part he did although the story of Biden's foreign policy I think could be titled TBD Because we don't know how a lot of these foreign policy efforts are gonna work out But he certainly rebuilt the Western Alliance NATO. This is a organization of

Democratic countries the United States and Canada and Europe that Donald Trump had belittled and derided and and Europe that Donald Trump had belittled and derided and threatened to pull out of and Biden did rebuild those alliances and he kept the Western Alliance together to support Ukraine. He's had some criticism that he didn't send Ukraine enough lethal weapons fast enough but there's no doubt that he was a staunch supporter of Ukraine and that's a big contrast to Donald Trump who had a long time animus towards Ukraine and a lot of sympathy for Vladimir Putin. And of course, famously, incoming vice president JD Vance said, I don't care what happens to Ukraine. Hmm. Greg, I think it's worth looking back at some of the biggest moments in foreign

policy in the Biden administration. And I think we should start with Afghanistan. He came into office saying he wanted to end US involvement in the war there, but that also led to the first foreign policy crisis of his administration. How did that play out? Yeah. So Biden had been the vice president during the Afghan war for many years, and he believed it was time for the US to leave after 20 years. The war was really dragging on with little change on the battlefield. So he announced the plan to pull out in the spring of 2021. He'd just been in office a couple months. And the US military did leave in an orderly fashion in July of that year. But so here's the caveat. Many Afghans who were eligible to leave didn't leave or couldn't leave when the US military did.

You know, some were Afghans who had dual U.S. citizenship and they took this sort of wait-and-see approach. Others were Afghans who'd worked with the Americans and were promised U.S. visas but couldn't get their paperwork processed in time. So when the Taliban surged across the country and seized Kabul, this led to the chaotic events everyone remembers in August of 2021. The US military returned to the Kabul airport. Afghans were hanging on to military planes as they taxied down the runway. There was a suicide bombing that killed 13 American troops at the gates of the airport. So the US ultimately evacuated about 125,000 Afghans, but that's certainly not what people

remember or focus on. Mara, I mean, it's also worth remembering that that wasn't exactly entirely Biden's decision. It was a decision that had been made in the Trump administration, Trump who also believed that the US needed to get out of Afghanistan. It was just Biden who inherited the chaotic, messy way in which it was done. Yeah, but the deal that Trump made was with the Taliban to pull out of Afghanistan.

And he, you could say, laid the groundwork for that messy withdrawal. But Biden was the president when it happened, and he takes the blame for the big mess that it was. And we are a long time away from the era where politics stopped at the water's edge. And when that messy withdrawal happened, the Republicans and in particular Trump

really used it to hammer away at Biden that he was incompetent and not a good leader. And although I think it's partly coincidental, Biden's approval ratings started dropping at that moment and never recovered. Now, other things were obviously in play there, like inflation, but that was a real pivotal point in his administration. And then, Greg, Biden faced another crisis in Ukraine

when Russia carried out a full-scale invasion back in February of 2022. Biden strongly supported Ukraine. He even became the first president to go to a conflict zone where US troops were not actually involved. That was a big moment in his presidency. Yeah, that's right. And I would start just a little earlier, you know, in the weeks leading up to the invasion,

Biden had to first convince the world and Ukraine, including Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that Russia really was about to carry out this large scale invasion. Russia had first invaded back in 2014. They sort of bluffed several additional invasions, but U.S. intelligence said this time was real. The U.S. shared that intelligence with Ukraine, with Europe, with the public, and said there needed to be a unified response. And there was this strong U.S US and European response, and that helped keep the Russians from capturing Ukraine's capital, Kiev, in the first days of the war. The US continues to lead this coalition of more than 50 countries,

mostly European. They meet regularly and figure out how to help Ukraine with military supplies, economic help, humanitarian assistance. And this has been a success. And Europe, in fact, has provided more overall help than the U.S. has and much more than many people expected. But it's been almost three years since the Russian full-scale invasion. It's become more complicated. Biden is now facing pushback from Republicans about his Ukraine policy. The Ukrainians feel the U.S. has been too cautious holding back weapons or restricting their use. Many Ukrainians

feel the U.S. is providing them with enough not to lose, but not enough to win. And there is the sense that the war is dragging on. Ukraine is struggling to hold the front line. Now President-elect Trump says he wants negotiations to end the war. Ukraine could be the place where we see the most immediate and dramatic change in policy from Biden to Trump. Mara, I also think that Ukraine just marked a fascinating moment of foreign policy here in the US among American politicians because this was where I think the country really started to see America first ideology take hold not just of Donald Trump himself

But down the board in Congress I mean the opposition to Ukraine involvement from the Republican Party in Congress over the past three years has just grown Exponentially and that is not a place the Republican Party would have been even ten years ago No But I believe that even though there's been an isolationist strain in the Republican Party for generations and generations, this shift was a top-down shift, not bottom-up. This was not the grassroots forcing Donald Trump to be against aid to Ukraine. Donald Trump has had a long-time animus to Ukraine, a long-time affection for Vladimir

Putin and other strongman leaders and dictators around the world. So I think that a lot of that was following Trump's lead. Remember, the first impeachment against Trump was because he tried to pressure Ukraine by threatening to withhold military aid so that they would open an investigation into Joe Biden. This was long before Joe Biden decided to run for president, but he was clearly on the radar screen as an opponent to Trump. All right. Let's take a quick break and we'll talk more about foreign policy in a moment. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend,

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And then Greg, there was October 7th, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. And then Biden in a very symbolic trip went to Israel in the days following that attack to reinforce the US support of Israel. But that conflict has probably another one that will come to define his presidency. Oh, absolutely

You know as you noted Hamas carried out this shocking surprise attack in October of last year Killed 1200 people in southern Israel most of them civilians Biden backed Israel to the hilt with political support military support the visit that you just mentioned and and we should remember this was Broadly popular in the very early days after the Hamas attack. However, Israel responded to this unprecedented attack with an unprecedented military campaign in Gaza, this sort of massive air campaign using huge bombs on densely packed territory in Gaza. This has decimated Hamas, wiped out much of its leadership, and of course it's also killed a huge number of civilians. The overall toll has now surpassed 44,000 according to the Palestinians, well over

half for women and children. Biden continues to back Israel overall while including some limited criticism over the high civilian death toll. They're still fighting mostly Israeli airstrikes at this point, though the attention in the region has now really moved on quite a bit, with focus more on Lebanon and now Syria. Mara, if Ukraine exposed a fissure within the Republican Party, this conflict certainly exposed current and growing divisions within the Democratic Party over U.S. military support for Israel. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. And I think it probably cost Kamala Harris a certain number of votes in Michigan and maybe some other states.

The question is, you know, does this last beyond the Biden presidency? I don't know, because Donald Trump is going to come in with potentially a much harder line in favor of Israel. He certainly has been more supportive, kind of up and down the line of whatever Benjamin Netanyahu wants to do. So I don't know what happens to that internal split inside the Democratic Party, but there's no doubt that that split will be part of Biden's legacy. Mara, Biden and Trump have such in so many ways very distinct views on foreign policy and what America's role in the world should be. But it strikes me that at least in the case of China, when it comes to US-China relations,

this is one area where American presidents, regardless of party, still seem to find a lot of similarities in what the US approach to China should be. So yes, there's no doubt that there's been a continuity between Trump, Biden, and I expect Trump again on China. There seems to be a bipartisan consensus that China is not just an economic competitor, but an actual opponent. Biden has tried to shore up U.S. defenses, not just in the South Pacific, but also at home in terms of not relying on China so much for key Computer chips and other things that affect our national security and I expect that that will be continued by Trump

When he gets into office Greg, how do you see the differences between the Trump and Biden administrations on their approach to China? Yeah I think the big one is that Biden has taken a number of steps with this so-called pivot to Asia Now this is an idea that was first introduced by President Obama who said the U.S. needed to focus more on Asia in the 21st century, but that effort kept getting sidetracked by other developments like renewed turmoil in the Middle East. However, Biden has taken some real moves and real steps. He's upgraded something called the Quad, which is an alliance of the U.S., India, Japan, and Australia. All of them have security concerns about China. There's a big

submarine deal with Australia. Why does Australia need expensive subs? Well, these are very advanced weapons that put fear in the heart of China, and they're also very advanced listening devices that can suck up communications in China. And Biden is investing tens of billions of dollars through the so-called CHIPS Act advanced listening devices that can suck up communications in China. And Biden is investing tens of billions of dollars through the so-called Chips Act to make advanced semiconductor chips in the US. Most of those chips are now made in Taiwan, which is faces threats from China. So Biden has taken all these steps in addition to the punitive measures like tariffs that that Trump focused on.

Mara, I know we're talking about Biden's legacy here, and I recognize that it's hard to talk about legacy when someone is still in office. But I think Donald Trump winning again, and especially on such an isolationist worldview, it does make you wonder that if a more isolationist foreign policy is the next chapter of America and how they're seen in the world, then part of Biden's legacy would be that he was sort of the tail end of the post-World War II worldview alliance that the US should be this dominant force in the world.

Well, I would say that's really plausible. I mean, you can imagine that really easily, that this is the end. This is the end of the post-Cold War era. But you know what? We don't know. There's so many things going on in the world right now. We haven't even talked about Syria.

Is Donald Trump gonna deal with that differently? He famously posted, it's not our fight, let's not get involved. Well, guess what? There are 900 US troops in Syria right now fighting ISIS. So this is very TBD. I think that it's possible that America might come to realize that alliances are indispensable.

We don't know. Greg, what do you think about Biden's legacy? Are there parts of it that you think are stickier than others or as Mara said, is it just still too soon to know if there's will be much of a legacy to speak of? Well, Mara's absolutely right about so much that remains to be determined. I think we can say at this point, Biden didn't intend to be a foreign policy president. He came into office with a focus on COVID and the U.S. economy, but as always happens, stuff happens in the world and the U.S. president has to respond. So I think at this point we can say he has a very substantial record on foreign policy and we don't yet know how a number of these crises and wars

will play out. You know, his initial response in the Ukraine-Russia war was, I think, considered very strong by many, but we'll have to see what ultimately happens in that war. You know, his support for Israel has faced a ton of criticism, as we've noted, but as we've seen with events in the Middle East, they're still evolving, like the revolution in Syria. So it's hard to draw any final conclusions at this point. All right. We will leave it there. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Greg Myrie. I cover national security.

And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen to this podcast, sponsor free on Amazon Music with a Prime membership or any podcast app by subscribing to NPR Politics Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.