Joe Biden says he was steady hand world needed after Donald Trump

President Joe Biden's foreign policy legacy, including Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East, faces scrutiny as he prepares to leave office.

President Joe Biden strode into the White House four years ago with a foreign policy agenda that put repairing alliances strained by four years of Republican Donald Trump’s “America First” worldview front and centre.

The one-term Democrat took office in the throes of the worst global pandemic in a century and his plans were quickly stress-tested by a series of complicated international crises: the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and Hamas’brutal 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the ongoing war in the Middle East.

As Mr. Biden prepares to leave office, he remains insistent that his one-term presidency has made strides in restoring American credibility on the world stage and has proven the U.S. remains an indispensable partner around the globe. That message will be at the centre of an address he will deliver on Monday afternoon on his foreign policy legacy.

Yet Mr. Biden’s case for foreign policy achievements will be shadowed and shaped, at least in the near term, by the messy counterfactual that American voters are returning the country’s stewardship to Mr. Trump and his protectionist worldview.

“The real question is: Does the rest of the world today believe that the United States is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world when it comes to our reservoir of national strength, our economy, our innovation base, our capacity to attract investment, our capacity to attract talent?” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an Associated Press interview. “When we took office, a lot of people probably would have said China. ... Nobody’s saying that anymore.” After a turbulent four years around the globe, the Democratic administration argues that Mr. Biden provided the world a steady hand and left the United States and its allies on a stronger footing.

But Mr. Biden, from the outset of his presidency, in which he frequently spoke of his desire to demonstrate that “America’s back”, was tested by war, calamity and miscalculation.

Chaotic U.S. exit from Afghanistan was an early setback for Mr. Biden With the U.S. completing its 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, Mr. Biden fulfilled a campaign promise to wind down America’s longest war.