The Failed Presidency of Joe Biden, Part Two

Biden's record on climate is better than most other policy areas. But his Middle East policies are a disaster even before considering the genocide he was a full partner in.

Jan 15, 2025

Continuing with my review of the Biden presidency, I wanted to highlight this surprising piece at Dropsite News which discusses a poll showing that Gaza actually played a much bigger role in Kamala Harris’ defeat than most of us thought. Supporting apartheid and genocide, it turns out, is both horrible policy and sucicidal politics.

As we stare at four years of Donald Trump working to bring a modern version of far-right repression to life in the United States, Cutting Through will be here to provide the kind of analysis you don’t get elsewhere.

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Breaking news: As this newsletter was being finalized, a ceasefire deal was formally announced between Israel and Gaza. This is a moment of relief, but also of complications. I’ve published a piece on the ceasefire at Mondoweiss. You can read it here.

In part one of this essay, I reviewed Joe Biden’s domestic policies and found them considerably poorer than what liberals, and even some leftists portray it as. But if his domestic policy has been bad, his foreign policy was an unmitigated disaster.

There is a lot to say about Biden’s foreign policy, which, I think it can be fairly argued, has done as much damage as any president in history. Indeed, there was so much to say that found it necessary to divide this chapter into two sections.

In this section, I begin with a brief look at Biden’s climate policy. Climate change is not my field of expertise, so I encourage people to follow the links embedded in this section to the work of people with real expertise.

I decided to put climate change here because of the obvious global effects of American climate policy. Of course, many domestic U.S. policies have major global ramifications, but climate seems to me to be in a category by itself both due to the massive effect our toxic actions have had and continue to have on the globe and how eager we as a country remain to escape taking responsibility for our actions, financially or practically.

Also, if I’m going to be fair in my assessment of Biden, it seems like climate, which is doubtless his strongest policy arena, is the best way to say something positive to balance the disaster Biden has been in foreign policy.

Next, I will take a broad look at Biden’s Mideast policy. The examination of that policy, particularly regarding Israel, Palestine, and related matters will not be very detailed; I have, over the past four years, written a considerable amount on those subjects, and it is all easily found in earlier editions of this newsletter, or at Mondoweiss, and links to all of it, plus additional works and materials, can be found at my site, ReThinking Foreign Policy.

Instead, the Mideast section here looks at the effects of Biden’s policies on international law and regional politics.

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Biden’s climate legacy

Joe Biden’s claim that he has done more to address the climate crisis than any other president is true, as even as harsh a critic of his presidency such as myself must agree. Yet, this truth speaks more about every president that came before Biden than it does about him.

The forces driving the planet to suicidal calamity for the sake of profits are great, they are bipartisan, and a centrist president is not going to be able, or willing, to confront them decisively.

Republicans deny the climate crisis exists while most Democrats, including Biden, have, for decades talked about the climate crisis, done little about it, and accepted a great deal of financial support (albeit much less than Republicans) from corporations that are causing the very conditions that are killing us.

A significant portion of Biden’s actions to restrict greenhouse gases and other pollutants came in the form of subsidies and tax breaks to polluters. In many cases these measures weren’t accompanied by penalties for continuing their reckless behavior. He did enact some important regulatory changes, that cannot be doubted.

Bearing in mind that climate needs to be fought largely through legislation rather than the much more easily reversed presidential fiat, the progress Biden made in the key pieces of legislation he did pass, primarily the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) laid a foundation that can be fortified and built upon by subsequent legislation.

Naturally, we can’t expect to see that happen in a Republican Congress under a climate-denying POTUS like Donald Trump. As a result, much of what Biden did through executive order and Executive Branch regulation is at risk and likely to be reversed. But the activism that will surely happen and the lobbying that we can expect over the next four years will prepare legislation for the next administration that is prepared to take action on climate.

Biden made long term commitments, targeting reducing emissions to net zero by 2050, for instance, re-entering the Paris Agreement, and signing on to the Kigali Amendment, this last being an agreement that could substantially lower the global temperature if it survives long enough to do so.

How much of that will survive Trump and subsequent climate-denying administrations is open to debate. Certainly a good deal of it will not. But even their cancellation will serve to spur more people toward climate action.

Even though Biden ended up with only a small percentage of the Build Back Better program that he campaigned on in 2020, what remained, the Inflation Reduction Act did allocate hundreds of billions of dollars for renewable energy and reducing emissions. That victory will stand, even if Republicans and Trump work to loosen and reverse regulations and guidelines that Biden’s EPA, Interior department, and his own White House put in place.

Biden can hardly be blamed for that; it’s a systemic problem, among a great many that hamper any effort to create even a semblance of democracy in the United States.

On the other hand, Biden refused to act against fracking, lied about preventing new oil and gas prospecting on public lands, accelerated the production of liquified natural gas (LNG), elevated the U.S. well beyond Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of crude oil, vastly increasing the gap between the U.S. and other countries in that regard.

Given the enormous political movement in favor of addressing the climate crisis that Biden rode into office, I think it’s fair to argue that a more progressive and, most importantly, courageous president could and should have done more. The blaming of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—who undoubtedly did undermine the Democrats in a particularly heinous way—cou8ld have been overcome with a stronger leader. As I noted with other aspects of Biden’s domestic agenda, we have seen presidents overcome greater resistance within their own party.

No president, including Obama, ever held office where there was so much political push for addressing climate change. In that context, it is not remarkable that Biden has done more on climate than his predecessors; rather, it is remarkable how little Biden was able to do to rein in polluters and address an issue that is already killing people across the globe and in the U.S. and will rapidly accelerate in the coming years.

But again, in fairness, that is what should be expected when the president is a man who thoroughly believes in the principles of predatory capitalism and sees government’s regulatory role in that system as only to control the excesses of that system that might lead to the system’s own demise. That’s who liberals and too much of the left decided they needed to turn to after the first Trump administration, and the price has been paid for that short-sightedness in many ways.

It would not be reasonable to expect or even hope that Biden could have done better than he did on climate. He is who he is, and in that context he did the most that anyone could have realistically hoped.

In the end, he was both not nearly good enough on climate and much better than what came before him. If we want better results, we need to avoid settling for milquetoast, career corporate politicians who don’t have the spine or energy for the kind of fight that we need to wage if the planet is to be saved.

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The ashes of Biden’s Mideast policy

The most prominent part of Biden’s legacy will be the horror he financed, armed, and ran political and propaganda cover for in Gaza. The moniker of “Genocide Joe” is well earned and will be remembered long after Biden’s death.

Biden didn’t just allow Israel to get away with genocide in Gaza; he actively funded and abetted it. While the tidal flow of weapons to Israel gets the most attention, Biden’s invective played no small role.

It was Biden, much more than Benjamin Netanyahu, who told the public and, most importantly, the mainstream media that Palestinian claims must be assumed to be dishonest while Israeli ones are to be treated as the virtual word of God himself. The impact that had on the ability of Israel to deny its atrocities in Gaza is immeasurable.

In the bigger picture, Biden presided over a new assertion of hegemonic force in the region, with Israel invading neighboring countries at will. However illegal the claims might have been for Israeli actions in Lebanon and Gaza, the massive attack and occupation of Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad—actions which did not get nearly the attention, much less the context and criticism, they required—were completely inexcusable. No attack or aggression of any kind was even suspected, much less launched in the wake of Assad’s fall. Israel’s invasion of Syria was the very definition of an unprovoked attack and Biden gave it his unconditional support.

Biden came in to office ignoring an Iranian leadership that had already proven itself willing to make enormous compromises for peace and sanctions relief from the United States, and it is leaving by acting in a similar fashion. The new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, made it clear that he was open to negotiations with the west. Rather than even explore that opportunity, Biden decided to threaten Iran if it retaliated in any way to Israel’s repeated acts of war against it, and to then act as if Iran’s measured and limited responses to Israeli aggression merited devastating retaliation.

Ultimately, when we look at a four-year term and a policy that spans a region as large and important as the Middle East, we must look at outcomes and the policies that were enacted, what their results were, and whether those results could have been expected.

In Biden’s case, he lied to the American people about how he would deal with Saudi Arabia and, instead of pursuing them for the murder of an American resident and legions of criminal acts and human rights violations, he genuflected to them at every opportunity. Biden increased tensions with Iran, building on Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” and ensuring that Tehran perceived that Barack Obama’s attempt to resolve matters with diplomacy rather than murder was the anomaly, not Trump.

Biden’s willingness to defend Israel at all costs exposed—in a way Trump, in his blatant extremism never could—American hypocrisy and its disdain for any rules or order other than the one based on its own capricious desires and interests. He destroyed for generations any opportunity any future leader would have to act with goodwill in the region.

Biden emboldened regional actors like Türkiye, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia to act without restraint to extend their influence beyond their borders and, most dangerously, to compete for those interests. By ignoring the actions American allies were taking throughout the Middle East in places like Syria, Libya, Sudan, and others, Biden helped to empower a “might makes right” approach to Middle eastern affairs that necessarily precludes any advances in democracy and human rights.

In sum, Biden inherited a Middle East put on edge by Trump’s flailing incompetence and made matters dramatically worse at every turn. That would be the sum of his Mideast policies before we even consider the fact that he was a full partner in the worst genocide of the 21^st century to date.

But Biden’s failures didn’t stop in the Middle East. In Part 3, I will look at Ukraine, China, and NATO and will demonstrate how Biden’s policies have left the world more unstable, more unjust, and more dangerous.

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The Failed Presidency of Joe Biden, Part Two

Biden's record on climate is better than most other policy areas. But his Middle East policies are a disaster even before considering the genocide he was a full partner in.

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