Amitava Mukherjee
(amitavamukherjee253@gmail.com)
Joe Biden, the 45th US President, will demit office on the 20th of this month. Impartially speaking, only four US Presidents in the 20th century—Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon—have left noteworthy marks in the world’s political landscape. In American history, Woodrow Wilson is remembered for his progressive reforms and his intervention in the First World War on the side of a free and democratic world. Franklin Roosevelt conceptualised the use of atomic energy in the days to come. It is only a different matter that his successor, Harry Truman, misused it by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even today, the liberal democratic world talks of John F. Kennedy for his contributions to liberalism and world peace. Nixon should also be remembered for positive as well as negative reasons. He ended American combat involvement in Vietnam, took some steps towards detente with the Soviet Union and brought about the historic thaw with China. But he had indirectly supported genocide by the Pakistan army during the Bangladesh liberation war.
Where would we place Joe Biden in the annals of American history?
Well, the outgoing President has both his supporters and detractors. The Observer, an influential British Sunday newspaper, provided space for castigating Biden severely. Simon Tisdall, a columnist on international affairs, avers that the US government was in possession of intelligence feedback for quite some time that Vladimir Putin was gearing up for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but Washington just sat back and did precious little to thwart Putin’s plan. True, Biden could have forewarned Putin that both the US and NATO would come forward to help Ukraine, and that might have some sobering effect on Putin’s designs. But this cannot be denied also that at a later stage the NATO and the US have supplied sophisticated weaponry to Kiev and that has helped Ukraine thwart Russian invasions for such a long time. Foreign Affairs, the influential American journal, has stood by Biden. Jessica Mathews, a distinguished writer, has averred in the Foreign Affairs that Joe Biden meaningfully came to Ukraine’s help by staying just behind, and not by leading military supplies to Kiev.
But a more intense debate will continue to take place over Joe Biden’s decision to opt out of the Afghan war scenario. It will give rise to the following question: Did the US get anything by quitting Afghanistan? The raison d’être of the US involvement in Afghanistan was to stamp out terrorism and nip in the bud any possibility of further attacks on the US in its homeland, and here Biden was perhaps right, judging the question from a purely American interest angle. Al-Qaeda was defeated. Osama bin Laden was killed, and the Islamic State in the Middle East was vanquished. There was little love lost between the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. So if Joe Biden thought that time was opportune for the US to depart from Afghanistan, he cannot be faulted.
Impartial judgement would, however, come to the conclusion that the US had lost the Afghan war long back. By the time Biden took office, the US had spent twenty years fighting in Afghanistan at a cost of more than USD 2 trillion. At the beginning Washington settled for a low profile approach hoping that a limited number of special forces and air power would suffice. It did not, and ultimately the US had to deploy one lakh troops and had to suffer large numbers of casualties. However, there is a moral side that the US must answer. Its intervention in Afghanistan meant something more than mere safeguarding of the US homeland from terrorist attacks. It had a latent promise to defeat fundamentalism, usher in a modern way of life, and spread education in Afghanistan. The victory of the Taliban pointed out that Washington had failed to measure up to all such promises. By coming to the aid of the mujahideen after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US needlessly created a cesspool, and it left the scenario in disgrace.
Biden’s domestic record is impressive. He opened up avenues for new businesses, created 16 million jobs, and boosted wages for workers. He also curbed illegal immigration, and his Inflation Reduction Act helped to control runaway prices to some extent. Donald Trump’s charges of rampant immigration during Biden’s time really do not hold water.
But it is in the arena of American foreign policy that Joe Biden will have to be judged carefully. Here he reversed Trump’s policy of isolationism and made the Asia-Pacific the pivot of the US’ foreign affairs approach, an aspect largely neglected by George Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump administrations. A number of Biden initiatives in this field can be cited: the elevation of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) from foreign ministers level to the level of heads of states, the creation of AUKUS, a new security arrangement consisting of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States for forging deterrence against China in the Indian Ocean and in the Pacific, and several trilateral summits in the Near and Far East.
But Biden has his failures also. The two most notable of them are his policies in regard to Israel and Iran. The US under Biden failed to take advantage of the Abraham Accord, which had paved the way for normalisation of Israel’s relations with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. The task left was to strike an agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. For it, the US should have pressured Tel Aviv not to indulge in further eviction of Palestinians from the West Bank. But Biden’s inexplicable softness towards Israel stood in the way of a rapprochement. Outwardly he is talking about a two-state solution—Palestine and Israel on the territory of the former Mandatory Palestine. Israel opposes it. That did not prevent Biden from transporting large amounts of weaponry to Israel in the current war over the Gaza Strip.
Another failure is over Iran. Donald Trump had exited from the Iran nuclear deal. Democrats described it as catastrophic. But Biden’s appointees for course correction started playing to the gallery of American public opinion in order to prove that they were also similarly hard on Iran as the American common people. So, the exercise failed. Biden could not salvage the situation.
Joe Biden is not any extraordinary material. But within his limitations, he tried his best to reshape the international order.
(The author is a senior journalist and commentator).