The Biden administration is preparing for the transition to the incoming Trump administration. That transition will take place over the next two months. US President Joe Biden will leave office with numerous conflicts that began under his watch, continuing to cause chaos in various parts of the world.
For instance, Russia is still fighting in Ukraine after launching a major attack on the country in 2022. Israel is fighting a multi-front war that began with the Hamas attack on October 7.
The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are part of a broader shift in the world order. Russia, China, Iran, and other countries are trying to re-make the world order. This has been a process that goes back decades.
It has accelerated recently. The Biden administration presided over this unprecedented decline in US ability to deter enemies and solve conflicts. The administration didn’t create the problem, but it didn’t reverse it either. The US retreating from some global responsibilities goes back to the Barack Obama administration.
That administration chose to find an accommodation with Iran. It also appeased Moscow. It should be recalled that Moscow began to understand Western weakness when it attacked Georgia in the Caucuses in 2008. From there it proceeded to also occupy part of Ukraine in 2014, and also intervened in Syria in 2015.
During the Obama years, the US tried a “reset” with Moscow. This didn’t work. It only increased Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appetite. In addition, appeasement from Europe, especially Germany’s Angela Merkel, weakened the West.
Biden administration’s foreign policy criticized
During Trump’s first term in office, the US sought to refashion a kind of doctrine abroad. This was based on transactional policies. This helped pave the way for the Abraham Accords. It also led to countries like Iran testing the US in Iraq by attacking US forces. When the war on ISIS wound down, Turkey also began threatening the US. Turkey arrested a US pastor and also invaded parts of Syria, and attacked US partners in Syria.
However, while the Trump administration was not always able to stop Ankara, which is a member of NATO, the administration did eliminate Iran’s IRGC Quds Force head, Qasem Soleimani, in 2020, sending a message to Tehran.
The US attempted to use maximum pressure on Iran to get it to change its behavior. Iran sought to provoke the region by backing the Houthis and carrying out attacks in the Gulf of Oman, targeting commercial ships. It downed an expensive US surveillance drone. It also attacked Saudi Arabia in 2019. Iran also increased the shipping of weapons via Iraq to Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran attempted greater entrenchment in Syria. This was how Iran exploited the vacuum of power in the Middle East.
The US weighed withdrawing from Syria and shifting troops to Iraq. Iran responded by attacking US forces in Iraq in 2019 and 2020 using militia proxies in Iraq. The US shifted forces to the Kurdistan region of Iraq in 2020, as COVID-19 began to increase the chaos in the region.
COVID-19, which began in Wuhan, China, not far from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, spread rapidly around the world in 2020, causing global shutdowns and chaos. Trump’s administration had to deal with that.
Biden came into office in the wake of this pandemic chaos. However, rather than confronting the chaos, his administration unleashed more. Biden’s administration said, “America is back,” and put in place a competent foreign policy team. However, his team was not able to manage the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. The Taliban, hosted by Qatar, rolled into Kabul, and the US was left in chaos. Americans died. Qatar benefited, and Qatar assumed it could also increasingly back Hamas.
Hamas had been in Qatar since 2012 when the Obama administration backed this movement of extremists to Doha as part of a wider policy of exploring possible deals with Iran and worked with the Muslim Brotherhood during the Arab Spring.
Biden inherited these problems, but he didn’t deter Hamas from attacking or deter Russia from its Ukraine invasion in 2022. When Hamas attacked Israel, this set in motion attacks by Iran’s proxies such as Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi militias. The US did respond to each, but it was too little and too late. The US deployed naval assets to try to stop Houthi attacks on commercial ships.
US-Israel cooperation via US Central Command was commendable. But the operations in the Red Sea didn’t stop the Houthis. In addition, the Iraqi militias killed three US service members in Jordan in January 2024. The US responded, but all it could achieve was a temporary ceasefire by the Iraqi militias, a ceasefire they chose to do, and one they will choose to end when they want to. This leaves Iran in the driver’s seat.
The US acted to deter Hezbollah after the October 7 attack. It rushed military assets to the region, including an aircraft carrier. This was a good sign. However, it also meant that the US had to keep sending different assets every time Iran threatened attacks. For instance, the THAAD system was sent to Israel in October. Iran now feels it can choose a time and place to attack. Iran’s proxies, such as Hezbollah, rain down missiles on central Israel. The Houthis attacked with missiles and drones. Iraqi militias attack as well.
The Biden administration has attempted to shore up Israel’s defenses with arms deals and also by sending warplanes to the region. However, the administration doesn’t have a regional strategy. When it came into office, it downplayed the Abraham Accords as “normalization agreements.” It embraced them later and sought “regional integration.” However, this was largely eroded by the Hamas attack. Gulf states felt the US’s weakness in commitment to the region. Qatar empowered Hamas, and Doha was rewarded with “major non-NATO ally” status. Saudi Arabia reconciled with Iran in a China-brokered deal. Many countries are now seeking to join BRICS and other Russia and China-backed economic groups. The Biden administration was not able to reverse this process.
The Biden era also presided over the displacement of Armenians in Nagorna-Karabkah. This preventable conflict was another example where the administration showed only token interest too little and too late. The Biden administration conducted itself in the same way in relation to Afghanistan, Armenia, Ukraine, and Israel. It didn’t do enough to prevent conflict. It only arrived after and then presided over chaos. This is the same kind of chaos that was unleashed years ago and which America’s enemies thrive off of. China and Russia want global chaos because they want a multi-polar world order.
They want a new New World Order. The Biden administration had promised that “America is back.” However, the administration couldn’t channel this talking point into action the way the Kennedy administration or Raegan administration would have. This was the flaw in Team Biden’s approach. Whether it was Jake Sullivan or Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, or others, there were always a lot of good intentions, but it was not grounded in the use of force. There was not a strategic Clausewitz embrace of how foreign policy and military policy must work together. America’s enemies sensed this, and they attacked them when they saw weakness.
America’s enemies are probing with their bayonets. They symbolize the saying, “You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.” They keep finding weaknesses, and they keep pushing. The fact that there are American hostages in Gaza, while Thailand was able to get Hamas to release most of its hostages, is an example. The US’s major non-NATO ally, Doha, hosts Hamas. Yet Hamas committed the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah while being hosted by a US ally.
Instead of demanding Qatar expel Hamas or getting Doha to stop the Hamas attack in the first place, the US kept thanking Qatar for its role. US citizens were murdered and taken hostage, and Hamas has not suffered consequences. Its leadership still relaxes in Doha. This symbolizes, most of all, the inability of an administration that had good intentions to prevent war. The US historically sought to end wars, such as Teddy Roosevelt’s work to end the Russian-Japanese war. Today, America’s enemies are running wild. It will require bayonets and steel to get them to withdraw.
