How Biden Destroyed His Great Legacy
How Biden Destroyed His Great Legacy
Biden was an exemplary American statesman but was unlucky to become president.
(Then-Vice President Joe Biden. | SOURCE: AP / Molly Riley)
After Watergate, American voters always preferred an outsider for the chief executive. America’s recent leaders have included a Georgian former peanut farmer, a Hollywood Western star, a rags-to-riches Southern governor in his forties, a Texan recovered alcoholic, the first African-American nominee, and, finally, a real estate and media tycoon. Only George H. W. Bush’s single term stood as an exception.
Like Bush, Biden broke this trend in 2020. At the pandemic's peak and the peak of America’s cultural shift leftwards, Americans, tired of the chaos of Trump’s first term, chose Biden. His message was simply: normalcy. After Trump’s daily Twitter crusades, Biden embodied a stark alternative as a moderate statesman with half a century of legislative experience and international recognition. In many ways, Biden symbolized the American political elite that Trump failed to conquer.
After the January 6 insurrection, and being backed by a liberal media consensus, Biden seemed poised to deliver four years of quiet progress and international leadership. However, he drastically failed.
On March 26, 2022, a month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, thousands of Poles gathered in front of the Royal Castle in Warsaw to hear Biden’s remarks. Biden’s Warsaw speech was supposed to symbolize Western resistance against Putin’s war and to reaffirm American leadership of the free world.
(Then-President Joe Biden prepares for his speech in Warsaw, Poland. | SOURCE: The New York Times / Doug Mills)
Before the speech, many hoped to hear echoes of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: an American leader travels to Europe during the continental war to lead the allies defending democracy. At the end of the speech, a visibly emotional Biden proclaimed, “For God's sake, this man [Putin] cannot remain in power.” The crowd responded with an ovation.
Hours later, the White House rushed to disavow Biden’s statement because the call for regime change was not in the script. Not only did these words mar the rest of the speech, but they also caused sincere confusion among the European leaders. Everyone wondered why the seasoned Biden would unintentionally announce the new doctrine of Russia’s regime change. Further confusion was caused by the White House saying that Biden's words were not to be taken seriously solely because they were not part of the official script.
This small example underpinned a few chronic problems of the Biden presidency. An 80-year-old failed to read from the teleprompter so his aides had to explain the “true” meaning of his speech to avoid offending Russia’s dictator. Instead of a new Roosevelt, Warsaw saw an incoherent elderly man dependent on his advisors. Unfortunately, on that night, Warsaw saw the true Joe Biden.
Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine exemplified the failure of Biden’s presidency. During Biden’s first weeks in office, he lifted sanctions on the construction of the Nord-Stream 2 pipeline. The pipeline, which supplied natural gas from Russia to Germany, bypassed Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic countries. The pipeline was Russia’s leverage against European security: it meant that Russia could go to war against any country in Eastern Europe, having an absolute monopoly on the energy market.
The pipeline's construction also hurt American interests, both by endangering the security of its NATO allies, and increasing competition for American gas in Western Europe, with the Russian alternative often being cheaper. Yet, Biden permitted the pipeline construction.
It is no coincidence that Russia started its preparations for invading Ukraine only after completing the pipeline: the first reports of Russian soldiers on the border appeared three weeks after the pipeline was completed. Putin was reassured that Europe would remain dependent on his oil independently of his actions.
Not only did Biden fail to prevent the invasion in 2022, he did everything to prolong the war. American weapons shipments to Ukraine were slow and limited, not allowing Kyiv to execute the ambitious military operations it aspired to. When Ukraine did receive modern weapons like rocket launchers HIMARS, often because of bipartisan pressure on Biden, the Pentagon gave Kyiv only a few dozen rockets to the launchers.
As Bob Woodward, a presidential insider since his Watergate scandal, writes in his new book War, Biden was tricked by Russia’s nuclear blackmail into stopping Ukraine’s offensive in November 2022. When Ukraine was close to capturing thousands of Russian soldiers stuck on the right bank of Dnipro during the Battle for Kherson, Biden forced Ukraine to permit Russian soldiers to evacuate in depth of the occupied territory.
The Battle of Kherson in November 2022 was the quintessential moment for the Russo-Ukrainian war. Ukrainian General Zaluzhyy’s brilliant plan to turn Kherson into a springboard for Crimea’s liberation failed not because of strategic mistakes but because of the threat from Kyiv’s own main ally.
Ukrainian victory in the Russo-Ukrainian war could have been the greatest geopolitical triumph of the West after the USSR’s collapse. A freedom-loving Western democracy would have defeated Russia, the world's largest country and a neo-imperial autocracy. David would defeat Goliath — and that would send a definitive signal to China, North Korea, and Iran. It would have been our closest approach to the end of history, as the theory’s founder Francis Fukuyama forecasted.
Instead, after the Battle of Kherson, Russia built impressive defense lines, turning the conflict into a stalemate and another forever war on a world map, this time in devastated Ukraine. Biden had a chance to be the new Roosevelt, but for Europe, from the greatest friend, he became the greatest disappointment.
I chose Biden’s role in the Russo-Ukrainian war as a centerpiece of this article because of the historical significance of the largest war in Europe this century. However, out of many calamities of Biden’s policies, the most paradoxical one was Biden’s harm to his own legacy.
Had Biden retired in 2017, he would have been remembered as one of the most consequential vice presidents in American history, a master of negotiations and bipartisan agreements. Instead, for four years, Americans observed Biden reading from a teleprompter even during TV interviews — and gaffing again and again.
By the end of his term, Biden had deteriorated so badly that his aides had to hire him a public speaking coach so Biden could learn how to speak with his fragile voice.
In Federalist No. 70, Alexander Hamilton called the President's energy a “definition of good government.” But at 82, Biden had little energy left. In 2012, Vice President Biden made one of the best performances in the history of vice presidential debates and sounded much more confident than the charismatic Paul Ryan. A dozen years later, Biden was unable to form comprehensive sentences during his 2024 debate against Trump.
(Then-President Joe Biden during his sole presidential debate of the 2024 cycle. | SOURCE: Getty Images / Justin Sullivan)
As a result of his governance, Biden turned the impossible into reality: he returned Trump to power. Following the January 6 insurrection, Trump lived in Mar-a-Lago in political isolation. But Biden knew that to be reelected at 82, he would have to return somebody as unpopular as Trump to the center of American policies. In every speech, tweet or statement, Biden contrasted himself with Trump. Constant attention from the sitting president gave Trump advertisements for free every day, and Trump used it masterfully, a skill he had honed in 2016.
Biden tried to portray Trump as the only alternative to himself. Biden’s most obvious promise was to embody decency after Trump’s norm-breaking presidency. Instead, he shut down the opposition within the Democratic Party and decided to run for president despite his age and unpopularity.
Later, he established a new height of double standards: while criticizing Trump for paternalism, Biden pardoned his son and almost the entire Biden family. After four years of Biden’s divisive governance, Americans followed Biden’s advice and chose this alternative. A one-term president who incited an insurrection against the national government, insisted on election denial, and argued that immigrants “poison the blood” of America returned to power — and it was Biden who made Trump suddenly so attractive.
Both in his inauguration and farewell speeches, Biden referred to the same lines from Norah Jones’ song “American Anthem”: “Let me know in my heart; When my days are through; America, America I gave my best to you.” However, it seems like Biden failed to give his best to the American people and, frankly, even to himself.