When President Joe Biden first joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1975, it was taken as a sign that the 32-year-old legislator was “ticketed for a bright future.” The assumption proved correct. Although it took decades, Biden did ascend the ladder of American power—rising to chair of that committee to vice president and, finally, to the presidency. As Biden climbed, he was not shy about selling himself as a master statesman and an expert on foreign policy. While running for president in 2007, he made that experience central to his case for why Democrats should back him over Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
In theory, the speech that Biden gave on Tuesday morning to the United Nations General Assembly—the last of his career before the body—was the end of this triumphant arc. An American president opining, at the end of his reign, on his record within a favored policy arena.
Instead, the timing of the UN speech highlighted one of the central failures of his presidency: Biden’s inability to restore even a semblance of calm between Israel and its neighbors in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas. As if to rub it in, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu posted a video on social media during the speech in which he vowed to continue the bombing in Lebanon that Biden tried in vain to prevent.
Since October 7, the Biden administration’s overarching diplomatic priority in the Middle East has been to prevent a broader regional war. The president sent top level envoys and military officials to the region countless times in service of that goal. He dispatched carrier strike groups to signal to Iran and its proxies that the United States was prepared to defend Israel. He agreed to almost all of Israel’s requests for weapons and diplomatic cover—partly out of a misguided belief that doing so would give the administration the ability to shape Israel’s actions.
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