(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden is out of the 2024 race for the White House, but his team is signaling he’s not nearly done yet when it comes to foreign policy.
Hours after Biden announced that he won’t seek a second term, his top diplomat, Antony Blinken, wrote on X that the president had restored US leadership around the world. “I look forward to building on that record with him over the next six months,” Blinken wrote.
The post was an unmistakable message to allies and adversaries that he has no intention of letting up on US efforts to broker an Israel-Hamas peace deal, press for more weapons and funding for Ukraine and push back against Chinese support for Russian forces fighting there.
“There will be a huge focus on foreign policy toward the final five, six months of his presidency,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “That is going to be one of the core pieces of his legacy.”
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As with any transition of power, there’s a risk that America’s foes conclude Biden is a spent force in world affairs and the time is ripe to challenge the US before he hands the reins to a largely untested Vice President Kamala Harris or to Donald Trump, who routinely condemns most everything the president has stood for. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping may be tempted to confront — or simply ignore — the lame-duck American president.
Still, Biden has long believed foreign policy is one of his strengths. It’s one of the themes on which he spoke most confidently as he argued he should remain in the race despite questions about his advancing age and declining acuity. With an eye toward his legacy, Biden may look to emulate predecessors such as Bill Clinton, who made a last-ditch attempt at Middle East peace with a summit at Camp David months before the 2000 election.
“There’s something to not having electoral pressure that allows you to act a little more boldly,” said Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University. “Even though often kind of being a lame duck can be a disadvantage, I actually think in this case he might have some room to maneuver in the next few months on the issues that matter to him.”
Netanyahu Visit
Biden will get the first test of how much sway he still retains — or has already lost — when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Washington for a previously planned visit this week.
Biden is scheduled to meet Netanyahu and seek to exert what influence he has to persuade the Israeli leader to commit to a cease-fire deal with Hamas that would end the fighting that has devastated the Gaza Strip and provoked fears of a wider war since the Iran-backed group attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7.
But the relationship has been turbulent for some time, especially given Netanyahu’s open support for Trump in the years he served as president. US officials are anxious about what Netanyahu may say when he addresses Congress later in the week and whether he goes after a weakened Biden.
“The 2021 botched withdrawal from Afghanistan already did some considerable damage to global perceptions about Biden as a foreign policy leader, and the Gaza war has reinforced some global perceptions about America’s weaknesses,” said Brian Katulis, a former US official now at the Middle East Institute. “But America still retains substantial capacities to shape outcomes around the world.”
Biden clearly believes he has that capacity too.
Seeking a major foreign-policy win — possibly including new efforts to confront China over its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine — would also allow Biden to neutralize some of the attacks featured at the Republican National Convention. With one night dedicated to the theme of “Make America Strong Again,” speaker after speaker hammered Biden over his purported weakness standing up to Iran, Russia and China.
On Friday, a day after the convention, his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, signaled the US was gearing up for a fresh effort to take action against China over its support of Russia, saying the world should “expect to see additional sanctions measures as we watch this picture continue to evolve.” That could include Chinese banks, a move that Beijing would see as a major escalation.
Harris on China
A vice president’s assignment in foreign policy is to echo and reinforce that of the president. Still, world leaders will search for clues about ways in which Harris’s foreign policy positions may align or diverge from Biden’s. For example, even though she hasn’t embraced Israel nearly as vocally as Biden has, she offers a degree of continuity.
Harris has stuck closely to Biden’s stance on China, telling the Munich Security Conference in February that the US would stand up to Beijing “when necessary and also working together when it serves our interest.”
Foreign leaders must now grapple with “uncertainty about how the policies of a victorious Democratic candidate would differ from Biden,” said Danny Russel, former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. “For China in particular, this argues for a cautious wait-and-see posture.”
It will also force foreign leaders to change their own calculus after a gloomy series of international summits gave them an up-close look at Biden’s growing frailty.
For them, Trump’s victory had begun to seem a foregone conclusion. Many had already begun outreach to Republican surrogates in hopes of gaining the president’s ear. Harris upends the race and may — if recent polling can be trusted — offer Democrats a better chance of keeping the presidency.
“If anything, this strengthens Biden and strengthens the US,” Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks said. “This will make allies more, not less, likely to work with the current administration and it will make adversaries think twice about counting us out.”
--With assistance from Josh Xiao.
(Updates with analyst comment in fourth paragraph.)
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