Joe Biden’s lacklustre performance in UN farewell speech

During his almost four years in office, Joe Biden abandoned an ally and has failed two democracies under existential threat. When the US President delivered his foreign policy farewell address at the UN on Wednesday AEST he was generous to a fault – to himself.

His speech was standard stuff – achievements met, challenges that will be met – while he diminished failures on his watch. He dismissed his surrender in Afghanistan in 2021 when the US abandoned the Afghan people to a cruel theocracy. “It was a hard decision but the right decision,” he said. Perhaps for American voters tired of a distant war but not for ordinary Afghans, especially women and girls, now denied basic human rights prescribed by the UN.

Mr Biden talked up ideals but failed to anchor them in reality. He stated his faith in democracy, certainly, but he failed to put those brave words in the context of his other two great foreign policy failures. That is, appeasing by inaction aggressors intent on destroying Ukraine and Israel. The President has talked a good rhetorical game in denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an attack on democracy. But the US and its NATO allies have provided just enough useful support, by way of ammunition, for Ukraine to stay in the field. Ukraine is not defeated on the battlefield but it is losing the demographic struggle. The average age of frontline soldiers is 40. Casualties among young men are likely to ensure a long-term birthrate decline. Regardless of whatever happens on the battlefield, Ukraine is set to shrink. What it needs is more weapons to secure its sovereignty – the “tools to finish the job”, as Mr Biden’s predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised Britain in 1941.

Neither had Mr Biden stepped up against Iran, which bankrolls and gives the orders to its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi terror proxies. If Tehran ordered them to stand down they would, and the miseries of war inflicted on people in Israel, Lebanon and Gaza would all but end. Yet Mr Biden, following the lead of his old boss Barack Obama, whose foolish nuclear deal was a boon for the ayatollahs, will not confront the creator of the Middle East horror. Instead, he is urging Israel to embrace a permanent ceasefire. The office of US Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, has warned Donald Trump of “real and specific” assassination threats from Iran. It shows who the ayatollahs fear.

In commanding what FDR called the “arsenal for democracy”, Mr Biden has not used his moral and military authority effectively as he should.