According to a new book chronicling the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, the man in the Oval Office has a towering regard for his own diplomatic talents. “When it came to foreign policy, Joe Biden believed he was the business,” says Franklin Foer, in just one of many moments of presidential iconography to be found in The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future.
Apparently, 12 years spent as the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee followed by eight years as Barack Obama’s vice-president have given Biden a “swaggering sense of his own wisdom beyond America’s borders”.
A less flattering verdict on the president’s long involvement with US foreign policy was offered some years ago by Robert Gates, Obama’s first defence secretary. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” he wrote in his own 2014 book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.
Whichever version you prefer, we must all hope that Biden now proves equal to pulling off the most difficult and fraught exercise in US foreign policy any president has faced in decades.
The conflict in the Middle East not only risks spreading and escalating in ways that could draw the US into an all-out war. Even if American diplomacy can help to avoid that conflagration, the crisis has shattered the central planks - perhaps illusions is a better term - on which Biden and his team were building much of their foreign policy. It will demand quick, deft and effective leadership to repair the gaping holes left in American grand strategy.
His abbreviated visit to the Middle East this week captured well the perils and the possibilities. It was a high-risk gambit, a piece of public diplomacy with two competing objectives: to demonstrate US solidarity with Israel in its most serious crisis in half a century; and to reassure neighbouring Arab states that the US could still be relied on as an honest broker in the wider regional context.
The second objective was undermined even while Biden was on his way from Washington when King Abdullah of Jordan cancelled the planned sit-down in Amman with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and President Sisi of Egypt. This came after news broke of the explosion at a hospital in Gaza that Hamas - aided and abetted by credulous news organisations - blamed on an Israeli air strike even though the evidence seems to point strongly to a Palestinian-fired rocket gone astray.
Biden was able to secure an Israeli commitment to help delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, but his visit will surely have been seen by the Arab and Muslim world as primarily a reinforcement of US defence of Israel, significantly complicating Washington’s wider aims.
This injury added to the insults already received by the US, with Antony Blinken’s desultory shuttle diplomacy earlier in the week. In Riyadh, the US secretary of state was made to cool his heels all night until Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman agreed to see him - and then proceeded to lecture him on American failures in the Arab world.
In Cairo, Blinken received an even more humiliating disquisition from Sisi on Middle Eastern history, including the bizarre claim that Egypt had never persecuted Jews. Evidently the Bible is one of the many books the dictatorial Egyptian regime forbids.
Tamping down Muslim anger as Israel goes about trying to destroy Hamas is only going to get harder for Biden and his officials. But the particular problem they face is that the war, even if they can keep it limited to Israel and Hamas, has blown open the contradictions in Biden’s larger strategic concept, the objectives around which his entire foreign policy was based.
When he came to office he had three primary goals: confront the growing strategic threat from China; contain Russia and its president’s megalomaniacal ambitions; and do that in part by disengaging from the many entanglements the US has created for itself in the greater Middle East. China remains the big challenge and while Biden gets high marks for handling the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a resolution to that conflict in ways that benefit the US is nowhere in sight.
In the greater Middle East, Biden’s blunders and harsh realities on the ground are destroying US plans. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a humiliating disaster that arguably emboldened America’s enemies.
Yet perhaps even worse has been the attempt to conciliate with Iran to secure longer-term stability - an effort that has spectacularly backfired. The initial attempt to ignore and isolate Saudi Arabia, in punishment for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, also quickly had to be reversed as realities in the oil markets sank in. And unlike the Trump administration - an enthusiastic supporter of Israel - Biden hoped to take a more detached approach, especially after the election of Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition last year, even as he tried to facilitate further rapprochement with the Arab world by pursing a diplomatic deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Hamas’s shocking terrorist attacks have shattered all those plans. Now, according to one foreign policy specialist who has advised Biden in the past, the US has been forced to execute a “re-engagement strategy”. The new approach will, he says, include “an enhanced security partnership with Israel, a more assertive Iran nuclear containment policy, and a more proactive stance towards Iran’s paramilitary networks”.
Pulling off that volte-face without provoking enemies such as Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed terrorists itching to get their chance to hit Israeli and US targets will be a Herculean task. If he can pull it off, perhaps that swaggering self-regard will be merited after all.
THE TIMES
More Coverage
Join the conversation
Professional and personal fulfilment for proud Roots star
John Amos played the slave Kunta Kinte in the award-winning television miniseries Roots, which helped to combat racism in America.
Read more
UK firms warned to watch for insider Russian attacks
Criminal gangs and proxies working for Putin are on a mission to bring ‘mayhem’ to our streets, says security service.
Read more