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Biden leaves a mixed legacy

23 October 2024

Commentary
Edmund O'Sullivan
Former editor of MEED

There’s no forecasting the winner of this year’s US presidential poll, but there is one certainty.

Joe Biden will exit the White House next January and be out of front-line politics for the first time in more than five decades.

History is rarely kind to presidents after they leave office. It is likely that, in due course, Biden will be remembered most for being the oldest person elected president. And he joins the small group of US presidents forced out of office, as he effectively was.

Biden’s fans will point to significant domestic achievements, including the decrease in the number of Americans without health insurance for the first time to under 10% of the population. Job growth in Biden’s first three years outperformed any previous president’s and unemployment in 2021-23 was below 4% for the first time since the 1960s. Wage growth has outstripped inflation, which has dropped sharply since hitting almost 10% in the summer of 2022. The stock market has boomed and violent crime is down.

History is rarely kind to presidents after they leave office

Biden’s big domestic negative is immigration. The number of encounters at America’s border with Mexico has soared and hit a record of 2.2 million in 2023. 

Biden’s apologists blame the Republican majority in the House of Representatives for derailing reform legislation that was making its way through the Senate. But worries about immigration damaged his opinion poll ratings.

In a normal election, nevertheless, a presidential incumbent with this kind of record should have been a shoo-in. It is the main reason Biden resisted pressure to step down even after his cognitive decline was impossible to conceal. He believed he was doing a good job and should have been allowed to stay on.

Foreign policy

Outside the US, Biden’s reputation will mainly be shaped by his foreign policy.

The record there is baleful. The chaos of the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was followed by a refusal to negotiate with Russia about Ukraine in 2022 and the lamentable failure to constrain Israel since October 2023.

His Secretary of State Antony Blinken is widely viewed as the worst in US history.

Reliable friends including Jordan and most of the Gulf Arab states have been alienated, possibly permanently.

Biden’s legacy is objectively mixed. But that’s no longer his problem.

The US foreign policy mess will divert much of the initial energy of America’s next president. But the ultimate sadness of Biden’s lifetime of public service is that, whoever wins in November, they will almost certainly blame him for it.

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More from Edmund O’Sullivan:

> Desperate days drag on
> The beginning of the end
> The death of political risk
> Italy at centre of new reduced Europe
> US foreign policy approach remains adrift
> Rainmaking in the world economy
> New shock treatment for Egypt’s economy
> Syria’s long march in from the cold
> Lebanon’s pain captured in a call from Beirut
> Troubled end to 2023 bodes ill for stability

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Edmund O’Sullivan

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