Joe Biden will likely go down in history as the US leader under whose presidency the liberal international order was dismantled. America has experienced periods of high inflation in the past, and Biden’s domestic failures will not be any different.
In foreign policy, however, Biden wrote the end of a chapter not only in American history but also in the world. Far from representing “hope and change,” the slogan on which he and Barack Obama were elected in 2008, Biden had personified the despair and stagnation of Western foreign policy after the Cold War.
The elites’ insidious plan for “eternal wars”
In 2008, American voters demanded something new and trusted Obama to deliver it. The overturning of the previous plan, that of the “Global War on Terror” under George Bush the Younger, had taken the form of a narrative in which “foreign populations would be liberated, who would shower American soldiers with flowers.”
Seven years after the war in Afghanistan and five years after the war in Iraq, it was clear that Bush and those who followed him had no way out of these conflicts, which were not fought to be won — since victory was difficult to define — but simply to postpone defeat.
These were the “eternal wars” with no end in sight. Obama, with Biden at his side, was mandated to end them and chart a different course. They failed to do so and instead maintained the destructive course set in the early 1990s.
The Failure of Post-Cold War Presidents
Bush was never able to truly end the 1991 Gulf War, which continued under Bill Clinton with the imposition of no-fly zones and sanctions, as Washington fed off various neoconservative dreams and plans for regime change in Iraq.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq, then, was a drastic escalation of a war that had already begun. Although Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the war was not over. Washington’s goals of regional state transformation by promoting democracy and liberalism were so vague and unrealistic that even a supposedly successful war could only be a prelude to a “forever war.”
Iraq was a clear symbol of the failure of US foreign policy. One mistake led to another. In Eastern Europe, the failure of US foreign policy is deafening. After each wave of NATO expansion, for example, Russia became more rather than less of a threat. If the purpose of NATO expansion was to make Europe more secure, the contrast between the security environment of 1992 and that of 2025 is damning—especially when contrasted with the success of a more limited NATO in containing the Soviet Union.
The Tragic Failure of the Neoliberal Agenda
As if on autopilot and unconcerned about the results, America’s post-Cold War presidents pursued a comprehensive neoliberal (and neoconservative) agenda, which included expanding international institutions, promoting global economic integration, condemning national movements of all kinds, while deploying U.S. military forces as police and social workers in trouble spots anywhere and everywhere.
The miserably failed U.S. foreign policy agenda also included encouraging regime change by any means necessary in targeted countries. All of this required not only the continuation but also the strengthening of America’s Cold War intelligence and surveillance apparatus.
As a senator, Biden acted with the consensus of Washington, with a few exceptions that tested his capacity for independent thought. He voted against authorizing the Gulf War in 1991, for example, but enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq in the 2002 and 2003 debates.
He then expressed his opposition in 2006 to sending additional troops to Iraq. The most obvious explanation for these fluctuations is that Biden was simply playing politics: Opposing Bush in 1991 might have seemed like a smart move in view of a future run for the White House.
The alleged ideologue Obama
In contrast, opposing the younger Bush’s plans for a new war in the years immediately following 9/11 would have been politically painful. Thus began the Obama era for the Democrats in 2008, with the future president prevailing over Biden and Hillary Clinton, who represented the interests of the US military-industrial complex.
Biden was then seen by the political establishment as the choice of vice president who would balance the outbursts of the inexperienced, seemingly ideologue Obama. US foreign policy elites knew that Biden was the man they could trust.
Obama did withdraw troops from Iraq, but in many other ways he maintained the direction of U.S. foreign policy that had been set in the early 1990s. He kept the system in place, even as he improved relations with Iran and Cuba.
How little Obama changed his party—let alone Washington—was demonstrated by the fact that his successor as the Democratic presidential nominee was the Iraq War supporter Hillary Clinton, who had won in 2008.
After Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016, the Democratic Party and Washington’s foreign policy elites had only one place to turn. Joe Biden was a symbol of the political past, but that was exactly what Washington wanted: a return to what had been considered normal since the 1990s.
Biden … the US Gorbachev
Biden and Obama played the role of the US Gorbachev together – leaders who insiders hoped would allow enough change to keep the status quo intact. But like Gorbachev, Biden presided over its collapse.
Biden chaotically withdrew US troops from Afghanistan and then pursued the same strategic vision that had already failed in Ukraine. There was never a realistic definition of victory in Afghanistan, and Biden had none for Ukraine.
Instead of an achievable goal, in both conflicts, Washington elites promoted idealistic dreams: a democratic and liberal Afghanistan, a Ukraine with Crimea restored and NATO membership, and a Russia too weak and fearful to cause trouble for anyone. Biden has embroiled America in a new, never-ending war, and his policies have been erratic even on their own terms.
If American support were intended to win the war for Ukraine, providing maximum aid upfront would have been the logical thing to do. Instead, Biden has followed a pattern of gradual escalation, giving Ukraine more powerful weapons and more room to use them only when Ukraine is weakened—as if the conscious goal of the U.S. administration was to prolong the war as long as possible, regardless of the cost in Ukrainian lives or the risk of the conflict going nuclear.
And while Biden has prolonged one war, another has erupted in the Middle East, with Hamas’s savage attack on Israel and Israel’s merciless, widespread response.
And in this conflict, the Biden administration was at war with itself, making recommendations to Israel while arming it and exerting no effective influence. A deployment of American forces to Gaza for humanitarian purposes—soldiers as social workers again—was predictably useless but brief, ending before Americans in uniform were killed in a war zone.
Trump has a popular mandate for world-historical change
Biden himself is as old as the worldview he represents. From George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and the George Bush and Obama administrations and then again with Biden Obama, and then again with Biden in the White House, Washington has had a way of operating: trying to create a global system that prefers to prolong conflicts indefinitely rather than have realistic goals.
When Donald Trump tried to move away from liberal foreign policy towards a more realistic and ready for negotiations, the media and official Washington took unusual steps to stop him. In his first term, Trump’s foreign policy was mined by his administration of unelected officials, even presidential appointees, who sought to prevent any deviation from the prescribed course of the liberal Order of Things.
But the November 2024 election gave American voters a simple choice, pitting Trump and his foreign policy against a unified establishment, with Kamala Harris having the support not only of liberal Democrats but also of neoconservative Republicans like Liz Cheney.
Americans gave Trump’s victory the dimensions of a triumph. Both at the polls and under the disastrous Biden administration, the old order collapsed.
Biden is the epilogue to the era of neoconservatism and neoliberalism that defined American politics for decades and that lost the peace after the Cold War.
