What Biden’s Exit Means for American Foreign Policy

A Conversation With Timothy Naftali

On July 21, following weeks of intense speculation, U.S. President Joe Biden announced that he would not run in the November 2024 presidential election and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place. Coming at a time of geopolitical uncertainty, the decision could have large implications for U.S. foreign policy for the remainder of Biden’s term.

To make sense of what Biden’s decision means for the presidency and U.S. world leadership in the weeks to come, Foreign Affairs’ senior editor Hugh Eakin spoke to the presidential historian Timothy Naftali, a faculty scholar at the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University, the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, the author of George H. W. Bush (a volume in the Times Books “American Presidents” series), and the editor of The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B. Johnson.  

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

In his momentous announcement, Biden said that it’s in the best interest of his party in the country for him to focus solely on “fulfilling [his] duties as president for the remainder of [his] term.” I wonder how easy that will be. Will the world, including not only antagonists but also partners and allies, see him as a lame duck?

I actually think that President Biden’s very difficult decision today has restored some of the luster to the American commitment to Ukraine and to stabilizing other parts of the world.

Leaders see power as always in flux. And in the three weeks since the debate, the Biden administration likely found the world more skeptical about U.S. power, in the sense that it seemed more and more likely that former President Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden in the election this fall. And as a result, countries were already gaming what kind of international political environment they would be contending with starting at the end of January, with Biden no longer in the White House.

But there is now a better chance that a Democrat will win in November. And so I’d argue that, for the moment at least, foreign leaders have to take seriously the possibility that a member of Biden’s team or someone else from the Democratic Party will be leading the United States, meaning that they may be able to count on support for Ukraine, for example. Some of that luster may disappear after the beginning of November. But the fact that the Democrats are no longer likely losers, I think will influence the way foreign leaders, particularly American adversaries view the Biden administration.

So to the extent that a likely Trump victory was already baked into the international calculus about the United States, Biden’s announcement forces a very different assessment.

And something else needs to be underscored here. Not since the early 1950s, when the internationalist General Dwight Eisenhower won the contest for the soul of the Republican Party over the isolationist Senator Robert Taft, have the two parties presented such fundamentally different worldviews with regard to America’s place in international affairs. Since 1952, both parties have been internationalist in their outlook. President Trump in his first term was an exception, but the Republican Party that he led was divided on this issue. 

As the recent Republican convention demonstrated, Trump has now refashioned the party completely in his own image. His choice of Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate, for example, didn’t represent an attempt to bridge different points of view, but a doubling down of Trumpism. And so were he to return to power—were he to regain the White House, and Republicans to hold the House and regain the Senate—foreign leaders, friends and foes alike, could anticipate a much more isolationist America. So the fact that now the internationalist party has an improved chance to win, will necessarily alter the calculations of foreign leaders. [Russian President] Vladimir Putin can no longer be certain that he can outlast the American commitment to European stability and to the sovereignty of Ukraine.

On the matter of antagonists, however, the United States is closely involved in two major wars, in Europe and the Middle East, and dealing with complicated issues in Asia and elsewhere. Does this announcement come at a perilous moment?

Oh, yes. It’s a perilous moment when the national strategy of a great power is so in question that an election could alter the country’s, or at least its leadership class’s, definition of the national interest. And it’s especially perilous for the international system when the country in question is a superpower. This situation introduces an uncertainty into the political calculations of every leader. It is very rare for an election to decide how the power elite of a nation defines its national interest. And it’s almost unheard of that this should happen for a great power.

During the Cold War, the two parties in the United States disagreed on the means by which to fight the Cold War, particularly in the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era. But they didn’t disagree on the fact that the United States faced a determined adversary and that national security entailed playing a role in defending, protecting, and encouraging regional and international stability. That consensus doesn’t exist anymore across the two parties.

Comparisons are naturally being made with President Lyndon Johnson’s March 1968 announcement that he would not run again. And many have noted that Biden’s decision is coming much later, in late July. But from a foreign policy point of view, it seems that actually, it’s early: we still have six months of the presidency left. What are the real possibilities in terms of what Biden can do during this time?

President Biden can ensure the continuation of the systems that are below the surface that are helping American allies around the world. If Trump is elected, we don’t know what will happen to intelligence cooperation, for example, not only with Ukraine but also with NATO allies and allies in East Asia. We don’t know what will happen to the training that our military is doing to assist allies of freedom around the world. 

All these processes, though they don’t get a lot of attention, matter for the stability of the world. And they don’t usually need special acts of Congress to be sustained; they just need a stable center in the Oval Office, and [under Biden] that’s been guaranteed. Adversaries are very sensitive to the continuation of those activities. It’s these day-to-day activities of the United States that are often the most alarming to them and most reassuring to our allies. International problems are rarely easy to solve, but they can be managed, and it’s that gardening, if you will, that American foreign national security policy makers need to do every day to be effective. 

And so the gardening can continue.

With the president in office focused on American internationalism, that’s a good thing for American allies. It gives them some predictive capacity about what they can expect from the United States between now and the 20th of January. And it’s a terrible thing for American adversaries, who know they are going to have to put up with a lot of American activities in support of aims that they don’t share.

What about the larger Biden record? Inevitably, one thinks of what happened at the end of the Obama administration and Trump coming to office setting out to undo so many of the major Obama policy initiatives. Are there specific ways that Biden can Trump-proof some of his own accomplishments?

By stepping aside, Biden is doing the most important thing that he can do at this point to Trump-proof the United States, in terms of our national security. As the Supreme Court just reminded us, the U.S. president has enormous authority to direct our foreign policy. And so the choice of the next president is so important. Even if Trump were to beat the ultimate Democratic nominee, Biden’s accomplishments in foreign policy might not all completely dissolve. Were Trump not to score a trifecta, and retain the House as well as win the Senate, one might see some pushback from Congress if a future President Trump and Vice President [J. D.] Vance were to try to dramatically rescind American activities abroad and sacrifice Ukraine to the wolf in the Kremlin. 

So how to Trump-proof our international stature will depend on which party the American people choose to lead the two houses of Congress. If Democrats control the House, they would complicate Trump’s efforts, for example, to shut down support for Ukraine. Trump could still veto a bill, but there may be the votes to overturn that veto. There will still be Republican senators and Republican members of the House who will want to vote for aid for Ukraine. So, if the Democrats control the House, Congress might be able to pass assistance packages for Ukraine and Israel, despite Trump’s being in the White House.

As a result of this decision, does Biden in fact have a chance to try to shape his legacy, given the timing and that there is a definite endpoint ahead? Are there useful historical analogies for what presidents have done in these final months?

Well, this will be an unusual late presidency because of how this new period we’ve just entered started. In 1968, Johnson attempted to combine two very difficult decisions as a way of strengthening his legacy and improving the well-being of the United States. At the same time that he said in March 1968 he would not be a candidate for reelection in November, he announced a serious commitment to negotiating a way out of the Vietnam War. In that way, he made clear that he was devoting his late presidency to an issue of foreign policy. 

Biden might view his remaining months in office as an opportunity to do something similar in the Middle East. But the current crisis in the Middle East is hardly a parallel to the US policy failure in Vietnam. The United States is not a direct combatant in Israel’s war with Hamas. It has to work through an ally, Israel. So there isn’t a direct parallel to Johnson, who said to the world, and particularly to Hanoi and Moscow and Beijing, “Take me seriously” in seeking a diplomatic off-ramp from the war in Vietnam. “I’m no longer playing politics. I’m out of politics.” I don’t see there being a direct parallel for Biden, and that’s OK. 

History provides us with echoes, but rarely does it repeat itself; the circumstances of each case are almost always very different though the dilemmas they raise can seem similar. The people, the political culture—those can be similar, the individuals can be similar. But history isn’t a crystal ball. There are unique elements to Biden’s decision that should be appreciated—and should be a source of some humility in trying to figure out what’s going to happen next.

From a historical perspective, is there something you see as particularly striking about the decision and how it happened?

In trying to follow from afar the discussions going on in Wilmington [Delaware, where the president was at his family home, isolated with COVID and struggling to decide what to do], it seemed that Biden was in part a prisoner to an unfortunate American tradition. This is the idea that only by winning a second term is the president of the United States validated. In the 1840s, James K. Polk made clear that he was seeking only one, very consequential term. Modern presidents, however, have treated their re-election as a referendum on their first terms, when the campaign would be better suited as a test of what they have to offer in a second term.

Presidents should be allowed to rise to greatness in our history simply by serving one term. The moment and the individual can coalesce and that moment may last only four years. George H. W. Bush is a good example. He was supremely qualified and had the right tools to manage the end of the Cold War and the first years of what followed. Yet he didn’t want to be just a one-term president. As a result, when he was defeated in 1992, he left office feeling depressed as if he had somehow failed as president, despite his one term having been so consequential and important. Gerald Ford was another excellent one-term president.

Biden’s one-term presidency is destined to be viewed very positively. How positively will ultimately depend on whether a Democratic successor, whether it’s Kamala Harris or not, is elected in November. But not all of his legacy depends on a Democratic victory in November. He brought us out of Trumpian chaos. He restored America’s role in the world, restored the trust of allies. He pushed adversaries away from goals they were hoping to achieve. Without anything like the majorities of FDR or LBJ, his deft touch with Congress led to a deepening of the social safety net, brought technology to bear in the problem of climate change without sacrificing American jobs, and made a generational commitment to American infrastructure. 

In sum, the president has had a successfully consequential term. Unfortunately, he felt that he alone could prevent Trump from returning to the White House and so sought reelection. But sadly, he didn’t have enough in the tank. It was his own body that defined that his moment had passed. I hope that with time he comes to view his term differently, just as I believe George H. W. Bush did, as one that was extraordinarily successful and a blessing for our country.