A New Candidate Must Now Defend Biden’s Legacy Abroad

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A New Candidate Must Now Defend Biden’s Legacy Abroad

As President Biden greeted the leaders of his 31 allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization a week ago, he described in vivid terms how he thought history would treat his first term in office.

He was the ********* president who had restored and then expanded NATO, the world’s biggest military alliance, saving it from his predecessor’s threats to withdraw from it. He organized the West to push back against President Vladimir V. ****** of Russia, and in so doing deterred Moscow from direct attacks on ********* nations beyond Ukraine’s borders. And he became the architect of a new ********* plan to contain China, though he never calls it that: cutting off sophisticated technology to Beijing while pouring billions of federal dollars into producing advanced chips at home.

But Mr. Biden’s defense of his record came too late, after the shocking debate performance that led to his withdrawal from the race on Sunday. And now it will fall to a different nominee — likely but not certainly Vice President Kamala Harris — to defend that record from a radically different interpretation of the past four years promoted by former President Donald J. Trump.

In his acceptance speech in Milwaukee on Thursday night, Mr. Trump insisted he had turned over to Mr. Biden a world at peace in January 2021, and that today “our planet is teetering on the edge of World War III.” It was a disingenuous argument at best. There was a low-level war bubbling in Ukraine throughout Mr. Trump’s term; he simply chose to pay little attention.

Elections are rarely fought on foreign policy records, except when the nation is at war. And while Mr. Biden’s recounting of events hews far closer to the historical record than Mr. Trump’s does, the Democratic nominee will have to explain how she or he will manage a world that is clearly far more dangerous today than four years ago. Whoever is elected in November will inherit confrontations with America’s nuclear rivals China and Russia, cold wars that are one mistake away from turning hot.

More than any election in decades, this one will be marked by starkly different approaches to an era of simultaneous confrontations: the re-emerging arms race with Beijing and Moscow; deterring attacks on Taiwan and the eastern edge of the Atlantic alliance; *******’s war against ******, which still threatens to set the Middle East aflame. Any one of those could easily explode on the watch of the next president.

“We are seeing territorial conflict between the great powers again,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, where Mr. Biden’s top foreign policy and national security aides made the case for Mr. Biden’s legacy — and for a second term that they suspected, but could not say, was slipping away. As in the ******* between World War I and World War II, Ms. Rice added, there has been the return of “the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: populism, nativism, isolationism and protectionism.”

Mr. Biden’s time in office was spent fighting the first three items on Dr. Rice’s list. Surprisingly, as his presidency moved into its last two years, he came to embrace the fourth, closing off ********* markets to ******** electric vehicles and embracing an industrial policy that closely resembled Beijing’s own.

But it is Mr. Biden’s decision to step in and support Ukraine, with over $100 billion in aid and military equipment, that seems certain to define his presidency — and become a centerpiece of the debates that will dominate the 106 days until the election.

He was under no obligation to do so. Ukraine was not a member of the Atlantic alliance. There was no treaty requirement that he come to the country’s defense, of the kind the ******* States has with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.

Instead, the decision was born of Mr. Biden’s Cold War roots. By his own account, Mr. Biden was convinced that if he did not stop Russia in Ukraine, Mr. ****** would keep going, on a mission to dismantle the ******** democratic order that had been constructed, defended, and ultimately expanded over Mr. Biden’s political lifetime.

Mr. Biden regarded himself as one of the last defenders of that order, and he was convinced that if Mr. Trump had been president at the time, he would have welcomed the invasion rather than rally the West against it.

“The day after ****** invaded Ukraine, here’s what he said,” Mr. Biden said last week, warming up to a campaign line for a race he still thought he could win. “It was ‘genius.’ It was ‘wonderful.’ Some of you forgot that, but that’s exactly what he said.” It was the kind of muscular defense of his signature foreign policy decision that Mr. Biden’s supporters would have liked to see in the debate.

Mr. Trump’s view of the war could not be more starkly different. The former president’s first impeachment was over the question of whether he had suspended arms to Ukraine because its leaders were not giving him political dirt on Mr. Biden. And in choosing JD Vance as his running mate, he selected the leading critic of ********* involvement in Ukraine, a man who has argued that the ******* States should cut off arms and intelligence to Kyiv and focus on China.

That sets up the Democratic nominee to play the role that Republicans once did: that of the hawks, warning that if America abandons the Ukrainian people, it will endanger all of Europe and could ultimately encourage China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to move on Taiwan.

It is Mr. Biden’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific region that perhaps marks one of his boldest foreign policy initiatives — but also one of the most fragile. He nursed along a rapprochement of the leaders of Japan and South Korea to overcome centuries of enmity and join forces in countering China’s expansionism.

Since a summit at Camp David last year, the three allies have conducted more than 60 trilateral meetings and military drills, a pace designed to solidify and, in a way, “future-proof” the relationship. He brought the Philippines into the mix as well, and he negotiated the construction of submarines by Australia.

It all adds up to the seeds of a nascent Atlantic alliance for the Pacific. Mr. Trump has already voiced his doubts, declaring in a recently published interview that he was not certain he would defend Taiwan, because it had stolen America’s semiconductor industry.

The result is that Mr. Biden is the preferred candidate among those allies, more popular abroad than at home. “Biden’s approach has made it feel like we can have a more normal and predictable relationship with the U.S.,” said Yujin Yaguchi, a professor of ********* studies at the University of Tokyo.

Under Mr. Biden, the ******* States expanded ****** military drills with South Korea while bringing it deeper into the folds of *********-led global supply chains, with top South Korean conglomerates building new factories in the ******* States to produce cars, batteries and computer chips. In recent months, the ******* States has begun replacing China as South Korea’s biggest export market, for the first time in two decades.

But it all has a sense of fragility about it; the partnerships in Asia have little of the muscle memory of the NATO alliance. And Mr. Biden has made no serious attempt at a diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea, as his halfhearted calls for “dialogue without preconditions” found no audience in Pyongyang. He will leave office with no progress to report on countering North Korea’s expanding nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

During his term, North Korea has rapidly expanded its weapons programs, using Washington’s intensifying strategic competition with Russia and China to its advantage. It has

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during Mr. Biden’s four years in the White House than under any other ********* leader, while Moscow and Beijing vetoed ********* attempts to impose new sanctions on the country at the U.N. Security Council. Last month, Russia and North Korea further closed their ranks against Washington by signing a mutual-defense treaty.

“After Trump’s cost- and benefit-oriented and arm-twisting foreign policy, Biden respected and restored the alliance,” said Park Won-gon, a political scientist at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. “But he leaves North Korea as homework for his successor.”

The same could be said of Iran, which Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Friday was just a few weeks away from “breakout,” obtaining the fuel necessary for a nuclear *******. (The ******* itself would take months, maybe more than a year, to develop.)

And Mr. Biden leaves one more legacy: a deepening partnership between China and Russia, potentially the most serious threat to the ******* States. Mr. Biden only acknowledged last week, for the first time, that he was trying to interfere in that geopolitical combination. The next ********* president may well become consumed by it.

Motoko Rich contributed reporting from Tokyo and Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul.

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