The World Is Leaving Biden Behind

It wasn’t an especially warm goodbye on either side of the podium.

U.S. President Joe Biden, making his valedictory speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, drew a mild laugh when he talked of his half-century in public service and delivered his now-tired joke about his age. (“I know I look like I’m only 40,” he said.) But that was it for the merriment: Biden then droned on dully about the global challenges ahead, and the U.N. delegates responded with a mere smattering of applause, even when he spoke of defending Ukraine and ending the war in the Middle East. When he defended his withdrawal from Afghanistan, there was dead silence.

No doubt the most memorable moment of Biden’s speech came toward the end when he alluded to his decision not to run for another term at age 81 and declared: “My fellow leaders, let us never forget some things are more important than staying in power.” Biden received sustained applause for that line—which was rather ironic since so many of the countries represented in the hall are now led by autocrats desperately trying to stay in power no matter the cost.

But then, as the president was ushered off the stage—both the actual stage in Turtle Bay and, simultaneously, the world stage—something else was clear: The failing global system that Biden had hoped to reclaim and revitalize as president has largely passed him by. It’s not just that, with four months left as president, Biden has little chance of resolving the bloody conflicts now raging—one of which grows hotter by the day as Israel attacks Hezbollah in Lebanon while U.S. diplomats have all but given up on restraining it. “Biden may love diplomacy, but diplomacy doesn’t love him back,” Walter Russell Mead wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Monday.

No, it’s more that the United Nations itself—and everything it once represented—is fast becoming as irrelevant as the League of Nations once was. With the United States on one side and Russia and China joined at the hip on the other—in other words, three of the five veto-bearing members of the U.N. Security Council—the U.N. is once again a football of the major powers, a forum for confrontation and endless stalemate. The situation is reminiscent of the height of the Cold War when the Soviet Union simply vetoed nearly everything in sight (with a few key exceptions, such as the Marshall Plan and the Korean War resolution—Soviet delegates were absent both days—and minor truce oversight missions in places such as Cyprus).

As for the General Assembly, the body once apotheosized as the Parliament of Man is more than ever a place paralyzed by regional politics, the speechifying and petty clubbiness of smaller nations—and often anti-Israel invective. Once this was symbolized most infamously by an Arab-railroaded resolution in 1975 identifying Zionism with racism. On Tuesday, the same sentiments were made manifest by the world leader who followed Biden up to the podium, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who delivered a rant comparing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his “mass murder network” to Adolf Hitler. Erdogan also inveighed against the Security Council and its five permanent members, saying, “The world is bigger than five.”

In his own speech, Biden sought to compare today’s rocky global situation to when he was first elected a U.S. senator at 29 and the Vietnam War and the Cold War were still ongoing. “The United States and the world got through that moment,” he said. “It wasn’t easy or simple or without significant setbacks. But we would go on to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons … through arms control and then go on to bring the Cold War itself to an end. Israel and Egypt went to war but then forged a historic peace. We ended the war in Vietnam.”

“I’ve seen a remarkable sweep of history,” Biden declared, saying that he leaves public life as optimistic as when he entered it. Biden then quoted William Butler Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming,” saying that even with today’s chaos things are better than during the World War I period when “mere anarchy” was “loosed upon the world” and “the center” could not hold.

“I see a critical distinction,” Biden said. “In our time, the center has held.” He noted that under his leadership, the world has “turned the page” on the worst pandemic in a century and defended the U.N. Charter in Ukraine and that the United States has made the largest investment in climate and clean energy in history—all to “make sure that the forces holding us together are stronger than those that are pulling us apart.”

That remains to be seen because, at the moment, things seem to be falling apart faster than Biden and his team can keep up with them.

“This was a legacy speech,” said Stephen Schlesinger, the author of Act of Creation, a book about the founding of the U.N. “Biden emphasized how his administration has vigorously displayed its commitments to the U.N. Charter, most importantly by helping Ukraine defend against Russia’s cruel and illegal invasion of that nation. As a traditional liberal Democratic president, Biden also checked off a list of his primary priorities in the organization—on global health, food insecurity, drought, trade and technology, norms on cyberspace, a global minimum tax on corporations, an Indo-Pacific security framework, supply chains, debt forgiveness, human rights and terrorism.”

But, in the end, “Biden did not present new policies,” Schlesinger said in an email. “He did not put forward new ideas about peace settlements in either Ukraine or Gaza. Nor did he chastise the U.N. over its inability to act in these crises. Biden’s speech changes nothing but is his effort to remind Americans of the importance of organization on the world scene … and to leave a possible marker for future U.S. presidents.”

Indeed, Biden’s efforts to shift from military hegemony to diplomacy have failed on most fronts—nowhere more than in the Middle East, as Mead points out. “No administration in American history has been as committed to Middle East diplomacy as this one,” Mead wrote. “Yet have an administration’s diplomats ever had less success? Mr. Biden tried and failed to get Iran back into a nuclear agreement with the U.S. He tried and failed to get a new Israeli-Palestinian dialogue on track. He tried and failed to stop the civil war in Sudan.”

According to some diplomatic sources, there is a strong sense in the Middle East that Netanyahu in particular is no longer listening to Biden and his team at all; instead, Israel will plow ahead with its escalated war until the next U.S. president, whether it is Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, is sworn in. For the Israelis as well as the Arabs, “there is no political gain in giving Biden any kind of victory,” as one diplomat put it.

As for the U.N. itself, it’s far too soon to write any obituaries. The League of Nations went comatose as World War II got underway (though it wasn’t formally disbanded until 1946), but the U.N.’s constellation of agencies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.N. Development Program, are still doing critical work in preserving stability around the world. The annual U.N. climate conferences are also an essential forum. And while it’s true that the U.N. has utterly failed in the role some internationalists believe it was designed to fulfill—maintaining global collective security—the world body has played a part in preventing a third world war and may do so again.

So argues Schlesinger. “The U.N. played a direct role in resolving the biggest and most dangerous confrontation we’ve had in the last 75 years, the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he told me in an interview on the U.N.’s 75th anniversary in 2020. Indeed, then-U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson helped avert nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union when he famously confronted the Soviet ambassador in the Security Council with evidence of Russian missiles in Cuba, telling him, “You are in the court of world opinion right now.”

No such confrontation is imminent now with either Russia or China, but the White House notes in a fact sheet issued this week: “We rallied 141 countries in the UN General Assembly to condemn Russia’s violations of international law. We used UN Security Council debates to shine a spotlight on Russia’s illegal war and atrocities. We pressed the UN General Assembly to kick Russia off the UN Human Rights Council. We isolated Russia by denying it senior UN appointments and preventing its election to UN bodies.”

Schlesinger counts about 30 cases in its history where the United Nations played a peacemaking role in preventing a regional or local conflict that could have threatened a wider war—some that easily might have drawn in Washington. These include crises in Angola, Cambodia, Croatia, Guatemala, Mozambique, Namibia, Serbia, and South Africa. The United Nations also still acts as a clearinghouse for an endless array of humanitarian aid projects that Washington has no interest in orchestrating—and which rarely garner headlines (among them the much-maligned U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Gaza).

But much will depend on who is elected the next U.S. president on Nov. 5. Harris has consistently stood up for the defense of international rules and norms embodied in the U.N. Charter, while Trump has tended to short-shrift them. Like it or not, the U.N. remains the only real forum for co-opting the Chinas, Irans, and Russias of the future into the international system—or at least what is left of it.