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14-01-2025
WASHINGTON: United States President Joe Biden has delivered a soaring speech defending his administration’s foreign policy, just days before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office.
Monday’s address, delivered at the State Department, served as a coda for Biden’s four years in office. He had pledged to re-establish US leadership on the global stage, pursue a foreign policy centred on human rights and rally alliances.
“We’re in an inflection point. The post-Cold War era is over. A new era has begun,” Biden said in his speech.
“In these four years, we’ve faced crises that we’ve been tested. We’ve come through those tests stronger, in my view, than we entered those tests.”
Critics, however, have given his administration poor marks in several areas, particularly with regards to US support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
Still, the outgoing president sought to drive home a defining message: that the US is more powerful and its enemies weaker than before he entered the White House.
“New challenges will emerge in the years and months ahead, but even so, it’s clear my administration is leaving the next administration with a very strong hand to play,” Biden said.
“We’re leaving them an America with more friends and stronger alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure, an America who once again is leading, uniting countries, setting the agenda, bringing others together behind our plans and visions.”
Biden spoke just seven days before Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
The president-elect had condemned Biden’s foreign policy on the campaign trail, accusing the Democrat of weakening the US’s standing abroad while allowing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to fester.
Biden offered a different picture on Monday. His leadership, he argued, had strengthened the US’s technological, economic and strategic position against China, a competing world power.
The Democrat also praised his administration’s role in rallying NATO support for Ukraine, which has faced a full-scale invasion from Russia since February 2022.
He also defended the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which fulfilled an agreement with the Taliban reached under Trump. The withdrawal ended two decades of US presence in the country.
“When I took office, I had a choice. Ultimately, I saw no reason to keep thousands of servicemen in Afghanistan,” Biden said.
“By ending the war, we have been able to focus our energy and resources on more urgent challenges.”
He added that he was “the first president of decades who’s not leaving a war in Afghanistan to his successor”.
‘Positive spin’
Israel’s war on Gaza perhaps loomed largest over Biden’s speech. As he arrived, the president was greeted by protesters who shouted, “War criminal!”
Critics have charged that Washington’s continued transfer of military aid to Israel has been tantamount to supporting atrocities abroad.
An estimated 46,584 Palestinians have been killed since the war began in October 2023, with United Nations experts warning that Israel’s actions in the Palestinian enclave are “consistent with genocide”.
The US supplied Israel with a record of nearly $17.9bn in military aid during the war’s first year and has thus far refused to leverage continued funding to bring the war to an end. (Int’l News Desk)
