With U.S. President Joe Biden set to leave office next week, evaluations of his foreign policy legacy are in full swing. Many of them so far have focused on Biden’s pledge to uphold the international “rules-based order” in the face of Russia’s wanton violations of those rules and China’s open efforts to rewrite them.
Some have argued that Biden failed spectacularly at this on the merits. Some, like David Ignatius, think his policies were an empirical success but a political failure that for all Biden’s “laudable effort” left the rules-based order “weaker rather than stronger.” Others portrayed the rules-based order that Biden championed rhetorically as a crumbling illusion. Robert Manning and Matthew Burrows went even further, stating that, “by many measures, the ‘rules-based order’ (adhered to à la carte by the United States) is decomposing.”
There are good arguments to be made that protecting the rules-based order was the wrong slogan for Biden or, for that matter, any administration willing to engage in such persistent hypocrisy on the world stage. Biden presided over the collapse of secular democracy and women’s human rights protections in Afghanistan; NATO’s failure to deter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; Israel’s obliteration of Gaza and use of starvation warfare against an entire region and its civilian occupants; and the re-emergence of a nuclear arms race.