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Joe Biden’s place in history is as the man under whom the liberal international order unraveled. America has suffered bouts of inflation before, and while Biden’s domestic failures will be remembered, they will not stand out as singular. In foreign policy, however, Biden has written the end of a chapter not only in America’s story but in the world’s as well.
Far from representing “hope and change,” the slogan on which he and Barack Obama were elected in 2008, Biden has personified the hopelessness and stagnation of the West’s post-Cold War foreign policy.
In 2008 voters demanded something new and trusted Obama’s ticket to deliver it. The regime-change projects of the “Global War on Terror” under George W. Bush had been sold to the public as a “cakewalk” and a liberation of foreign populations who would greet our soldiers with flowers. Seven years into the Afghan War and after five in Iraq, it was clear that Bush and those who followed him had no way out of these conflicts, which were being fought not in order to be won — since victory could hardly even be defined — but simply to postpone defeat.
Read the full article by The Responsible Statecraft
