Biden’s Midterm Report Card

In only his first two years in office, U.S. President Joe Biden has presided over the most transformative phase in U.S. foreign policy in decades. His administration has led a massive effort to push back against Russia after it unleashed the most horrific war of aggression in Europe since 1945, built and expanded new alliances to contain China in the Indo-Pacific, and rejoined global efforts on climate policy and other issues. Biden and his team have brought a renewed seriousness to U.S. foreign-policy making that stands in sharp contrast with the chaos of the Trump era.

But not all of Biden’s efforts have been successful. The U.S. pullout from Afghanistan in 2021 was a disaster, even if it finally ended a 20-year war. After the Biden team’s early emphasis on democracy and human rights, geopolitical realities have forced uncomfortable compromises.

To help us assess the highs and lows of Biden’s term at the halfway mark, Foreign Policy asked 20 experts to grade his performance across 10 foreign-policy topics. You can scroll down or jump to each topic using the buttons below.

—Stefan Theil, deputy editor

Russia: No Guardrails for Putin

The Biden administration came into office saying it wanted a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia, seeking to create “guardrails” so the United States could focus on its main adversary, China. That worked for a time in 2021, with a U.S.-Russia summit that June and cooperation on a number of issues, including strategic stability, cyberattacks, and climate change. But once the U.S. intelligence community saw the massive Russian military buildup around Ukraine later that year, the administration realized that an invasion was in the cards. Washington shared this information with skeptical U.S. allies and warned Moscow that it knew what was happening. When the Kremlin presented its list of demands to the United States and NATO in December 2021, the administration was willing to negotiate and even make some concessions—all to no avail.

Since Russia’s invasion, U.S. President Joe Biden has successfully created a robust trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific coalition to support Ukraine and sanction Russia. Washington has provided the lion’s share of military equipment to Kyiv, enabling the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to succeed on the battlefield and push the Russians back. However, the administration has imposed restraints on what weapons it will supply Ukraine out of what are probably excessive concerns about Russian escalation, which has made it more difficult for Ukraine to achieve its objective of restoring control over its territory. A Patriot air defense battery and Bradley anti-tank vehicles will be sent, but this should have happened months ago. The Biden administration has also maintained some high-level channels of communication with the Kremlin, sending repeated warnings about the repercussions of Russia’s possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. Today, the U.S.-Russian relationship is unstable and unpredictable. It has been impossible to establish guardrails around Russian President Vladimir Putin.

China & Indo-Pacific: Sustained Focus Despite War

The Biden administration deserves high marks for sustained focus on China and the Indo-Pacific despite Russia’s war in Ukraine. It has begun to deliver on what it calls its “invest, align, and compete” strategy toward China, including by channeling billions of dollars into U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and science research, retaining most of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s restrictions on China, and going a significant step further by restricting semiconductor exports in an attempt to thwart China’s development of high technology.

Little progress, however, has been made in putting guardrails around intensifying Sino-U.S. competition, such as risk reduction measures between the two countries’ militaries. Cooperation on climate change, global public health, and even narcotics trafficking has stalled. Beijing has either set unworkable preconditions or suspended talks due to U.S. policies toward Taiwan.

Biden officials have taken welcome steps to strengthen Taiwan’s security (including almost $3.8 billion in arms sales approvals), bolster economic ties, and cooperate on semiconductor supply chains. U.S. allies have been persuaded to warn Beijing against the use of force to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. But Biden’s suggestion that Taiwan can declare independence if it chooses to do so, along with other gaffes and decisions, have undermined the credibility of U.S. support for the “one China” policy, thus increasing the risk of war. The U.S. military still hasn’t addressed its dependency on large, fixed bases and vulnerable aircraft carriers to defend Taiwan, which could tempt Chinese President Xi Jinping to try to seize the island. A plan to transform the U.S. force posture in the region is in the works, but it’s unclear whether it can restore a more favorable military balance.

The administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, released in February 2022, makes a strong case for a bigger U.S. role in the region. Its implementation is a work in progress. Achievements have been most significant in the diplomacy bucket, including two presidential trips to the region, annual Quadrilateral Security Dialogue summits, a U.S.-Pacific Island Country Summit, and the launch of the U.S.-Association of Southeast Asian Nations Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.

The economic pillar of Biden’s Indo-Pacific Strategy remains weak. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is better than nothing, but its lack of market access and tariff reductions limits its appeal. Rejoining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership remains the best way to boost U.S. economic competitiveness and geopolitical influence.

Alliances and partnerships that frayed in the Trump administration have been restored and strengthened, although concerns persist among Washington’s closest friends over what they see as its proclivity to act alone to advance its interests.

Alliances: Test of Leadership

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the biggest foreign-policy challenge to face any U.S. president since the end of the Cold War. On this, Biden has proved more than up to the task, and he has demonstrated that Washington can still lead the democratic world. Under Biden’s leadership, the United States has provided vast military aid to Ukraine, allowing its forces to stop Russia’s initial advance and turn the tide of the war. Biden and his team have also taken a strong and clear line with Moscow, spelling out clearly the consequences of any nuclear escalation.

Biden has taken a similarly firm approach with Beijing over Taiwan, repeatedly committing the United States to helping the island if China were to invade. Strategic ambiguity has been replaced by strategic clarity.

The one major blot on Biden’s foreign-policy report card is the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. This departure was never going to be easy, but the failure even to coordinate with allies or engage the Afghan government meant that a lot of the progress made over the last 20 years was unnecessarily lost.

Luckily, U.S. Afghanistan policy seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. Overall, Biden’s approach has been the right one: firmness with adversaries while rebuilding alliances with traditional partners. As democracies face increasingly aggressive autocracies, they must work closer together. That is the purpose behind Biden’s Summit for Democracy, first held in December 2021 and reconvening later this year. It also echoes the work of the Alliance of Democracies, which will bring together leading politicians, business leaders, and democracy activists from around the world at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit in May.

Defense: Mismatch of Threats and Budgets

Most of the deficiencies of Biden’s national security policies, such as the United States’ disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, are White House errors. Where the U.S. Defense Department has had policy latitude, it’s done reasonably well. Civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon argued against the rushed withdrawal, U.S. Cyber Command has shown conceptual and operational excellence, counterterrorism operations were sustained as those threats metastasized, and support for Ukraine hasn’t prevented progress on countering the China challenge.

The Pentagon has done an excellent job building and sustaining the international effort to arm Ukraine, commendably led by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. He made the important executive decision to commit roughly 5 percent of the U.S. defense budget on an ongoing basis so Ukraine can decimate the Russian military, which the United States still assesses to be an “acute threat.”

The main failing in defense policy—and it is a serious one—is in matching identified threats with budgets and timelines. The gaps are huge: Congress needed to top up Biden’s military budget by $25 billion last year and $45 billion this year. The administration’s 2022 budget was based on a severely understated inflation figure—a willful underfunding that equates to a nearly 5 percent budget cut in inflation-adjusted terms.

Biden has committed the United States to fight to defend Taiwan several times. U.S. intelligence officials and military commanders believe that the greatest risk of a Chinese attack on Taiwan is between now and 2027, yet the military budget is cutting forces, ships, and aircraft. The current budget does not foresee adding any capacity until 2035.

Biden’s National Defense Strategy rightly emphasizes “our ability to withstand, fight through, and recover quickly from disruption.” But as the ammunition shortfalls from supplying Ukraine demonstrate, that’s not how the U.S. military has been spending its money. Tolerating such a yawning gap between stated goals and abilities risks tempting the United States’ adversaries. Bringing the defense budget into line with strategy should therefore be an urgent task for the Biden administration’s remaining two years.

Economy: Geopolitics Trumps Trade

By the historical yardstick—which used to judge trade policy by the number and size of newly concluded trade and investment deals—Biden would get a D. By this measure, his administration has nothing to show after two years. Indeed, it quite proudly proclaims it is not seeking additional “market access” to help U.S. exporters. No U.S. president in 75 years, not even former U.S. President Donald Trump, has accomplished so little in terms of trade liberalization.

But Biden should be graded on what he is actually trying to do, which is to craft a different sort of trade policy for an era of geoeconomic competition and domestic economic anxiety. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai calls this a “worker-centered” trade policy. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen favors “friendshoring,” in which critical supply chains will shift from China to reliable allies, while Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo wants next-generation technologies made in the United States and kept out of Chinese hands. These approaches have found expression in several new framework agreements: the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, and the Trade and Technology Council with Europe. The administration hopes these discussions will produce new kinds of bargains focused on climate policy, labor standards, and supply chain security. Already, however, European protests over new “America First” rules on electric vehicles as well as export controls on chip sales to China suggest this will be challenging.

A big question mark remains: Can trade policy succeed if it does nothing to expand trade? In Asia especially, U.S. friends are anxious about losing access to China’s market without gaining opportunities in the United States. The administration’s rather overt hostility to the World Trade Organization has many experts questioning its commitment to the trade rules Washington once championed. At home, officials are mired in increasingly outdated rhetoric about the harm trade can do to workers. The Biden team needs to find a balance between new approaches and what has worked in the past. It has yet to find that sweet spot.

Climate & Energy: Enviable U.S. Position

In 2022, Biden followed the maxim that Americans will always do the right thing after all other possibilities have been exhausted. After placing a moratorium on oil and gas drilling on federal lands in 2021, Biden reversed course in the face of rising energy prices amid Russia’s war in Ukraine—and even pressed U.S. oil companies to increase production. He used the strategic petroleum reserve to buffer oil price swings and approved increased exports of liquefied natural gas to help Europe wean itself off Russian gas. And after a year of following the cues of the climate movement and his party’s progressive caucus, Biden finally cut a deal with U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin—the Democrats’ swing vote in the Senate—to pass the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a $500 billion package to invest in clean energy technology and infrastructure.

The IRA probably resulted in less money for clean energy than what was on the table a year earlier. But Manchin also forced important concessions that made the package stronger, including technology-neutral tax credits, the extension of tax provisions until 2030, and the elimination of an expensive and convoluted Clean Electricity Payment Program. Biden also backed Manchin’s effort to reform and expedite the process for permitting and constructing the newly funded clean energy infrastructure.

As a result, the United States enters 2023 in an enviable geopolitical position from an energy and climate perspective—blessed with abundant energy resources, technical capabilities, and a package of policies and investments designed to secure cheap and abundant energy while simultaneously accelerating U.S. decarbonization efforts. To truly make progress on the latter, however, will require Biden to take on the third rail of environmental politics and reform both the general permitting process and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has presided over the decline of the U.S. nuclear industry despite the latter’s indispensable role in any serious decarbonization strategy. Both these reforms will be necessary if the United States is to actually achieve the deep emissions reductions envisaged by the IRA. In 2023, we will learn if Biden is willing to buck his anti-nuclear and “not in my backyard” green supporters to take the actions necessary to protect the climate.

Democracy & Human Rights: Selective Amnesia

To his credit, Biden has stood firmly against the world’s two leading autocrats, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has gathered alliances against their military threats, joined multilateral efforts to condemn their atrocities, and imposed sanctions.

Sadly, those moves were not paralleled for autocratic leaders whose support the Biden administration believes it needs for other reasons. Abandoning concerns about the Saudi murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the bombing of Yemeni civilians, Biden traveled to Riyadh to unsuccessfully beg the Saudi crown prince to pump a bit more oil. As Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi presided over the worst repression in his country’s modern history, Biden withheld $130 million in military aid—but let the remaining $1.17 billion in U.S. assistance proceed.

Biden’s Africa summit excluded leaders who seized power in military coups but included others who use slightly more subtle ways to crush democracy, such as Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Biden even allowed himself to be photographed watching the World Cup with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed despite the mass atrocities that Abiy had just overseen in Tigray. In U.S. policies toward Vietnam, India, Mexico, and Poland, the defense of human rights also gave way to other preoccupations.

The danger of this selective approach is that it is so obviously unprincipled. Principles require taking a position even when it is difficult. Biden seemed to embrace human rights only when there was no cost.

That opportunism leaves many of the world’s human rights victims in the lurch. It also weakens Biden’s human rights pronouncements whenever he does make them. The sting of denouncing Putin’s war crimes or Xi’s repression is far less painful if these leaders can pass Washington’s statements off as a geopolitical ploy rather than the consistent application of global standards.

Global South: Less Ideology, More Engagement

Whereas his predecessor, Donald Trump, called parts of the global south “shithole” countries, Biden has made important efforts to reengage with these nations. When he began his term two years ago, it appeared that Biden would make the situation worse by replacing Trump’s ignorance with liberal condescension: the temptation to impose current ideological fashions on the developing world to remake it in America’s image.

Despite its humbler tone, the Biden administration’s initial idea of global democracy promotion was ill-equipped to deal with the many shades of gray in the global south’s complex politics. Washington’s impulse to scrutinize political processes in non-Western societies for democratic compliance had little credibility after Biden abandoned Afghanistan in 2021 to the Taliban’s medieval rule.

The conflict between democracy promotion and the pursuit of U.S. interests became evident in Biden’s moral grandstanding against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. If it looked as if the Saudis and their oil did not matter to U.S. foreign policy in 2021, then it was clear by 2022 that Saudi support in the oil market was critical to raise the costs on Russia for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

If Biden’s efforts to correct course with Saudi Arabia have been unsuccessful, then he has done a better job checking his administration’s ideological impulses and productively engaging with other parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Putting U.S. interests above ideology was part of the policy discipline needed to isolate Russia and effectively compete with China.

To win support for the West against Russia, the administration sensibly began to highlight Ukraine’s national and territorial sovereignty rather than framing the war as a contest between democracy and autocracy. On China, the Biden team moved from convening a democracy summit at the end of 2021 to an intensive outreach to the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America in a series of summits—without making too much of various countries’ internal politics. Despite the widespread narrative that Ukraine and the West have found little support in the global south, there has been significant support from developing countries in the United Nations General Assembly. Under Biden, U.S. strategic competition with China for the global south has finally begun.

Middle East: One of the Least Remarkable Administrations

The Biden administration’s most tangible achievements in the Middle East have been the killing of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and the brokering of a long-awaited Israel-Lebanon maritime border deal. Unfortunately, there is little to report other than that. There has been no resurrection of the Iran nuclear deal despite Washington’s efforts, and U.S. attention to conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Libya has been modest at best. A visit by Biden to Saudi Arabia elicited only lukewarm commitments from Persian Gulf allies to increase oil production, and it is difficult to imagine U.S.-Saudi relations becoming truly functional for as long as Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are in power. In response to mass protests and a violent regime crackdown in Iran, Washington issued strong words and additional sanctions—but paid little attention to Tehran’s destructive regional role in the Middle East.

Unsure about the United States’ future relationship with the region, U.S. allies turned increasingly pragmatic toward Russia and China. The Abraham Accords brokered by the Trump administration may have been a step toward stabilization in the region, but they continue to stand in sharp contrast to Israeli-Palestinian tensions.

Even the Biden administration’s two achievements in the region faced challenges: The deal to demarcate the disputed maritime border between Israel and Lebanon was not accompanied by any push for political and economic reform in Lebanon. A similar critique applies to the U.S. stance toward reform in Iraq and Tunisia. Despite Zawahiri’s death, the United States and its allies have yet to win the so-called war on terrorism. Although no U.S. ally in the Middle East has shifted its foreign-policy direction entirely away from alignment with the United States, the general feeling among U.S. allies is that Washington’s role in the region is less active now and could be even more remote in the future. The Biden administration has not been a complete failure in the Middle East—but so far, it has been one of the least remarkable U.S. administrations in memory.

Immigration: Nothing, Zilch, Nada

Biden has avoided an outright failing grade on immigration only because of two positive decisions he made early in his term: sending a comprehensive immigration reform bill to the U.S. Congress (it went nowhere, but at least he made the effort) and eliminating the Trump administration’s most odious policies, including family separation and the requirement for asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their cases are reviewed.

Other than that, the Biden team has been unable to deter migrant flows—what it and the Republicans want—or channel them through legal, secure, and orderly channels. It made a mess of Title 42, the pandemic-era measure used to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants on supposed public health grounds, even if Republican governors and the U.S. Supreme Court take part of the blame. Biden has neglected every other issue concerning Mexico in exchange for Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador doing Washington’s dirty work by stopping Central American migrants at Mexico’s southern border. Biden also helped provoke an immense increase in Cuban migration to the United States—more than during the 1980 Mariel boatlift and 1994 Balsero crisis together—in a foolish attempt to win Democratic votes in Florida.

Biden has done very little, and now the worst of both worlds are on his hands. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and powerful Democrats such as Sens. Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez have lashed out at the administration’s policies from the left while Biden finds no support from Republicans on any immigration issue.