When President Joe Biden first joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1975, it was taken as a sign that the 32-year-old legislator was “ticketed for a bright future.” The assumption proved correct. Although it took decades, Biden did ascend the ladder of American power—rising to chair of that committee to vice president and, finally, to the presidency. As Biden climbed, he was not shy about selling himself as a master statesman and an expert on foreign policy. While running for president in 2007, he made that experience central to his case for why Democrats should back him over Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
In theory, the speech that Biden gave on Tuesday morning to the United Nations General Assembly—the last of his career before the body—was the end of this triumphant arc. An American president opining, at the end of his reign, on his record within a favored policy arena.
Instead, the timing of the UN speech highlighted one of the central failures of his presidency: Biden’s inability to restore even a semblance of calm between Israel and its neighbors in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas. As if to rub it in, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu posted a video on social media during the speech in which he vowed to continue the bombing in Lebanon that Biden tried in vain to prevent.
Since October 7, the Biden administration’s overarching diplomatic priority in the Middle East has been to prevent a broader regional war. The president sent top level envoys and military officials to the region countless times in service of that goal. He dispatched carrier strike groups to signal to Iran and its proxies that the United States was prepared to defend Israel. He agreed to almost all of Israel’s requests for weapons and diplomatic cover—partly out of a misguided belief that doing so would give the administration the ability to shape Israel’s actions.
While it has been clear for most of the past year that his approach has failed in Gaza—where more than 41,000 people have been killed and nearly 100,000 people have been injured—the Biden administration has clung, as ceasefire talks fell apart, to the victory of Israel not starting a massive regional conflict. Now, even that tiny glimmer of a win has faded.
In the past week, Biden’s efforts in Lebanon have fallen apart. The signs that Israel was headed toward war began in earnest last week when it made a central goal of its military campaign to return residents that had evacuated out of the north to their homes. One day later, it began detonating thousands of pagers sent to members of Hezbollah in what even centrist American officials like former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have called an act of terrorism. On Friday, it launched an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders that killed at least 50 people.
Despite this, during the speech, Biden reiterated his longstanding position that it is “not in anyone’s interest” for there to be a full-scale war in the region. “Even as the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible,” he continued. “In fact, it remains the only path to lasting security…That’s what we’re working tirelessly to achieve.”
Israel clearly disagrees. Monday was the deadliest day in Lebanon since at least 1990. Israeli airstrikes throughout the country killed more than 550 people—including at least 144 women and children—and injured more than 1,800, according to the Lebanese health ministry. (By population, this is equivalent to the United States suffering roughly 150,000 casualties in a single day; there were less than half as many US casualties during the entirety of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.)
Israel’s assault shows no sign of letting up. In his Tuesday post, Netanyahu pledged to continue the bombing and said “anybody who has a missile in their living room will not have a home.” Hezbollah has responded by launching rockets into Israel.
Another US goal of the Biden administration has been a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, which has also fallen apart. In private, even Biden’s own officials now say that is unlikely to happen during his presidency. Netanyahu seems to have no interest in a ceasefire partly because it would cost him the support of the far-right Jewish supremacists in his cabinet and potentially bring down his governing coalition.
Biden detailed the horrors of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Tuesday before making clear that the families of Israeli hostages he has met with are “going through hell.” He added that “innocent civilians in Gaza are also going through hell” as evidenced by the “thousands and thousands” of people who have been killed. “Now is the time” for Israel and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire that ends the war,” Biden said.
But his administration has proven to be almost completely unwilling to use the United States’ substantial leverage to push Israel to change course. As a result, Biden has been repeatedly and publicly humiliated by Netanyahu, an ostensible ally who is believed to want Donald Trump to beat Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
Throughout the speech, Biden made a point of defending the UN Charter and his efforts to uphold it. “The Security Council, like the UN itself, needs to go back to the job of making peace—of brokering deals to end wars and suffering,” the president argued. It is a noble goal but it almost surely rang hollow to the diplomats and heads of state in attendance.
Over the past year, Biden’s UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield has consistently vetoed Security Council resolutions designed to hold Israel accountable and end the war. In April, the United States was the only Security Council member to veto a resolution that recommended that Palestine be admitted as a member of the UN. In December, it was one of 10 out of 186 nations to oppose a ceasefire resolution. No other major powers joined it in doing so. (On Tuesday, ProPublica reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a longtime Biden aide, rejected US government reports that found that Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza—a conclusion that could have forced the United States to cut off military aid.)
The United States is not the only nation to use its Security Council position to run interference for violent and illiberal actions. China and Russia do the same. The difference is that Biden wanted to be seen as a champion of a “rules-based” order that respected international law and prioritized humanitarian concerns. His actions in relation to Israel and Palestine do not fit with such a goal. If Biden is aware of the tension, he did not mention it on Tuesday.
