The year's best stories
Joe Biden has always aimed to shape the post-Cold War era—but in 2023, the post-Cold War era began to shape the fate of his administration. This became the year that Biden’s foreign-policy strategy reached its fruition and its potential obsolescence.
Joe Biden has always aimed to shape the post-Cold War era—but in 2023, the post-Cold War era began to shape the fate of his administration. This became the year that Biden’s foreign-policy strategy reached its fruition and its potential obsolescence.
That’s because political events, in the United States and abroad, began to expose unresolved ambiguities at the heart of Biden’s strategy. His foreign policy has been motivated by the idea that great-power rivalry was inevitable—and that Washington could master any such competition. Biden hasn’t shirked from the challenge of confronting Russia’s aggression in Ukraine or China’s economic and technological rise.
But this year revealed the limits that the United States faces. As Ukraine’s spring counteroffensive stalled despite backing from the Biden administration and its allies in Europe, boasts of Ukrainian victory gave way to resignation about the potential inevitability of negotiations with Russia. And, as the extent of U.S. economic dependence on China revealed itself, the Biden administration’s tough economic talk took on conciliatory tones.
The flipside of Biden’s great-power framework has been the idea that the United States could avoid distraction from conflicts that did not directly involve great powers. That assumption, too, has come undone this year as Israel and Hamas produced a war that immediately involved the United States—and in some ways, that involvement may be serving to intensify the conflict. Biden clearly judged it prudent, politically and strategically, to invest in Israel’s victory. But that seems to have come at the expense of making the war deadlier for Palestinian civilians—and riskier for U.S. interests.
Common to both assumptions at the heart of Biden’s foreign policy—the ability to assert primacy in great-power competition and preside passively over all other conflicts—is a vision of American power, and its relationship to global order, that might be too fragile to realize in any sustained way. Biden acknowledges we are in an era of new global competition but assumes it will be defined by American leadership. He imagines an America powerful enough to intervene everywhere but never obliged to intervene anywhere. In 2023, some of those commitments came due, to the detriment of Biden’s foreign-policy agenda—and potentially his legacy. These five contemporaneous Foreign Policy pieces chart how the United States got here—and where it might end up next.
By Adam Tooze, April 24
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s speech in April on Washington’s economic relationship with China was widely interpreted as an accommodating gesture in the competition between the world’s two largest economies. For FP columnist Adam Tooze, this only seemed to underscore the overreach of the Biden administration’s economic strategy. “Judged by the tone, her message is intended to clarify and calm the waters of speculation and debate about motives and intentions,” he writes. “In the current situation, however, it is far from clear whether clarity actually contributes to calm.”
Yellen said that China can freely grow without threatening American economic leadership. For Tooze, this is less a concession than a veiled threat. “So a strong and self-confident America has no reason to stand in the way of China’s economic and technological modernization except in every area that America’s national security establishment, the most gigantic in the world, defines as being of essential national interest,” he writes. “For this to be anything other than hypocrisy, you have to imagine that we live in a Goldilocks world in which the technology, industrial capacity, and trade that are relevant to national security are incidental to economic and technological modernization more broadly speaking.”
By Matt Duss, Oct. 19
The Biden administration’s strategy for Palestine, to the extent it had one, was based on the assumption that its conflict with Israel need not be resolved. Instead, Palestinian interests would be folded into a broader peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia—a de facto “shunt[ing] aside” of a lasting two-state solution, as Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, puts it in an article for Foreign Policy. That strategy was exposed as a fantasy on Oct. 7 and the weeks afterward, leaving the Biden administration grasping for an alternative.
“The overriding imperative of Biden’s approach to the Middle East has been to limit U.S. attention to it in order to enable greater focus on strategic competition with China as part of the long-desired ‘pivot to Asia,’” Duss writes. “The United States has now dispatched two Navy carrier strike groups to the eastern Mediterranean to try to contain any potential escalation beyond Gaza, and especially an intervention by Lebanese militant group Hezbollah or its patron, Iran. This is clearly a security concept that has failed.”
By Howard W. French, Oct. 19
Few doubted that Biden’s emotional response toward Israel in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack was authentic. There was a lively debate, however, over whether it was wise. FP columnist Howard W. French offered reasons to think that the unconditional quality of Biden’s support for Israel in the early stages of its war against Hamas may “come to be seen as a costly error for the United States.” That’s in part because it undermined Washington’s status as an honest broker as it pursues diplomacy in the Middle East.
The second reason highlighted by French “is closely related to the first and has to do with Washington’s diplomatic standing both in the Middle East and in the broader world.” What’s at stake in America’s Israel policy is its own moral credibility as a world leader. “Not a few observers have begun to note,” he writes, “that the biggest collateral damage to the United States in the recent violence between Israel and Hamas is to Washington’s image in the world.”
Republican Rep. Brandon Williams holds an Israeli flag as protesters stage a demonstration in support of a cease-fire in Gaza in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington on Oct. 18. Alex Wong/Getty Images
By Michael Hirsh, Nov. 3
In 2023, as geopolitical instability convulsed the Middle East and Europe, the foreign-policy debate in the United States organized itself around two archetypal poles. Many Americans, and their representatives in Congress, reverted “to their default mode going back to the Founding Fathers, which is to avoid too many foreign entanglements,” writes FP columnist Michael Hirsh. Biden, meanwhile, presented the United States as the world’s “indispensable nation,” a critical part of the solution to any given global problem. In his article, Hirsh describes how both visions for American strategy are incoherent in the face of present circumstances.
“It’s probably healthy that these debates are happening now. With Israel’s war against Hamas recently added to the mix, the United States is once again seriously entangled abroad,” Hirsh writes. “And this at a time when its defense-industrial base is shrunken and ill-prepared, its economy is sluggish, and its politics at home are polarized and, far too often, paralyzed.”
By C. Raja Mohan, June 21
Conflicts involving China, Russia, and Israel received most of the headlines this year. But it was U.S. policy toward India—precisely because it was largely out of the spotlight—that may prove the most clarifying about the state of U.S. foreign policy. The Biden administration’s relationship to India has been freighted with ideological baggage, with the White House embracing Prime Minister Narendra Modi as leader of the world’s largest democracy—and critics decrying Modi’s democratic backsliding at home. But, as FP columnist C. Raja Mohan argues, the public debate in both India and the United States about the other generates “a noise that drowns out the signals on changing Indo-U.S. relations.”
“The problem is a reluctance to correctly read the trends driving the United States and India into a strategic embrace,” Mohan writes. “The main source of their convergence is by now familiar: Both nations feel challenged by China. After much hesitation and reluctance over the last two decades, the United States has finally come around to the clear proposition that China represents a persistent, long-term threat to U.S. interests.”
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