On the foreign policy front, Biden’s agenda faces increasing challenges

Two years ago, just six days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden opened his State of the Union address by promising to stop Vladimir V. Putin. The response in the House of Representatives was a series of standing ovations.

On Thursday evening, Mr Biden again opened his speech by repeating his warning that, if left unchecked, Mr Putin would not abandon his territorial ambitions on Ukraine’s borders. But the political climate was completely different.

With many Republicans vowing not to vote for more aid and the Ukrainians short of ammunition and losing ground, Mr. Biden challenged them to defend former President Donald J. Trump’s statement that if a NATO country were not enough pay for his defense, he would tell Mr Putin to ‘do whatever you want’.

As Democrats cheered Biden’s direct shot at his opponent in the 2024 election, many Republicans in the House looked down or checked their phones — an illustration of the evolving and mounting challenges he faces at a time when his foreign policy agenda comes into play. central role in the re-election campaign.

Mr. Biden’s pledge to restore American power by rebuilding alliances and “proving that democracy works” is a far more complicated task than when he came to power.

His problems go deeper than the new thinking of a Republican Party that has moved in two decades from President George W. Bush’s declaration that America’s mission would be the spread of democracy to Mr. Trump’s open admiration for Mr. Putin and quasi-autocrats like the president. Viktor Orban of Hungary, who will visit Mar-a-Lago on Friday.

On the progressive side of his own party, Mr. Biden is dismayed to discover that an entire generation of Americans does not share his instinct to protect Israel at all costs, and is highly critical of the way he has used American weapons to undermine Prime Minister Benjamin’s power Netanyahu had him fed. Bombings of civilian areas in Gaza continue, killing more than 30,000 people, according to local health authorities.

After two Democratic primaries in which “unaligned” won notable percentages of the vote in protest of the administration’s Middle East policy, Biden spent the final part of his speech struggling to let progressives know he was listening. He described in detail what Gazans have experienced and emphasized that “Israel must allow more humanitarian aid.” It was a change of tone for a president who has no desire to pressure Netanyahu in public, even as the two leaders have feuded bitterly over safe lines.

Mr. Biden sought to use the receding memory of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to stitch together his domestic and foreign democracy agenda, at one point declaring the disaster “the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War formed. ”

And while he counted on the sound of cheering that he knew would greet these remarks, hoping to expose the election deniers in Congress and beyond, the sound was almost certainly heard from Beijing to Berlin, where leaders were desperate want to gauge what America they will have to deal with in ten months’ time.

Ukraine presents the clearest test of Biden’s ability to declare that he has rebuilt America’s alliances just in time.

He opened with a reminder of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, when “Hitler was on the march” and “the war was raging in Europe.” Comparing that moment to today, he argued that “if anyone in this room thinks Putin will quit on Ukraine, I assure you he won’t.”

It was part of a strategy to portray opponents of future military aid to Ukraine as appeasers, accusing Mr Trump – whose name he never spoke and called him “my predecessor” – of “bowing to a Russian leader ‘. And he went on to celebrate NATO, “the strongest military alliance the world has ever known.”

Now, after two years in which the alliance has rediscovered its mission of containing Russian power, even that line has left Republicans silent. Nothing that has happened in the past two years, not even the European commitment of $54 billion to rebuild Ukraine and the delivery of Leopard tanks, Storm Shadow missiles and millions of artillery shells, has deflected Trump from his talking points. He still denounces the alliance as an attack on America, and his former top aides say he might withdraw from the alliance if elected.

Mr. Biden’s most influential advisers, including Senator Chris Coons, the Delaware Democrat who regularly talks to the president, have insisted that Mr. Trump’s expression of sympathy for the Russian leader is the rare case of a foreign policy issue that could move the needle of conflict. a presidential election.

And they think support for Ukraine runs deeper than it seems. Many Democrats argue that if the bill to provide $60.1 billion in additional aid to Ukraine — much of which will remain in U.S. weapons factories — were voted on in the House of Representatives, the bill would pass. But under pressure from Mr Trump, Chairman Mike Johnson has so far avoided discussing the vote.

But if Ukraine is a place of moral clarity for Mr. Biden and his argument that American intervention on behalf of democracies is at the heart of the national mission, the war between Israel and Hamas is a quagmire.

Mr Biden’s announcement during the State of the Union address that he had ordered the military to send emergency aid to Gaza by building a pop-up port on the Mediterranean Sea was in some ways a demonstration of America’s global reach, as the country struggles to cope with a massive humanitarian disaster before hundreds of thousands starve.

But in other ways it was also a symbol of Mr. Biden’s global frustrations.

The very fact that he had to order the construction of the floating pier in Israel’s backyard, apparently without assistance, was a remarkable admission of how his repeated pleas to Mr. Netanyahu have fallen on deaf ears.

Unable to influence Mr. Netanyahu and his war cabinet, Mr. Biden is literally walking around them, building floating piers designed for landing in hostile territory. Biden’s order was motivated not only by a humanitarian impulse but also by the electoral imperative to unite his party’s divisions over Middle East policy and demonstrate that he is willing to do much more for the Palestinians than Mr. Trump .

“To Israel’s leadership I say this,” Biden said Thursday. “Humanitarian aid should not be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip. Protecting and saving innocent lives must be a priority.”

Mr. Biden is not yet where the left of his party is; for example, he did not say he would place restrictions on how American weapons supplied to Israel can be used. And while the new maritime effort to deliver aid quickly may help, if combined with a pause or ceasefire that allows for the distribution of food and medicine, Mr. Biden may be too late to reassure disenchanted members of to regain his base.

Remarkably, the foreign policy initiative that Mr. Biden sees as the single most important of his term received the least mention: containing China’s power while competing with China on key technologies and pushing the country cooperation on climate and other common issues.

He gave China just seven rules, but officials say these remain the core of his strategy. But even there he couldn’t resist a jab at Mr. Trump, who railed against the “China virus” during the pandemic but was slow to cut chips and chip-making equipment, as Mr. Biden has done . “Frankly, for all his tough talk on China,” Mr. Biden said, “it never occurred to my predecessor to do that.”