Whatever voters decide in November, US foreign policy will shift in 2025. One way or another, President Joe Biden will be the last traditional Atlanticist in the White House, the last commander-in-chief steeped in the traditions of America’s post-World War II ascendance and Cold War leadership. But while change may be inevitable, consistency is imperative.
Faced with a challenge greater than any American president has seen since John F. Kennedy, the deepest-seated of Biden’s instincts underpinned a remarkable transatlantic response, reversing a decades-long trajectory of disengagement, while mounting the largest defense of a non-allied country in modern memory.
Those same instincts, however, steered the administration toward a degree of caution that has prolonged the war and raised the cost of victory. For Ukraine, Europe, and America itself, then, much will depend on whether America’s next president can learn the right lessons from the successes and failures of the current one while maintaining the core thrust of solidarity with Ukraine, partnership with Europe, and containment of Russia.
To be sure, the Biden administration’s failures on the Russia-Ukraine front are significant. A fixation on the risk of nuclear escalation engendered a slow-walking of military aid to Kyiv and continues to result in a reluctance to allow Ukraine to use US arms to their fullest potential effect. As a result, while Biden helped ensure that Ukraine did not lose the war, he may have inadvertently helped ensure that it also could not win.
Equally problematically, Biden proved unwilling or unable to make the case to the American public for support for Ukraine, and for the level of sacrifice that support would require. Only in one address to the American people — after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel — did Biden explicitly link Ukraine’s victory to America’s own security, a message he, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan communicated clearly in European capitals but muddled at home. That, in turn, gave oxygen to opponents, particularly in the House of Representatives, who tied up funding at a critical phase in the conflict.
Future historians will tally the costs of this strategic and rhetorical reticence, but they are unlikely to overshadow his successes. However much Ukraine has struggled, it has also not succumbed to Russia’s seeming military superiority. The lion’s share of the credit, of course, rests with the resilience and heroism of Ukrainians themselves. Nonetheless, America and its allies have allocated some $300bn to the fight, without which the cost to Ukraine in lives and territory would likely have been immeasurably higher, and perhaps insurmountable. And without American leadership — without Biden’s leadership — that would not have been possible.
Early on, Biden realized two truths that may not have been evident to other presidents. First, he understood the importance of Europe. America alone would not be able to afford the cost of the war, much less the estimated $1 trillion cost of eventual post-war reconstruction. Nor could sanctions have been effective without transatlantic coordination, something he and his administration set out to build even before the war began, and thanks to which some $300bn in Russian sovereign assets have been seized and will likely be used for Ukraine’s recovery.
Second, Biden understood that the politics of the war would require something President Barack Obama once called “leading from behind.” If Washington were seen to be dragging Berlin, Paris, and other European capitals kicking and screaming into the pro-Ukraine coalition, insurgent politicians on Europe’s left and right fringes — to say nothing of Russia’s narrative machine — would find it all too easy to undermine cohesion. By taking it slowly, and letting Ursula von der Leyen, Olaf Scholz, and Emmanuel Macron do much of the talking, Biden likely did more than any other leader to ensure that Putin faced a more or less united front in the West.
Nonetheless, those achievements, while monumental in many respects, have manifestly failed to deter Putin. The Russian president’s decision to go to war, like his decision to remain at war, even as his initial aims evaporated, was not a response to Biden, however. Rather, it was predicated on Putin’s belief in American inconsistency, a belief inculcated through decades of experience.
Having survived Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Biden, Putin has seen America undermine its own power through alternating bouts of hubris, naivety, and feckless unilateralism. He has watched Washington abandon the principle that politics stops at the water’s edge, giving way to wild swings in approach from administration to administration. He is now banking on a change of president bringing a change of policy, allowing Russia, once again, to press its advantage.
Inconsistency on any of the three pillars of current US foreign policy — support for Ukraine, resistance to Russia, and partnership with Europe — will do more than ensure Ukraine’s eventual defeat. It will cement in Europe an understanding that the US is no longer reliable. And it will prove to Putin and every other aggressive autocrat from Caracas to Tehran to Beijing that America cannot mount a generational response to a generational challenge.
And that would mean more wars, fought alongside fewer allies, and at greater cost.
Sam Greene is Director of the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
