Biden’s Legacy: Major Accomplishments but Unfinished Business

Charles Kupchan is a senior fellow and professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. From 2014 to 2017, he served as special assistant to the president and senior director for European affairs on the staff of the National Security Council.

President Joe Biden has faced a uniquely vexing task: navigating a fractured United States through a fractured world. Against this backdrop, his presidency has been one of remarkable accomplishment. Abroad, Biden restored the United States as the anchor of the free world while leading the successful effort to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression. At home, he healed an economy that had been distressed by the pandemic and put the nation on a path of sustainable growth.

Yet as made clear by the divisiveness of the 2024 presidential race, Biden fell short of achieving his most ambitious objective: winning “the battle for the soul of this nation.” He came into office focused on the home front, determined to build back the middle class and ease the partisan divide. To this end, he successfully guided through a divided legislature major domestic investments aimed at promoting economic growth and getting working Americans back on their feet. But his efforts to get even more resources into the economic bloodstream were blocked by a recalcitrant Congress. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine then distracted him from his domestic agenda. Biden wanted four more years to finish the job of healing the nation. But that task now falls on the shoulders of the new Democratic nominee— most likely, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Leader of Alliances

Biden reestablished the United States’ credentials as the world’s leading democracy and reclaimed the nation’s commitment to upholding a liberal international order. The United States’ image abroad, particularly among allies and partners, sharply rebounded almost overnight. Biden set about repairing relations with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, an effort that paid off handsomely after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Even before Russia launched its attack, he was laying the groundwork for the flow of military and economic assistance that enabled Ukraine to rebuff Russian efforts to subjugate the country. A stalemate has settled in, with Kyiv still in control of some 80 percent of the country’s territory—a remarkable feat given Russia’s numerical superiority.

NATO today is strong and unified. Two-thirds of its members are now meeting the benchmark of spending at least 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense, up from only one-third of its membership in 2020. Finland and Sweden have joined the alliance, augmenting NATO’s aggregate strength and giving it new heft in the high north. The alliance can partly thank Russian President Vladimir Putin for this rebound, but Biden’s leadership in the face of Russian aggression has been steady and resolute.

The same goes for U.S. alliances in Asia. There is no counterpart to NATO in Asia, but to counter China’s growing strength and ambition Biden invested in a network of strategic partnerships with key countries, particularly Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea. He also strengthened deterrence by breaking with the tradition of “strategic ambiguity,” confirming that the United States would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. Once again, Biden exercised steady and resolute leadership. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has certainly taken notice, complaining that the United States is seeking to implement “all-around containment, encirclement, and suppression against us.”

Biden has sustained criticism for providing continuing support to Israel amid its military campaign against Hamas. To be sure, the loss of civilian life in Gaza has been beyond excessive, the level of humanitarian crisis shocking and avoidable, and Israel’s failure to plan for the day after inexcusable. But Biden has repeatedly pressed the Israelis on all three of those fronts, while—true to character— demonstrating loyalty to a longstanding ally and sticking to his conviction that Israel has a right to defend itself.

Biden deftly navigated the United States through a fractured world even as he guided major investments at home through a fractured legislature. Despite holding the narrowest of partisan margins in Congress, he secured major pieces of legislation—the pandemic relief bill, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act—that advanced a number of critical, overlapping goals. They helped revive the economy and spur job growth. They directed investments to regions hit hard by deindustrialization, seeking to build back the nation’s middle class. They advanced the nation’s economic security, repatriating manufacturing and supply chains in critical sectors and investing in the United States’ competitive edge in semiconductors and artificial intelligence. The Inflation Reduction Act stands out as the nation’s largest investment ever in clean energy and climate action. 

Biden coupled those domestic investments with a new approach to foreign trade, wisely backing away from several decades of hyper-globalization. He instead balanced foreign commerce with industrial policies and protectionist measures aimed at advancing the fortunes of working Americans while greening the U.S. economy. Biden’s brand of globalization—one that both advances economic security and works to the benefit of a broader swath of the electorate—is likely here to stay.

A Nation Divided

Yet despite this impressive list of accomplishments, Biden withdraws from the race no doubt frustrated that he could not do more to heal the nation. Part of the problem is that he ran out of time. Indeed, even if he had served a second term, he would have run out of time. Rebuilding the middle class and, along with it, the nation’s political center, will take—under the best of circumstances—a generation or two. New infrastructure takes years to complete; new manufacturing plants are still in the pipeline; workers need time to be retrained. Moreover, adding new manufacturing jobs is not the answer to the problems facing the nation’s deindustrialized heartland. The challenge is to secure well-paying jobs in the service sector, which is where most Americans will of necessity work in the digital age. Thinking through how to tackle that challenge has only just begun.

Biden also ran into resistance from Congress. His Build Back Better proposal initially envisaged some $3.5 trillion in domestic spending. But Congress stripped out many of the provisions that would have had the most immediate and telling impacts on working Americans, including free prekindergarten, free community college, government-subsidized family leave, and the child tax credit. Biden tried to go big in an effort to improve the lives of millions of hurting Americans, but he could not convince Congress to go along—in part due to legitimate concerns about inflation and mounting public debt.

Biden also stumbled on immigration. He initially increased refugee quotas, ended family separation, and reinstated previous asylum procedures—all part of an effort to “rebuild a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system that was gutted by the previous administration.” But the southern border was soon overwhelmed. Patrols encountered some 2.2 million migrants crossing the southern border illegally in 2022, an all-time high. Despite important innovations, such as the introduction of an app that allowed asylum seekers in Mexico to schedule an appointment at a U.S. port of entry, political necessity forced Biden to let pragmatism prevail over principle. Pressure was mounting within his own party, with Democratic mayors in major urban centers—Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York—struggling to provide shelter and support to the thousands of migrants arriving in their cities. Biden had no choice but to pivot back to more stringent measures aimed at stemming the migrant flow.

The Ukraine Challenge

Finally, Biden’s successful effort to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia, even though a feather in his cap, did distract him from his domestic agenda. He started off in the right place, pursuing a “foreign policy for the middle class.”  He completed the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan—a necessary move given that the mission was failing to keep the Taliban at bay, even if the exit itself was disorderly and bloody. He revamped trade policy, seeking to craft a tamed version of globalization that would work to the benefit of more Americans. Biden seems to have understood that U.S. statecraft had become politically insolvent and that he needed to rekindle public support for internationalism.

But Russia’s assault on Ukraine made it much harder for Biden to keep international objectives and domestic means in balance. He let the perfect become the enemy of the good in Ukraine, backing a strategy that continues to aim at enabling Ukraine to defeat Russia even though a bloody stalemate has set in. He portrayed the conflict as a defining battle between democracy and autocracy, a framing that convinced few countries in the Global South to choose sides. He overestimated the durability of the bipartisan consensus supporting Ukraine by underestimating the continuing appeal of an America First narrative. The miscalculation was on full display during the seven-month delay in getting Congress to sign off on the $61 billion in Ukraine aid that finally won approval in April.

Now, Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), are attempting to exploit Ukraine as a wedge issue, threatening to cut off aid to the besieged country. Senator Vance voted against the aid package that passed in April and recently said that “I do not think that it is in America’s interest to continue to fund an effectively never-ending war in Ukraine.”

Vance is mistaken. Biden is right that Ukraine needs and deserves U.S. aid for the indefinite future; its survival rests on its ability to defend itself against Russia over the long haul. But even as Kamala Harris makes that case as she campaigns to succeed Biden, the Democrats need a strategy for ending the war in Ukraine and ensuring that the country, even if not yet in full control of all of its territory, becomes a stable and prosperous democracy permanently able to defeat Russian predation. That prize—a sovereign and democratic Ukraine—would constitute a decisive strategic defeat of Putin’s imperialist ambitions.

The first priority for Biden’s successor should be to pivot back to his ambitious domestic agenda. The 2024 election is yet another “battle for the soul of this nation.” Biden made that clear to the electorate in his Oval Office address on July 24: “Whether we keep our republic is now in your hands.” Rebuilding America’s middle class and its ideological center is the starting point not just for healing the nation, but also for reviving a domestic consensus behind a purposeful and steady brand of U.S. statecraft. Biden understood that challenge and set the country on the right course. His legacy will be immense as long as his successor picks up where he leaves off.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.