It is easy to forget how desperate things were on Jan. 20, 2021, when Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. became the 46th president of the United States.
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Just two weeks earlier, thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters had stormed the U.S. Capitol in a
violent attempt to keep Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory. The nation was at the height of the coronavirus pandemic; in that month,
3,000 Americans died daily from covid-19. There were newly developed, lifesaving vaccines, thanks to the Trump administration’s
Operation Warp Speed — but there was no viable plan to distribute them. Schools and workplaces were shuttered; hotels and airlines had no customers; restaurants tried to survive by offering take-out. The U.S. economy and the world economy were on life support.
Four years later, the country is in vastly better shape, at home and abroad. The economy, though still recovering, is the envy of the developed world;
U.S. stock markets are at or near all-time highs. Our political system has survived. We have made overdue investments in infrastructure and technology. And in a world full of conflict and danger, American troops are not at war for the first time in a generation.
History may fault Biden for the way his term in office ended. By any objective standard, however, he was a very good president whose accomplishments will benefit the nation for many years to come.
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Biden’s critics find it convenient to look past what may be remembered as his biggest success: He guided the country through, and ultimately out of, the pandemic. The virus has not entirely gone away, but getting vaccinated is as easy as dropping by one’s neighborhood pharmacy. And regardless of what Republican polemicists want us to believe, it was during Trump’s presidency when government officials imposed draconian anti-covid rules that sent us into dour isolation — and during Biden’s when we regained the freedom to go about our lives as we pleased.
On the economy, Biden’s record is remarkable. The pandemic shutdown in the spring of 2020 had caused unemployment to
peak at 14.8 percent. When Biden became president, joblessness had eased considerably but was still elevated at
6.3 percent. Unemployment declined steadily during Biden’s first year in the White House until, in December 2021, it dipped to just
3.9 percent — and remained at or below 4 percent for
30 straight months. Biden’s was a “jobs, jobs, jobs” economy.
First Trump and then Biden opened the spigots of government spending to keep Americans afloat during the pandemic. To be sure, the resulting inflation was not as “transitory” as the Biden administration said it would be. But the independent Federal Reserve brought rising prices under control — and did so without sending the economy into a recession. Such “soft landings” are rare, and Biden has one on his ledger sheet.
In an era of bitter partisanship and polarization, Biden succeeded with Congress where his predecessors had failed. The Trump administration repeatedly promised an “infrastructure week” but never delivered; Biden won approval of a
$1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Another major piece of legislation, the
Inflation Reduction Act, made the nation’s biggest investment ever in fighting
climate change — more than $400 billion. Still another bill, the
Chips and Science Act, marked $280 billion to boost scientific research and spur domestic manufacturing of cutting-edge semiconductors.
These initiatives will produce returns in the years and decades to come. When future presidents smile for the cameras at ribbon-cuttings, remember that it was Biden who laid the foundations.
In foreign policy, too, Biden and his team have ably acted in the national interest with an eye toward the future. Begin with the bottom line: For the first time in two decades, there are no U.S. troops deployed in combat anywhere in the world. President George W. Bush got us into wars; Biden finally got us out of them.
Without question, the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was
chaotic and tragic. Thirteen American service members were killed in a terrorist attack amid a sudden collapse of public order in Kabul that Biden and his planners should have anticipated.
That mistake cost Biden dearly in public support. It also obscured the administration’s subsequent foreign policy successes.
Without putting boots on the ground, the United States and its allies fortified Ukraine with the arms and intelligence it needed to fight invading Russian troops to a stalemate. Effectively, Biden forced Russian President Vladimir Putin to pay a much bigger price in manpower and materiel than he had anticipated — weakening the Russian military at minimal cost to the United States.
Taking a broader view, prior administrations had talked about making a foreign policy “pivot” toward Asia as a way to counter the rise of China as a superpower. Biden actually executed the maneuver.
Two new alliances — the
AUKUS security partnership, among Australia, Britain and the United States, and the
Quad partnership, among the United States, Australia, India and Japan — greatly boost American influence in the region. Biden’s diplomatic envoys also helped reinforce the United States’ relationship with the Philippines and forge closer ties between South Korea and Japan, both of which are U.S. allies.
Chinese President Xi Jinping might still be considering an invasion of Taiwan, but now he has to recalculate the risk.
Many in Biden’s own party are sharply critical of his handling of the
war in Gaza. The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and hostage-taking were atrocities, and Israel had the right to respond. Killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and reducing their homes, schools and hospitals to rubble are also atrocities. The fact is that U.S. officials have limited influence over how Israel conducts its military operations — and much less influence over Israeli public opinion, which generally supports the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been waging war.
It is true that the world has become messier on Biden’s watch. But he has kept us out of wars, strengthened our alliances and created obstacles for our strategic adversaries. Those count as successes.
Why, then, does Biden have an approval rating that struggles to reach
40 percent? Why did he have to end his campaign for reelection, abandoning a race he still thinks
he could have won? What was his unforgivable sin?
Actually, there were two. One sin was political: Biden failed to address the crisis at the southern border — failed, even, to recognize it as a crisis — until far too late. By the time he finally took executive action that calmed the chaos, the immigration issue had become a millstone he could never remove.
The other sin was actuarial: Biden got old. Worse, he showed his age, reaching the point where he walked and talked unsteadily. None of that said anything about his thinking, but no matter. Voters had the right to decide he looked and sounded too feeble to be president for four more years.
But I am confident that historians, with the clarity of hindsight, will focus less on Biden’s softening voice and tentative gait — and more on all that he managed to achieve in a single term. He was a consequential and farsighted president who leaves the nation much better off than he found it.
