Biden’s Legacy: Far-Reaching Accomplishments That Didn’t Translate into Political Support

US President Joe Biden waves while boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on November 1, 2022. (AFP)
US President Joe Biden waves while boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on November 1, 2022. (AFP)
TT
20

Biden’s Legacy: Far-Reaching Accomplishments That Didn’t Translate into Political Support

US President Joe Biden waves while boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on November 1, 2022. (AFP)
US President Joe Biden waves while boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on November 1, 2022. (AFP)

Sitting in the Oval Office behind the iconic Resolute desk in 2022, an animated President Joe Biden described the challenge of leading a psychologically traumatized nation.

The United States had endured a life-altering pandemic. There was a jarring burst of inflation and now global conflict with Russia invading Ukraine, as well as the persistent threat to democracy he felt Donald Trump posed.

How could Biden possibly heal that collective trauma?

“Be confident,” he said emphatically in an interview with The Associated Press. “Be confident. Because I am confident.”

But in the ensuing two years, the confidence Biden hoped to instill steadily waned. And when the 81-year-old Democratic president showed his age in a disastrous debate in June against Trump, he lost the benefit of the doubt as well. That triggered a series of events that led him Sunday to step down as his party's nominee for the November's election.

Democrats, who had been united in their resolve to prevent another Trump term, suddenly fractured. And Republicans, beset by chaos in Congress and the former president’s criminal conviction, improbably coalesced in defiant unity.

Biden never figured out how to inspire the world’s most powerful country to believe in itself, let alone in him.

He lost the confidence of supporters in the 90-minute debate with Trump, even if pride initially prompted him to override the fears of lawmakers, party elders and donors who were nudging him to drop out. Then Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and, as if on cue, pumped his fist in strength. Biden, while campaigning in Las Vegas, tested positive for the coronavirus Wednesday and retreated to his Delaware beach home to recover.

The events over the course of three weeks led to an exit Biden never wanted, but one that Democrats felt they needed to maximize their chance of winning in November’s elections.

Biden seems to have badly misread the breadth of his support. While many Democrats had deep admiration for the president personally, they did not have the same affection for him politically.

Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said Biden arrived as a reprieve from a nation exhausted by Trump and the pandemic, reported The Associated Press.

“He was a perfect person for that moment,” said Brinkley, noting Biden proved in era of polarization that bipartisan lawmaking was still possible.

Yet, there was never a “Joe Biden Democrat” like there was a “Reagan Republican.” He did not have adoring, movement-style followers as did Barack Obama or John F. Kennedy. He was not a generational candidate like Bill Clinton. The only barrier-breaking dimension to his election was the fact that he was the oldest person ever elected president.

His first run for the White House, in the 1988 cycle, ended with self-inflicted wounds stemming from plagiarism, and he didn’t make it to the first nominating contest. In 2008, he dropped out after the Iowa caucuses, where he won less than 1% of the vote.

In 2016, Obama counseled his vice president not to run. A Biden victory in 2020 seemed implausible, when he finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire before a dramatic rebound in South Carolina that propelled him to the nomination and the White House.

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama who also worked closely with Biden, said that history would treat Biden kinder than voters had, not just because of his legislative achievements but because in 2020 he defeated Trump.

“His legacy is significant beyond all his many accomplishments,” Axelrod said. “He will always be the man who stepped up and defeated a president who placed himself above our democracy."

But Biden could not avoid his age. And when he showed frailty in his steps and his speech, there was no foundation of supporters that could stand by him to stop calls for him to step aside.

It was a humbling end to a half-century career in politics, yet hardly reflective of the full legacy of his time in the White House.

In March of 2021, Biden launched $1.9 trillion in pandemic aid, creating a series of new programs that temporarily halved child poverty, halted evictions and contributed to the addition of 15.7 million jobs. But inflation began to rise shortly thereafter as Biden’s approval rating as measured by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research fell from 61% to 39% as of June.

He followed up with a series of executive actions to unsnarl global supply chains and a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package that not only replaced aging infrastructure but improved internet access and prepared communities to withstand the damages from climate change.

In 2022, Biden and his fellow Democrats followed up with two measures that reinvigorated the future of US manufacturing.

The CHIPS and Science Act provided $52 billion to build factories and create institutions to make computer chips domestically, ensuring that the US would have access to the most advanced semiconductors needed to power economic growth and maintain national security. There was also the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided incentives to shift away from fossil fuels and enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

Biden also sought to compete more aggressively with China, rebuild alliances such as NATO and completed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan that resulted in the death of 13 US service members.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 worsened inflation as Trump and other Republicans questioned the value of military aid to the Ukrainians.

Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack in Israel sparked a war that showed divisions within the Democratic party about whether the United States should continue to support Israel as tens of thousands of Palestinians died in months of counterattacks. The president was also criticized over illegal border crossings at the southern border with Mexico.

Yet it was the size of the stakes and the fear of a Biden loss that prevailed, resulting in a bet by Democrats that the tasks he began could best be completed by a younger generation.

“History will be kinder to him than voters were at the end,” Axelrod said.



Europe’s Military Personnel Shortfalls Exposed as Trump Warns US Security Priorities Lie Elsewhere 

Lithuanian Land Force soldiers attend the Allied Spirit 25 exercise in Hohenfels, Germany, 12 March 2025. (EPA)
Lithuanian Land Force soldiers attend the Allied Spirit 25 exercise in Hohenfels, Germany, 12 March 2025. (EPA)
TT
20

Europe’s Military Personnel Shortfalls Exposed as Trump Warns US Security Priorities Lie Elsewhere 

Lithuanian Land Force soldiers attend the Allied Spirit 25 exercise in Hohenfels, Germany, 12 March 2025. (EPA)
Lithuanian Land Force soldiers attend the Allied Spirit 25 exercise in Hohenfels, Germany, 12 March 2025. (EPA)

In the year after Russia launched outright war on Ukraine, NATO leaders approved a set of military plans designed to repel an invasion of Europe. It was the biggest shake-up of the alliance’s defense readiness preparations since the Cold War.

The secret plans set out how Western allies would defend NATO territory from the Atlantic to the Arctic, through the Baltic region and Central Europe, down to the Mediterranean Sea. Up to 300,000 troops would move to its eastern flank within 30 days, many of them American. That would climb to 800,000 within six months.

But the Trump administration warned last month that US priorities lie elsewhere. Europe must take care of its own security, and those goals now seem questionable. Mustering just 30,000 European troops to police any future peace in Ukraine is proving a challenge.

Billions of euros are being shifted to military budgets, but only slowly, and the Europeans are struggling to fire up production in their defense industries.

Beyond funding, tens of thousands more European citizens might have to complete military service, and time is of the essence. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has warned that Russian forces could be capable of launching an attack on European territory in 2030.

Concerned about Russia's intentions, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wants to introduce large-scale military training for every adult male, and double the size of Poland's army to around 500,000 soldiers.

“If Ukraine loses the war or if it accepts the terms of peace, armistice or capitulation ... then, without a doubt — and we can all agree on that — Poland will find itself in a much more difficult geopolitical situation,” Tusk warned lawmakers last week.

The scale of Europe's military personnel shortage

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that Europe, including the UK, has almost 1.5 million active duty personnel. But many can't be deployed on a battlefield, and those who can are hard to use effectively without a centralized command system.

The number of Russian troops in Ukraine at the end of 2024 was estimated to be around 700,000.

NATO troops are controlled by a US general, using American air transport and logistics.

Analysts say that in the event of a Russian attack, NATO’s top military officer would probably dispatch around 200,000 US troops to Europe to build on the 100,000 US military personnel already based there.

With the Americans out of the picture, “a realistic estimate may therefore be that an increase in European capacities equivalent to the fighting capacity of 300,000 US troops is needed,” the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank estimates.

“Europe faces a choice: either increase troop numbers significantly by more than 300,000 to make up for the fragmented nature of national militaries, or find ways to rapidly enhance military coordination,” Bruegel said.

The question is how.

Making up the numbers NATO is encouraging countries to build up personnel numbers, but the trans-Atlantic alliance isn't telling them how to do it. Maintaining public support for the armed forces and for Ukraine is too important to risk by dictating choices.

“The way they go about it is intensely political, so we wouldn’t prescribe any way of changing this — whether to go for conscription, elective conscription, bigger reserves,” a senior NATO official said on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to brief journalists unless he remained unnamed.

“We do stress the point that fighting with those regional plans means that we are in collective defense and likely in an attrition war that requires way more manpower than we currently have, or we designed our force models to deliver,” he added.

Eleven European countries have compulsory military service: Austria, Cyprus, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, and non-European Union nation Norway. The length of service ranges from as little as two months in Croatia to 19 months in Norway.

Poland isn't considering a return to universal military service, but rather a reserve system based on the model in Switzerland, where every man is obliged to serve in the armed forces or an alternative civilian service. Women can volunteer.

Belgium’s new defense minister plans to write a letter in November to around 120,000 citizens who are age 18 to try to persuade at least 500 of them to sign up for voluntary military service. Debate about the issue goes on in the UK and Germany.

Confronting the challenges

Germany’s professional armed forces had 181,174 active service personnel at the end of last year — slightly lower than in 2023, according to a parliamentary report released Tuesday. That means it’s no closer to reaching a Defense Ministry target of 203,000 by 2031.

Last year, 20,290 people started serving in the German military, or Bundeswehr, an 8% increase, the report said. But of the 18,810 who joined in 2023, more than a quarter — 5,100 or 27% of the total — left again, most at their own request during the six-month trial period.

The German parliament’s commissioner for the armed forces, Eva Högl, said that army life is a hard sell.

“The biggest problem is boredom,” Högl said. “If young people have nothing to do, if there isn’t enough equipment and there aren’t enough trainers, if the rooms aren’t reasonably clean and orderly, that deters people and it makes the Bundeswehr unattractive.”

At the other end of the scale, tiny Luxembourg has unique demographic challenges. Of its roughly 630,000 passport holders, only 315,000 are Luxembourgers. The number of people of military service age — 18 to 40 — is smaller still.

Around 1,000 people are enlisted. That’s small compared to some European powers, but bigger per capita than the UK armed forces. Recently, Luxembourg — where unemployment is low and salaries are high — has struggled to find just 200-300 military personnel.

Military service comes with many challenges too, not least convincing someone to sign up when they might be sent to the front, and hastily trained conscripts can't replace a professional army. The draft also costs money. Extra staff, accommodation and trainers are needed throughout a conscript's term.