Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Presidents have two major legacies, on domestic policy and on foreign policy. Big foreign policy mistakes can throw even gargantuan domestic wins into the shade. President Lyndon Baines Johnson reshaped the United States with his Great Society programs, and at least acquiesced in finally ending Jim Crow racial discrimination. Johnson’s obsession with winning the Vietnam War and his investment in the false “domino theory” of the spread of Communism, however, doomed his presidency and harmed the United States for decades. I’m old, so I remember as a teenager watching Johnson on March 31, 1968 come on television and announce that he would not seek another term in office. Unfortunately, the Vietnam War would grind on until 1972, taking two million or more Vietnamese lives and 58,220 US military casualties. By 1975 the US would withdraw entirely, amid chaos.
I was reminded of LBJ’s resignation speech by Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he would not seek another term.
Much to the annoyance of my leftist friends, I once suggested that Biden would be the most consequential president since Lyndon Johnson. I’m reprinting my reasoning below. Those achievements, however, were domestic.
Like Johnson, Biden has provoked massive campus protests by going all in on a ruinous foreign misadventure. In Biden’s case, the great white whale has been the destruction of Hamas, and his albatross has been his “bear hug” of the extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Biden has resupplied Israel with ammunition and weaponry in real time to allow Netanyahu and his far, far right cronies (the Israeli equivalents of Neo-Nazis) to destroy much of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and to kill over 38,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children. Biden’s State Department has avoided concluding that Israel has misused US weaponry to commit war crimes, making a mockery of the Leahy Act. Biden has attempted to create a US shield of impunity for Netanyahu, even calling a UNSC ceasefire resolution “nonbinding” (it was binding). The International Criminal Court found on January 26 that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide and ordered a halt to such activities, but to no effect. Biden himself disputed the numbers of dead Palestinians at first, but later admitted that 30,000 had been killed, going on to say “it must not be 60,000.” He drew a red line around Rafah, but Netanyahu made a laughingstock out of him by simply ignoring US strictures and destroying Rafah the way he had previously destroyed Gaza City.
Biden’s extreme backing for Netanyahu’s genocide has left an indelible stain on his presidency and has harmed US diplomacy around the world.
The president has only a few months to make at least some amends for his catastrophic Gaza policy. He should restore funding to the UN Reliefs and Works Agency, which Israel falsely accused of being a Hamas front. Even Britain has restored funding, but Biden remains the odd man out.
Biden should cut off shipments to Israel of further munitions unless Netanyahu gets out of Gaza and lets the Palestine Authority move in to govern it.
Biden should massively sanction the Israeli enterprise of squatting on ever more Palestinian land in the West Bank.
As for his domestic legacy, I wrote in 2022:
Biden came into office under the cloud of the pandemic and Trump’s lackadaisical response to it, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It is true that Biden had the advantage that the vaccines had been developed, in part with Trump’s investment in Moderna. (Pfizer marketed the German Biontech vaccine). But under Trump, few federal resources had been mobilized and one leak suggested that Jared Kushner deliberately hurt New York’s response to punish it for voting Democratic.
Biden mobilized the US military to provide vaccinators, because there were too few civilian ones, and coordinated with states and localities. In 6 months he got those adults vaccinated who were willing, and began the process whereby getting Covid for most of people was no longer life threatening. As for the die hard Trumpist old people who refuse to get vaccinated, they are harming themselves and those around them.
Biden’s pandemic intervention is estimated to have saved a million lives.
Biden put America back to work, getting the unemployment rate down to levels not seen since the Woodstock Music Festival and the craze for paisley.
So much production had temporarily cut back during the pandemic that when consumers wanted to buy again, there were bottlenecks that caused inflation. These supply problems are easing, though prices of staples remain too high. In some instances, Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine caused spikes that won’t be easy to overcome, both in energy prices and in wheat prices. Still, gasoline prices have fallen steadily for two months now.
Biden charged the Department of the Interior to jumpstart the US offshore wind industry, with a goal of 30 gigawatts by 2030, by leasing federal waters offshore to private companies. We will see some new, enormous wind farms come on line in as little as four years, some of the biggest in the world.
Biden glad-handed and wheedled to get the bipartisan $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed, which will among other things build out electric vehicle charging stations throughout the country and help schools buy electric buses, along with investments in bridges (10% of which seem to be on the verge of falling down) and other key infrastructure. It even has $65 billion in it to ease access for all Americans to the internet, which should increase productivity.
Biden got a new industrial policy with the $52 billion in the CHIPS Act for revving up a US-based semi-conductor industry, which is key to progress in fighting climate change, as well. He arranged funding for veterans suffering the after-effects of toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
. . . He succeeded in encouraging Democrats in the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act . . . with $369 billion for the green energy transition. It will also make seniors’ medicines cheaper and help the 40% of the country stricken by long-term drought owing to the climate emergency adopt resiliency measures.
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