Biden's successor must turn the page on America's Middle East failures

A man holds a sign showing his appreciation for US President Joe Biden in front of the White House on Sunday. Americans will have a different kind of election this year, one in which policies may play a bigger role than personalities. AFPShow less

“America has never been better positioned to lead than we are today,” US President Joe Biden wrote in Sunday’s statement announcing that he would drop out of the race for the White House. Indeed, the US will continue to play a defining role in world affairs but Mr Biden will no longer shape that leadership.

That task may eventually fall to current Vice President Kamala Harris, who Mr Biden endorsed as the Democrats’ likely candidate for the presidency. Mr Biden’s repeated public gaffes and lapses, including a poor electoral debate performance against Republican challenger Donald Trump, proved too much for many in his party and his inner circle. His decision has upended this already-fraught presidential contest, rewriting the script that many believed would lead to an increasingly frail Mr Biden losing to Mr Trump in November.

Instead, Americans will have a different kind of contest, one in which policies may play a bigger role than personalities. Although Ms Harris must wait until next month’s Democratic National Convention to learn if she will be the party’s official candidate, she remains the frontrunner to challenge Mr Trump, whose campaign seems, if anything, energised by the recent attempt on the former president’s life.

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Although the majority of Americans will base their choice of president on domestic issues, from the perspective of the Middle East, whoever wins in November must turn the page on the past four years of questionable US policy regarding this region.

Mr Biden’s presidency will forever be marked by the shambolic and deadly withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in 2021, a decision that delivered the country’s people over to the Taliban and subsequent international isolation. Israel’s war on Gaza has been allowed to rage unchecked, with the US on one hand providing weapons, financial support and political cover for its ally while simultaneously trying to supply minimal aid to the Palestinians. Arab-American voters are not the only people to be angry and dismayed at such obvious dissonance.

Mr Biden’s decision to quit has also taken place in a critical week for the Middle East. As the mayhem continues in Gaza and spreads as far as Yemen, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to address the US Congress. This will be an opportunity for Ms Harris to hit the ground running by signalling a different kind of US approach towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict - but is unlikely to do so.

Israel’s war on Gaza has been allowed to rage unchecked, with the US providing weapons and political cover for its ally

In February, Ms Harris told the Munich Security Conference that there “cannot be, in my opinion, peace and security for that region – for the people of Israel or the Palestinians and the people of Gaza – without a two-state solution”. Given Mr Netanyahu’s opposition to Palestinian statehood – a position endorsed last week by an overwhelming majority of Israeli MPs – it will be interesting to see if Ms Harris will adopt a more candid attitude to the US-Israel relationship.

Indeed, although much remains unknown about the Vice President’s foreign policy priorities, there are signs that Ms Harris could orchestrate a constructive reset of American ties to this region. Ms Harris has personal links to some world leaders given her four-year role as Mr Biden’s number two and she is no stranger to the UAE, having met several senior Emirati figures, including President Sheikh Mohamed. It was Ms Harris who led America’s delegation to the UAE on the occasion of President Sheikh Khalifa’s funeral in 2022.

Mr Biden has made a decision that is good for his party and US electoral democracy. That he took it with less than four months until Election Day is something for political historians to debate in the years ahead. In the meantime, the rest of the world will be watching and hoping that politics in the US abandons its currently unserious trajectory. If America wants to lead, as Mr Biden wrote, then it must rediscover its responsibilities too.

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