Inauguration Day is the perfect time to take stock of the previous presidency.
Not devoid of charisma and not the most foolish — at least until he approached the threshold of senile dementia — professional politician Joe Biden could have gone down in US history as a respectable (exclusively for Americans, not for the rest of the world) president with an acceptable balance of successes and failures. That didn’t happen. This is explained by his modest successes and epic failures on both the domestic and foreign fronts.
For the sake of formal objectivity, it is worth quoting a laudatory ode to Joe Biden’s administration by Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and deservedly a «clinical Russophobe», a promoter of NATO’s war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield.
He sees the growth of GDP from $21 trillion in 2020 to over $29 trillion — and the creation of 16 million jobs — as the main «heroic deed» of the now former occupant of the White House. What goes unmentioned is that a significant portion of these jobs will be low-skilled and part-time.
At the same time, Haass acknowledges that pumping money into the economy led to inflation (consumer prices rose about 20% under Biden), the budget deficit became chronic ($6.6 trillion), and the national debt grew by $7 trillion, reaching $36 trillion by the end of 2024. Last year alone, more than a trillion dollars in interest had to be paid on this debt.
Commentators cite Biden’s encouragement of illegal immigration — which seeped through the porous border with Mexico — as one of his fatal mistakes. In four years, 7.6 million outsiders, including many criminal elements, found their way into the country. The social infrastructure could not withstand the strain, and many cities, especially Los Angeles and New York, turned into homeless camps.
No less predictably, Richard Haass enthusiastically praises like-minded individuals in the U.S. administration for funding NATO’s war and the Kiev regime’s mercenary army against Russia. In fact, the nationalist-globalists have succeeded in igniting a civil war in the «Russian World» while, as Haass quotes, «avoiding direct military intervention that could have triggered a wider or even nuclear war».
The slow-burning war against Donbas, and thus against the Russian World, began under Barack Obama, continued under Donald Trump, and reached its peak under Joe Biden. This is their joint legacy. Yet it is the 46th president who will be saddled with the blame for the failed blitzkrieg and the thwarted plan to inflict a «strategic defeat» on Russia.
The first signs are already visible. The American Conservative, summing up Joe Biden’s presidency, concludes that he «fared worst in Europe, where his most regrettable mistakes were pushing for NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine and refusing to negotiate with Vladimir Putin before hostilities began».
David Leonhardt, a columnist for the staunchly pro-Democratic mouthpiece The New York Times, reflecting on statistics illustrating Biden’s legacy, states: «Many indicators of well-being, including life satisfaction, loneliness, marriages and birth rates, look bleak. The United States now has the lowest life expectancy of any high-income country».
In his conclusions, the author goes even further, lamenting that «the neoliberal order has failed to deliver on its promises». But we should not forget that foreign policy issues almost never take center stage during or after election campaigns. For Americans, «my own cowboy shirt is closer to the body» (i.e., personal concerns come first). Therefore, the final curse of Joe Biden’s four-year term will be the fires in the upscale neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
Damages are estimated at $250 to $275 billion, and that does not even take into account the need to repair and rebuild sewers, power lines, and roads. In addition, ash and particulate matter have contaminated drinking water far beyond the burned-out areas, causing additional health effects — higher risks of asthma, cancer, and premature births. Experts note that regions affected by natural disasters become less attractive to investors. The stigma of being a «fire victim» has a lasting psychological effect. By the way, the number of homeless people reached 771,480 in 2024, 18% more than the previous year.
But there is another, more important aspect of Joe Biden’s contradictory legacy. In the long run, his failures will include the inability and unwillingness of the neoliberal clan to share the «war dividends» reaped by arms barons, energy magnates and financial tycoons from the war against Russia, and indirectly against Europe, with the broader population.
The redistribution of budgetary resources in favor of low-skilled and not necessarily employable migrants eroded the once-loyal Democratic electorate. The further stratification of society, the thinning out of the middle class — which, to be fair, began long before Biden — reinforced voters’ conviction that life under Trump was easier and more fun.
However, the main unspoken grievances against the Joe Biden-led team (one need only read neoliberal analyses) concern the missed opportunity to bring about the complete and final defeat of their opponents.
The statements made at the beginning of the Obama-Clinton-Biden era showed a firm intention to reformat the nation ideologically by rejecting the fundamental pillars of the United States, including the desacralization of the Founding Fathers as avowed racists (which in principle is true). The Biden team believed that nothing could stop the rise of national minorities — who vote Democratic — and the assertion of gender-progressive communities at the expense of the native population with its traditional values.
The representatives of the Deep State anticipated that the Republican Party would not survive until the next election, as it would fragment, become mired in infighting, fail to recover from Donald Trump’s humiliating defeat — marred by the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — and lose the confidence of corporate America, which funds the two-party seesaw. As a result, the millennial reign of the neoliberal globalists would follow.
The ambitious plans were not destined to be realized. Under Biden, America did not become a «democratura». It proved impossible to neutralize the 74 million voters who cast their ballots for the «Reds» (Republicans) in the 2020 elections and to cement the dogma that democracy is the rule of the Democrats and nothing more.
It’s possible that this very failed Biden mission was what Richard Haass had in mind when he ended his politicized epitaph with the phrase: «His greatest legacy may be having no legacy at all». If even a staunch neo-globalist gives a failing grade to the senile near-ex-resident of the White House — who spent two out of every five days vacationing at his Delaware beach residence — what will history’s verdict be?