Following his disastrous debate performance, President Joe Biden turned to former White House communications director turned ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos to help salvage his reputation. In a July 5, 2024 interview, the president listed his foreign policy successes: “I also was the guy who put together a peace plan for the Middle East that may be comin’ to fruition. I was also the guy that expanded NATO,” he said.
Biden’s faith in Middle East peace—presumably a push to get Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel—is misplaced. Middle East peace plans are a dime-a-dozen; for every ten peace plans, maybe only one comes to fruition. Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman will be reluctant to hand Biden a victory not only because of Biden’s gratuitous criticism of the Saudi leadership over its conduct of the war in Yemen and the murder of former Saudi intelligence agent-turned-journalist and Muslim Brotherhood activist Jamal Khashoggi, but also because King Salman himself reportedly suffers from advanced dementia. The crown prince fears his enemies might use any willingness to recognize Israel to convince the king to swamp him out for a more reactionary replacement.
Biden’s expansion of NATO is more real—Finland and Sweden joined under his watch—but the president’s stewardship of NATO is not the success the president believes.
The accession process humiliated Sweden and caused its government to erode its democracy and its embrace of human rights. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly extorted the alliance to demand ever-greater concessions in exchange for lifting his veto.
Erdogan, for example, compelled Biden to give him advanced F-16s and avionics upgrade kits despite never having returned the F-35 schematics that Turkey illegally held following its expulsion from the joint strike fighter program. The entire process accentuated Biden’s weakness. After all, if he is unable to stand up to NATO member Erdogan, why should Russian President Vladimir Putin expect Biden to negotiate from a position of strength with him?
Biden’s weak negotiating and unwilling to stand up to Erdogan may have fatally hampered NATO in the future. Other NATO leaders—Viktor Orban in Hungary, Edi Rama in Albania, and Slovakia’s Robert Fico, for example—are likely to follow the Erdogan model in the future and extort NATO into paralysis whenever the opportunity arises
In essence, Biden unraveled Sweden’s human rights protections, empowered Erdogan to launder Russian funds and support terrorist groups like Hamas, and the set the stage for NATO dysfunction, all for the sake of a photo opportunity.
Certainly, expansion rejuvenated NATO, but the assets Finland and Sweden brought NATO did not offset the costs of their entry, especially since both countries could have acted in unison with NATO absent formal accession.
About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin
Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
