Biden insists America is ‘winning the worldwide competition’ after his four years in office

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “Today, I can report to the American people, our sources of national power are far stronger than they were when we took office,” said Biden, adding that America’s adversaries were conversely “weaker than they were when we came into this job four years ago.” He also said he is “leaving the next administration with a very strong hand to play,” with “an America that once again is leading, uniting countries, setting the agenda, bringing others together behind our plans and missions,” one that is “no longer at war.” His speech is just one of several events the administration has planned to mark Biden’s final week in office, after which he’ll close out more than a half-century in public service by attending Trump’s second inauguration to mark the peaceful transfer of power he was denied four years ago when the president-elect attempted to overturn his 2020 election loss. Four years ago, Biden told the audience of largely career foreign service professionals that the message he wanted to send the world was that diplomacy was “back at the center of our foreign policy” after four years with Trump in office carrying out the transactional, bellicose “America First” policy that has been the hallmark of his time in politics. America, he said, had to lead at a “new moment” in world history that required countering what he described as “advancing authoritarianism, including the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States and the determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our democracy.” Biden, a committed internationalist who has spent decades steeped in foreign policy matters, first as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later as vice president and as president, leaned on his half-century on the world stage as he brought together a coalition of more than 50 nations to support Ukraine in the face of Russia’s invasion. “Neither has occurred.” “Ending the war was the right thing to do, and I believe history will reflect that.” Biden’s doomed quest for re-election would also be dogged by the faces of more innocents — the hundreds of hostages taken by Hamas during the October 7, 2023, terror attacks on Israel and the thousands of dead and wounded Palestinians who would meet grim fates during Israel’s yearlong retaliatory war against Hamas.