Biden says his foreign policy gives Trump ‘a strong hand’

Before a supportive crowd of aides and State Department officials, Biden sought to put a bookend on the speech he gave in the same room four years earlier, where he vowed to place diplomacy and democratic values at the center of efforts to rein in autocrats, restore alliances and bring more stability to the world. “But even so, it’s clear my administration is leaving the next administration with a very strong hand to play.” Biden declared that his foreign policy successes were “bipartisan” in nature and that a stronger America and more secure world benefit all Americans — an attempt, it seemed, to coax Trump and GOP leaders in Congress to build on his efforts, not reverse them. “The United States should take full advantage of our diplomatic and geopolitical opportunities we’ve created: to keep bringing countries together, to deal with challenges posed by China, to make sure Putin’s war ends in a just and lasting peace for Ukraine and to capitalize on a new moment for a more stable, more integrated Middle East,” the president said. “In the past four years we’ve used that power not to go it alone but instead to bring countries together, to increase shared security and prosperity, to stand up to aggression and to solve problems through diplomacy wherever possible.” While Biden touted strengthening alliances with Europe and in the Pacific, he also touted new domestic investments in manufacturing aimed at lessening America’s economic dependence on China and other countries. Noting an emerging coalition of autocrats from Moscow to Tehran and Pyongyang, Biden asserted that rogue states were banding together “more out of weakness than strength.” The U.S., he said, is “in a fundamentally stronger position than we were four years ago.” Biden also sought to put a more positive spin on his foreign policy failures, suggesting that the botched 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan, however messy, followed through on a promise to bring U.S. troops home after two decades of war.