Editor’s Note: This article was written just before President Biden announced he would not be seeking re-election.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s signature defense of his accomplishments and record is that he energized NATO and put together a coalition of fifty countries to oppose Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But it was not Biden that reenergized NATO, it was Putin. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO remained a living anachronism with neither enthusiasm nor purpose. French President Emmanuel Macron spoke with more energy about strategic autonomy for Europe than he did about NATO. It was Russia’s aggression, and not Biden’s diplomacy, that united and energized NATO. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO had strayed off its path and stumbled in search of a purpose. It was the war in Ukraine that put NATO back on the path of its founding purpose.
Biden’s legacy boast is that he “rallied a coalition of 50 nations from Europe to Asia to help Ukraine defend itself.” But that coalition is smaller than the fifty-two nations that the U.S. rallied to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021.
And NATO had fewer member nations then. Thirty-two members of the fifty nation coalition are NATO countries for whom the U.S. makes decisions. That means that Biden only moved eighteen countries to join the coalition. And even that’s not quite true. Because some NATO countries, like Hungary, Turkey and Slovakia, were never fully on board. In the first phase of the war, even France and Germany were not in complete harmony with the United States. Nearly a year into the war, Macron was insisting that an “essential point” that security guarantees made to Russia need to address “is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors, and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that “there is a willingness” to engage with Putin and that “all questions of common security could be solved and discussed.”
In addition to its thirty-two member states, NATO also has well over two dozen “partner” nations that Biden could have recruited, making the roll call of fifty even more unexceptional.
And while Bilen repeatedly reminds that he has strengthened U.S. hegemony in pursuit of a unipolar world by expanding and energizing NATO, he has never mentioned the overall global balance sheet. That balance sheet shows also the extraordinary growth of international organizations who oppose U.S. hegemony in an emerging multipolar world. That fifty nations joined the United States entails also that 145 did not.
During the same period that Biden speaks of, five countries joined BRICS, an international organization made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. At its annual summit in 2023, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all became members. BRICS now has 41.13% of the world’s population under its multipolar umbrella and accounts for 37.3% of the world’s GDP, surpassing the G7. At least a dozen other countries are lining up for membership.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, another important Russian and Chinese led organization whose purpose is to balance U.S. hegemony in a unipolar world, now represents 43% of the world’s population and is still growing.
The fifty nation coalition Biden rallied against Russia is smaller than previous coalitions the U.S. has assembled. It highlights the 145 nations who refused to join and ignores the Russian and Chinese led multipolar organizations whose simultaneous growth balances it.
It also leaves the question of whether reanimating NATO is an accomplishment to boast about. There would be no need for NATO without NATO. Since the internal collapse of the Soviet Union, a NATO which no longer had a purpose for being, has only created the threat it was meant to prevent. It was NATO’s continued expansion, and Biden’s insistence on keeping America’s careless promise in 2008 that Ukraine would become a member of NATO, that finally provoked the very Russian response that, for the first time, created the need to defend against Russia that NATO was meant to prevent. NATO has become the self-fulfilling cause of the need for its own existence. The growth and energizing that Biden counts as his signature foreign policy achievement helped cause a confrontation with Russia instead of preventing it: the very reason for being of NATO.
Article 1 of NATO’s North Atlantic Treaty commits the members to “undertake… to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means.” But that’s not what they did in December 2021 when Russia attempted to diplomatically pre-empt its invasion of Ukraine. At that time, weeks before the invasion, Putin sent both the U.S. and NATO a proposal on mutual security guarantees and an urgent request for immediate negotiations. The key point was a written guarantee that NATO would not expand to Ukraine: a concession that Ukraine was prepared to make. NATO and the U.S. were not. The U.S rebuffed Russia, informing them that NATO expansion into Ukraine was not on the table. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that Putin “sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that… We rejected that.”
Even if other details of the security proposal were not acceptable to the United States, they could have attempted negotiations instead of risking war. The energized NATO that Biden counts as an accomplishment became the self-fulfilling cause of its own need, not protecting peace, but provoking war with Russia. It then, when approached diplomatically, spurned a diplomatic solution to the problem it had helped cause.
It is not clear that either part of Biden’s signature defense of his accomplishments and record are worthy of pride. The rallying of fifty nations in defense of Ukraine against Russia is neither as large nor as impressive as at first appears. And the energizing of NATO contributed neither to enhanced American hegemony nor to a more secure world. Instead, insistence on nourishing NATO led to the very European security crisis it was meant to prevent and brought the world into a new Cold War and to the edge of a new World War.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.
