Biden loses – foreign policy focus is a liability to swing voters

[Elena, ELI STOKOLS and LISA KASHINSKY, “Foreign policy becomes a liability for Biden’s campaign as he heads to France”, ]

President Joe Biden vowed during his 2020 campaign to restore America’s alliances and leadership abroad.

But if Biden’s foreign policy served as an effective contrast with Donald Trump’s “America First” isolationism that year, it has now become a liability for his 2024 campaign.

As Biden begins a month of high stakes international meetings with a trip to France this week, two bloody wars in Ukraine and Gaza have complicated the president’s job and, polls show, contributed to the shakiness of his political standing at home.

“There is a sense of global chaos that will not be helpful to him” this fall, said Matt Duss, a former senior policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and an executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. “I think people have legitimate questions of, ‘Are we on the right track here?’”

Or as put by one longtime Democratic strategist, who was granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly: “Foreign policy is a problem for Biden because it undermines the central tenet of his 2020 candidacy, when he said he would restore America abroad and return us to normalcy.”

Biden’s polling took a hit — and never recovered — after the the botched withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, with 13 American service members killed by a suicide bomber. But after that debacle, Biden could still point to a string of foreign policy successes. By the midway point of his term, he had helped unify NATO allies following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and stymie President Vladimir Putin’s hopes for a quick and easy war.

That’s turned in recent months as Ukraine has lost ground in a slow, brutal war of attrition, owed in part, critics say, to Washington’s six-month delay in approving the latest round of defense aid. And a second war in Gaza that began with the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack, does not appear to be close to a resolution, despite Biden’s efforts to bring about a ceasefire.

Those conflicts are certain to dominate discussions during Biden’s five-day trip to France, which begins Wednesday as well as the G7 summit in Italy next week and the landmark NATO summit, marking the alliance’s 75th anniversary, taking place in Washington early next month. Both wars have created difficulties for Biden politically and the alliance faces critical questions about its next secretary general, cost sharing and its overall posture toward Russia.

The American public’s support for continued funding of Ukraine’s defense has dipped, part of why it took six months for House Republicans to allow a vote on another $60 billion in aid that finally passed in late April — after Russian forces had taken back territory from a depleted Ukrainian military. And Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has been more politically damaging to Biden, who has continued to defend Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has yet to heed his calls for a ceasefire and warnings to limit civilian deaths.

A New York Times/Siena College poll last month found that half of registered voters across six battleground states said they trusted Trump more than Biden to handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just 35 percent said they trusted Biden more.

“If this election is at all about foreign policy, Biden’s going to lose,” said Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, a risk assessment firm in New York. “His China policy is basically the same as Trump’s and there are now two wars, neither of which is going well.”