What Biden’s State of the Union Revealed About Foreign Policy and the 2024 Election

When it comes to State of the Union addresses, domestic plans and pocketbook issues usually take precedence over foreign policy. But on Thursday, U.S. President Joe Biden attempted to connect the two: He drew a line between threats to democracy at home and abroad, presenting a stark choice for voters between himself and former President Donald Trump, whom he referred to only as “my predecessor.”

To discuss what the speech revealed about foreign policy in a busy campaign season ahead, I spoke with Susan Glasser, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a former editor in chief of Foreign Policy. Subscribers can watch the full discussion in video on the box atop this page. What follows is an edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You wrote in the New Yorker that this was an unusual State of the Union. Some of the words you used to describe it were “partisan,” “shouty,” “rowdy,” “combative,” and “sharply confrontational.” Talk to us about that.

Susan Glasser: We’ve all seen the State of the Union before. To be blunt, these are not usually the greatest speeches. It’s an annual ritual. But this came at such an important political moment for Biden. I don’t think he had the option of just checking the box and doing it as normal. And so we heard something really different. We heard a campaign rally in the middle of the Capitol last night, and it was really something to watch, that made it much more of an engaging spectacle. You had Democrats on their feet cheering. You had chants of “four more years” even before Biden began speaking. And then you had half the room sitting on their hands, looking very glum about it.

RA: Throughout this speech, Trump loomed large. One of the bits that stayed with me was that Biden refused to call him by his name. He called him his “predecessor” again and again. And as he talked about how some people his age—Trump, of course—saw the American story as one of “resentment, revenge, and retribution,” Biden tried to paint a more hopeful picture for himself. It seemed like a preview of what we’re going to hear all year, right?

SG: Absolutely. Contrast is the name of the game. Biden doesn’t want people dwelling on him and his age and his capacity. He wants people thinking about this as a choice and realizing that there is a ceiling of support for Trump.

He began this speech not only with the threat of Trump and Trump supporters to American democracy at home, but he instantly brought in both Trump and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin at the very opening of this speech. I think we’re going to hear a lot more of that. It’s not going to be a foreign-policy election, per se, but he is going to use that contrast of the Republican Party that is so lost that they have a leader who is cheerleading for the maniacal dictator of Russia. I think that really resonates for many Americans, including many Republicans. So we’re going to hear again and again about that link between the threat to democracy from illiberalism—both at home and abroad.

RA: Biden’s been criticized a fair bit, including in our magazine, for describing the world as black and white in terms of democracies and autocracies. But there’s some gray, in fact, and a lot of countries that don’t fit neatly into that dichotomy. But last night seemed a bit different. He made it about how freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and overseas at the very same time. And that’s when he segued into talking about Ukraine. And so, in a sense, he was linking problems at home with problems abroad without really saying that democracy and autocracy are these two black-and-white things. How effective do you think that transition is?

SG: Biden still thinks that this is an inflection point and a conflict that we’re seeing growing between democracies and autocracies. He is very much a man of the 20th century. It’s not that Biden has changed his mind about that, but politically speaking, it’s quite hard to use this kind of stentorian rhetoric about the great democracies when the biggest threat, arguably, to international stability and to democracy in the world is America’s own internal conflicts.

I also just think it’s good politics. Americans don’t have the nuanced view of geopolitics that you’re talking about. In the end, this is not about winning a foreign-policy argument. It’s about winning an election. Second, it’s not just backward-looking. This part of Biden’s speech came with a very explicit call to action. He wasn’t just using this as a rhetorical device, but he was trying to push and pressure the House Republicans and their speaker, Mike Johnson, to bring to a floor vote the urgently needed assistance package of $60 billion that has been sitting around in Congress since the fall, without which it’s going to be very hard for Ukraine to keep fighting.

Read More

Biden Starkly Lays Out the Stakes for 2024

The president delivered one of the most politically significant State of the Union addresses in memory.

Analysis

|

Michael Hirsh

State of the Union: What’s At Stake for Biden’s Foreign Policy

Biden must rally support for U.S. efforts on two major wars.

Situation Report

|

Robbie Gramer, Jack Detsch, Amy Mackinnon

Europe Braces for Trump 2.0

European officials are scrambling to ensure the transatlantic relationship can survive the U.S. election.

Situation Report

|

Jack Detsch, Robbie Gramer

RA: One of the contrasts that Biden tried to make was in having the Swedish prime minister sitting in the audience, while suggesting that Trump was too close to Putin.

SG: It was an amazing coincidence of timing that Sweden’s very protracted process of accession to NATO culminated the very week that Biden was giving this State of the Union address. I thought that was notable. It’s not really going to break through politically to the American people, but it was a very important message to NATO. If there is any throughline in Biden’s foreign policy, it absolutely is an emphasis on getting back in step and in sync with, especially European allies, but South Korea and Japan as well.

There was incredible angst and concern generated by the four years of the Trump presidency and by the prospect of a Trump return. Trump is a destabilizing force in these alliances in ways that many Americans may not fully appreciate. He is not committed, as a bedrock principle, to these partnerships as the foundation of American security in both Asia and Europe.

RA: Now, in contrast to Europe and Ukraine, which he addressed around the start of his speech, Biden waited until near the end to get to the Middle East. What do you make of that?

SG: I think that was definitely on purpose and very notable. The bottom line is the politics are quite different for these two conflicts right now. Ukraine remains an important cause across the political spectrum, and Americans are supportive of that. Many Republicans are very dubious of Putin and of what a Trump return would mean on that front. It’s a different matter on Israel, especially inside the Democratic Party.

Biden was actually late because there were pro-Palestinian protesters who were trying to block his motorcade route to the U.S. Capitol. There is a real cooling of relations that you can see that has happened between the Biden administration and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s government in the last couple of weeks. It’s not nearly enough for the critics. There are many of them inside Biden’s party and inside his own government, who are very concerned that Netanyahu has kind of played Biden. That explains what Biden said in the speech.

They’re scrambling now to try to get more aid into Gaza. This was just a terrible delay and a terrible mistake. They’re building this emergency pier when just a week earlier, I was told by a senior administration official, that they’re not practical and that they won’t really produce enough assistance for the Palestinians anyway. To me, the fact that the Biden White House flip-flopped on that from their internal discussions is very telling because it shows you that the political urgency is to do something, even if it’s not actually all that meaningful on the ground.

RA: I keep hearing that Biden himself isn’t there yet when it comes to exerting direct pressure on Netanyahu to adjust his strategy. We’ve seen a bit of an evolution over the last few months, but he’s still not there. What do you make of that? And did you sense any difference last evening?

SG: I do agree with you, although I’m not sure it’s a generation gap. I have heard, going all the way back to October, a concern from inside the White House and the State Department that this was basically Biden himself setting the contours and the constraints around the American response, in particular the handling of Netanyahu.

Biden has always seen himself politically as a strong supporter of Israel and also as somebody who is at the center of his party. He believes that while there’s a concern around Israel’s over-the-top military response, Americans are not yet ready to jettison their feeling of themselves as supporters of Israel. But it’s a mess politically as well as morally in every way.

There’s a real feeling that Netanyahu is probably not straight-up with the Americans and that he himself has a political incentive to keep this war going. He and Biden have almost competing political imperatives right now. Biden needed the war to end yesterday. And Netanyahu is extremely unpopular. He is yet to face his reckoning from the Israeli electorate. Many people believe he will lose an election, and so he wants to keep fighting.

RA: It’s remarkable that we’ve discussed foreign policy for so long without really mentioning China.

SG: What a change a couple of years can make. This was the third straight administration that came in saying they were going to pivot to Asia and that they were going to focus American foreign policy on the challenge and the threat posed by a resurgent and revisionist China. Then, of course, we had Afghanistan, the invasion of Ukraine, and then Oct. 7. China is just not a front-burner issue right now.

There was a conscious effort on the part of both the White House and also the Chinese to dial things down and not to be the central issue in the campaign. Interestingly, I did detect that Biden’s framing on China was a little bit different than I’ve seen before. He laid open the possibility of having a campaign argument with Trump and his proxies over China. Essentially, he is saying that Democrats and him have a different policy on China and that they are not going to be the kind of blunderbuss that Trump is. They are going to have a more sophisticated, targeted, and effective policy.