Commentary: Bringing American prisoners home from Russia will be Biden’s last big win

BIDEN IN A BIND

But such lame-duck foreign policy successes are rare. Failures, missteps and frustrations are more common.

In December 1992, Reagan’s successor, George HW Bush, dispatched US troops on a humanitarian mission to Somalia; that became a big mess for Bill Clinton, who had to pull them out again. During his own finale in 2000, Clinton in turn threw a Hail Mary to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians; that fell flat, and instead led to the second intifada.

The nearest and most ominous analogue to Biden is Lyndon Johnson in 1968, another Democrat who voluntarily withdrew from the presidential race in favour of his vice president. Johnson then applied himself to ending the Vietnam War, but foundered on the politics of Indochina as well as America, where the campaign of Richard Nixon sabotaged the peace talks.

Ivo Daalder, head of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former US ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), tells me that Biden is in a bind similar to Johnson’s, and thus anything but liberated.

Yes, Biden would love to secure his legacy. But for that he must pass the torch to Harris, who shares his internationalist philosophy, as opposed to having it ripped out of his hand by Donald Trump, an unpredictable nationalist and diplomatic wrecking ball who would gladly undo Biden’s work shoring up America’s alliances and isolating its authoritarian foes.

In the Middle East, Biden is unlikely to score a late win and will be lucky to avert disaster. His objective is to prevent the wars between Israel and Hamas and Israel and Hezbollah from spreading into a regional conflict that draws in the US and Iran.

But that effort just got harder, after leaders of both terrorist groups were assassinated, one in Beirut, the other in Tehran. Biden will also keep working on a pact with the Saudis, but there’s no way he could get it through Congress before he leaves, and Riyadh may not give him or the Israelis a good deal anyway.