Joe Biden Is as Embarrassed by His Presidency as We Are

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 07, 2025

 

This week, Joe Biden emerged from ignominious political exile to speak with the only people who still seem to appreciate his presidency: foreigners.

 

In his first interview since he left the White House, Biden sat down with the BBC’s Nick Robinson for a conversation in which the former president succumbed to the understandable temptation to rewrite the history of his administration. The revisionism to which the Beeb’s viewers were privy was multiaxial — Biden has many scores to settle with his own record in office — but none proved as grating as his attempt to leverage Russia’s war in Ukraine against his successor.

 

“Listen to what Putin said when he talked about going from Kyiv into Ukraine and why,” the president muttered incomprehensibly to his interlocutor’s incurious nods. “He can’t stand the fact that the Russian dictatorship that he runs, that the Soviet Union has collapsed.”

 

The former president eventually stumbled across the point he was trying to make. “He,” meaning Vladimir Putin, “believe it,” meaning Russia, “has historical rights to Ukraine.” The 46th president agreed with his interviewer’s characterization of Trump’s posture toward Putin as a display of “modern-day appeasement,” and he promoted his own record on the conflict. “We gave them everything they needed to provide for their independence,” Biden said of Ukraine, “and we were prepared to respond more aggressively if Putin moved again.”

 

Hogwash.

 

It was only in late February of last year — just about two years to the day from the outset of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine — that the Biden administration reluctantly dropped its objection to providing Kyiv with long-range ordnance for use in Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). Biden wouldn’t authorize the use of that ordnance against Russian targets outside the Ukrainian theater for another nine months. Indeed, the former president didn’t consent to providing Ukraine with ATACMS at all until September 2023, even though Ukraine had requested access to those platforms from the start of Russia’s campaign of conquest.

 

That story — one defined by the Biden administration’s persistent self-doubt and halting, qualified, often insufficient support for Ukraine’s cause, only to be abruptly reversed after the damage had already been done — repeated throughout the war. The same sequence of events describes the administration’s withholding and eventual reluctant provision of High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), heavy artillery, tanks, fixed-wing aircraft, cluster munitions, antipersonnel mines, and so on.

 

The administration’s first thought was always about how the Russians would respond to America’s furnishment of weapons platforms and ordnance that Moscow was already using on Ukraine’s battlefields. The Biden administration’s concern wasn’t irrational, but the president and his subordinates refused to revisit their assumptions. Moscow would draw a red line, Washington would observe that red line, and when that red line was crossed without broader incident, the White House would move on to obsess over the next illusory red line. Biden declined to revise this doctrine even when it became obvious that Russia’s table-pounding objections to America’s support for Ukraine would amount to just that.

 

Biden failed to deter Russia’s war. Indeed, it responded to months of provocative indications that Putin was ready to attack by rewarding the Russian despot with bilateral summitry. And when Putin’s forces poured over the Ukrainian border anyway, the former president didn’t just fail to hand over “everything they needed to provide for their independence.” Rather, the administration provided Ukraine with just enough to prevent it from being wholly subsumed into the Russian Federation — and that only after losing an unnecessarily public argument with itself.

 

In fact, we can safely conclude that the Biden administration never trusted the Ukrainians to provide for their own defense. Instead, the president signaled to the Kremlin that the U.S. would not respond to a “minor incursion” into Ukrainian territory, and his instinct in response to Moscow’s full-scale invasion was to establish a Ukrainian government in exile. “The fight is here,” Volodymyr Zelensky said in his famous rejection of Biden’s pusillanimity. “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

 

Donald Trump’s approach to this conflict leaves a lot to be desired. He, too, is plagued by misapprehensions and misplaced sympathies, and his eagerness to sate Moscow’s hunger for territorial conquest will only whet Putin’s appetite. But neither Trump nor Ukraine occupies the most advantageous position right now. That unfortunate circumstance is of Joe Biden’s making.

 

It takes a lot of gall to tacitly fault the Ukrainians for coming up short on the battlefield, as Biden has in this interview. He is attempting to recast his record for the history books.

 

And yet, the assumption of malice on Biden’s part presumes that the former president is even aware of his own record when it comes to Ukraine. We probably shouldn’t take that supposition for granted. This is Joe Biden we’re talking about, after all.