In his final foreign policy speech as US president, Joe Biden summed up what he hoped to be the legacy of his administration. He boasted that he “increased America’s power in every dimension,” while “our adversaries and competitors are weaker.”

Biden declared that his administration “significantly strengthened the defense industrial base, investing almost $1.3 trillion in procurement and research and development in real dollars.” He added, “It’s going to ensure that we’re fully equipped to fight and win wars.”

If President John F. Kennedy is remembered for falsely promising “not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women,” Biden can at least be given credit for openly stating that the central focus of his administration has been global domination.

Biden’s remarks were framed within the doctrine of “great power competition” first articulated in the Trump administration’s 2018 national security strategy. The central focus of US military and economic policy is seeking to weaken and subjugate the targets of its aggression: Russia, China and Iran.

Biden leaves office after having played the leading role in provoking, then preventing any diplomatic resolution to the Russia-Ukraine war, and having funded, armed and enabled the Gaza genocide.

In September, the Wall Street Journal estimated that as many as 1 million Ukrainians and Russians had been either killed or wounded in the Ukraine war. An entire generation of young people has been wiped out or maimed.

Biden did not reference the death toll of the war but simply what he dubiously claimed it has achieved: that Russia is “weaker.” The implication is that these Russian and Ukrainian deaths are fully justified for facilitating Biden’s goal of “strengthening” the United States and NATO and “weakening” Russia.

According to Biden, as a result of the war provoked and escalated by the US and other imperialist powers in Eastern Europe, “NATO is more capable than it’s ever been, and many more of our allies are paying their fair share.” He continued, “Before I took office, nine NATO allies were spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense. Now, 23 are spending 2 percent.”

Biden boasted of his military policy in the Middle East, whose central pillar is the Gaza genocide. He did not mention the death toll in Gaza, which currently stands officially at 46,000, with the vast majority of the dead being women and children. Rather, he boasted that “Israel did plenty of damage to Iran and its proxies,” and that as far as the United States was concerned, “Our actions contributed significantly.”

He declared:

Now Iran’s air defenses are in shambles. The main proxy, Hezbollah, is badly wounded. … All told, Iran is weaker than it’s been in decades. And if you want more evidence, if it was seriously weak in Iran and Russia, just take a look at Syria. President Assad was both countries’ closest ally in the Middle East. Neither could keep him in power.

He boasted of the trade war measures carried out under his administration, which were aimed at stifling China’s economic growth. He said:

You all recall, and the experts believe we were predicting. It was inevitable that China’s economy would surpass ours. ... Now, according to the latest predictions, on China’s current course, they will never surpass us.

While Biden is correct in opining on the foreign policy aims of his administration, his assessment wildly overstates the actual position of US imperialism. Ukraine’s military is on the brink of collapse amid mass desertions and growing popular opposition to the Zelensky government’s increasingly draconian recruitment policies. Biden’s wars not only fueled a $7 trillion increase in the national debt, they also stoked soaring inflation that immensely eroded the living standards of the American population.

In boasting of the supposed achievements bought with the blood of the people of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, Biden repeated the central lie of his administration—that “we have not gone to war to make these things happen.”

He is right only to the extent that these bloodbaths have been created without the death of significant numbers of American troops. The Biden administration vastly expanded military spending and flooded the war zones of Eastern Europe and the Middle East with weapons. Since September 2022, the US has provided Ukraine with $183 billion in weapons and arms, and since October 7, 2023, it has provided Israel with $17 billion.

The use of the weapons provided to Israel and Ukraine has been closely overseen, monitored and directed by US forces in those regions. Hundreds of US combat troops are on the ground in Israel, while the Pentagon has admitted that active duty US forces are deployed in Ukraine to oversee the distribution of weapons.

The Biden administration has, at the same time, vastly expanded the danger of nuclear war. In March 2024, a US intelligence assessment placed the likelihood that Russia would use nuclear weapons in Ukraine at 50-50. Yet the Biden administration continued to funnel weapons to Ukraine and allowed the use of NATO long-range weapons to strike deep inside Russia, setting a new precedent for nuclear brinksmanship that endangers all of humanity.

Biden declared, “I’ve said many times, we’re at an inflection point. The post-Cold War period is over. A new era has begun in these four years,” in which there is “a fierce competition underway for the future of the global economy.”

This “fierce competition” will be continued in the second Trump administration. Biden added, “So as a new administration begins, the United States is in a fundamentally stronger position. … It’s clear my administration is leaving the next administration with a very strong hand to play.”

It is the official position of the White House, as expressed by White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre in October 2024, that Donald Trump is a “fascist” who would be a “dictator on day one.”

But now, the outgoing president is boasting that he is leaving this would-be dictator with a “strong hand to play.” Biden, characteristically, made no mention of the fact that Trump has threatened to use American military power to annex Canada, Greenland and Panama.

The legacy of the Biden administration is the clearest possible demonstration of the character of the Democratic Party. It is a party of the financial oligarchy, dedicated to the policies of imperialist war and global domination. The horrific consequences of America’s drive for global domination in the killing fields of Gaza and Ukraine and the domestic consequences of these wars will be Biden’s legacy.