Michael Hirsh
Foreign Policy, Sept. 24, 2024
“… the General Assembly, the body once apotheosized as the Parliament of Man is more than ever a place paralyzed by regional politics, the speechifying and petty clubbiness of smaller nations—and often anti-Israel invective.”
It wasn’t an especially warm goodbye on either side of the podium.
U.S. President Joe Biden, making his valedictory speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, drew a mild laugh when he talked of his half-century in public service and delivered his now-tired joke about his age. (“I know I look like I’m only 40,” he said.) But that was it for the merriment: Biden then droned on dully about the global challenges ahead, and the U.N. delegates responded with a mere smattering of applause, even when he spoke of defending Ukraine and ending the war in the Middle East. When he defended his withdrawal from Afghanistan, there was dead silence.
No doubt the most memorable moment of Biden’s speech came toward the end when he alluded to his decision not to run for another term at age 81 and declared: “My fellow leaders, let us never forget some things are more important than staying in power.” Biden received sustained applause for that line—which was rather ironic since so many of the countries represented in the hall are now led by autocrats desperately trying to stay in power no matter the cost.
But then, as the president was ushered off the stage—both the actual stage in Turtle Bay and, simultaneously, the world stage—something else was clear: The failing global system that Biden had hoped to reclaim and revitalize as president has largely passed him by. It’s not just that, with four months left as president, Biden has little chance of resolving the bloody conflicts now raging—one of which grows hotter by the day as Israel attacks Hezbollah in Lebanon while U.S. diplomats have all but given up on restraining it. “Biden may love diplomacy, but diplomacy doesn’t love him back,” Walter Russell Mead wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Monday.
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