Joe Bidendelivered his foreign policy farewell address Monday at the State Department. The speech was largely a celebration of his own (perceived) accomplishments — all the things he wants to be remembered by as a foreign policy president. One of them is enacting a historic redistribution of wealth from the public to private weapons companies:
“We’ve significantly strengthened the defense industrial base [read: arms industry], investing almost $1.3 trillion in procurement and research and development. In real dollars, that’s more than America did in any four year period during the Cold War.”
Foreign policy for the one percent
The type of direct, trillion-dollar-plus government investment Biden promised for climate and social welfare only happened for arms companies. The amount Biden just bragged about giving to the weapons industry is about $540 billion more than the combined value of all the projects announced under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS Act (as of Jan. 10: $756,247,845,330).
The combined effect of Biden’s flagship domestic accomplishments isn’t particularly climate-friendly, either. For example, over 40% of the funding in the infrastructure law — often marketed as a climate bill — is exclusively for highways, roads, and bridges. That’s not just not green, that’s anti-green. Biden described the climate crisis as “the single greatest existential threat to humanity” in yesterday’s speech, but it definitely wasn’t budgeted like one during his administration.
At least there are more robust climate programs now than there were in 2020. The same can’t be said for social welfare — the U.S. social safety net is considerably weaker now than it was when Biden entered office. You might be thinking “but the pandemic assistance Biden inherited was intended to be temporary,” which is true. Also true: the purpose of Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan was to make the bulk of those programs permanent and establish several new ones.
It was never enacted. In 2021, Biden abandoned the strategy needed to overcome the challenge posed by the GOP and a couple recalcitrant Democrats and pass the social spending plan. In early 2022, Biden ditched the trillion-dollar-plus welfare agenda he campaigned on entirely and rebranded himself as a foreign policy president. From that point on, pandemic assistance was nolonger something Biden sought to expand or preserve; in fact, the more of those programs that expired, the more he could brag about reducing the deficit. Ending that assistance during a historic bout of inflation devastated the working class. Many people lost their homes because of it.
The Pentagon budget was exempt from Biden’s deficit reduction regime. Little wonder — it takes serious cash to implement a foreign policy as bellicose and destructive as Biden’s. As key social welfare provisions expired or were eliminated, military spending soared. This is not the hallmark of a “foreign policy for the middle class” and it’s definitely not one for the working class.
The beneficiaries of Biden’s foreign policy are part of a much more exclusive group. Here are a few of them:
Stephen Semler is co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, a think tank that develops policy ideas for the working class. He writes the Polygraph newsletter on Substack.
Top photo credit: President Joe Biden on the White House Lawn, July 14, 2023. (Shutterstock/Salma Bashir)
Despite positive recruitment reports from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Army is struggling with high attrition rates. Nearly 25% of recruits have failed to complete their contracts since 2022.
The Army reported in September that it exceeded its FY2024 recruitment goals. It even witnessed a backlog of new recruits waiting for training, as around 11,000 were placed in the delayed entry program. The question seems to be, can they keep them? The numbers aren’t promising.
Army data reviewed by Military.com suggests that, since 2022, nearly 25% of recruits have left the military before completing their initial contracts. The quality of recruits is one of several factors contributing to high attrition rates. According to service data, the military placed 25% of all enlistees in at least one of the Future Soldier Preparatory Courses, a series of trainings designed to assist recruits who do not meet academic or health standards set by the Pentagon. Of those who attend these courses, 25% do not complete their first contract. Those who did not attend the course still had a 20% attrition rate.
The number of eligible recruits in the country has also shrunk dramatically. According to a senior Army official, only 8% of the population is eligible for “clean enlistment” with no waivers, much lower than the 23% found in a 2020 DOD study. To combat this, the Army more than doubled the number of medical, academic, and criminal waivers granted to recruits in 2024 compared to 2022. More than 400 felony waivers were included in the 2024 waivers, up from 98 in 2022.
Not only did the Army reduce its recruitment goal to 55,000 from 65,000 in 2023, but the previous recruitment gains are muddled by the high attrition rates.
Hegseth previously mentioned the need to strengthen the military’s standards. President Trump signed an executive order in January to end the Department of Defense's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs but has not addressed slipping academic or health standards within the recruitment pool.
The military has been suffering from a credibility problem overall. A survey from 2022 found that only 48% of the public “expressed a great deal of trust and confidence” in the military. Of the respondents, 47% said that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were reasons for their lack of confidence. Some have blamed the post-9/11 wars and growing mistrust in government institutions for lagging recruitment over the last several years. In addition, broader access to secondary education and job training have offered other options to kids who, in years past, would see the military as the only ticket to school and work after high school.
But that doesn’t explain the crisis of attrition, which appears to be a much more complicated issue.
“I don't know what an acceptable attrition rate is, but we have to meet people where they are," stated a senior Army official. "The quality of new soldiers is an enormous problem we're paying for. But that's just where the country is."
When asked about the quality of recruits, service spokesperson Madison Bonzo said, “U.S. Army Recruiting Command remains committed to recruiting young men and women into our Army that are ready and qualified to join the most lethal fighting force in the world to ensure our nation's security."
New Gallup polling indicates that, for the first time, a minority of Americans — only 46% — are sympathetic toward Israelis. The percentage is the lowest recorded in Gallup’s 25 years of tracking the issue via its annual World Affairs Survey.
While the polling shows that Americans are more sympathetic toward Israelis over Palestinians overall (46% vs. 33%), U.S. adults are reporting they are more sympathetic toward Palestinians, up 6% from last year.
Americans’ views are largely split by political affiliation, according to Gallup. Republicans remain broadly supportive of Israelis, with 75% sympathizing with them over the Palestinians. Democrats, meanwhile, now side with Palestinians over Israelis by an almost 3-to-1 ratio (59% vs. 21%).
And a majority of Americans support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, though Democrats (76%) and Independents (53%) support the idea more than Republicans do (41%).
Americans’ increased Palestinian sympathies follow an extended Israeli war on the Gaza strip, that has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians and wounded 110,000 others, though bodies are still being recovered from the rubble.
Previous polling suggests Americans’ changing attitudes toward the Israel-Palestine issue can impact election results. Indeed, a mid-January YouGov pollbacked by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project indicated the Biden administration's Gaza policy was a top reason 2020 Biden voters stayed home in 2024, costing then Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris critical votes.
The cease-fire agreement on the Gaza Strip is on the verge of dissolving, for reasons that were predictable when the agreement was reached in January.
To follow an initial six-week phase, which has just concluded, the agreement envisioned second and third phases that would see the additional release of hostages by both sides, Israeli military withdrawals from the Strip, and a reconstruction plan. But those parts of the agreement were mere outlines or statements of objectives, with further negotiations needed to resolve all the details.
As addressed in Responsible Statecraft when the agreement was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has strong personal and political reasons to keep Israel at war, including his need to maintain a coalition with extreme right-wingers in his government whose policy on Gaza is to eliminate all Palestinians from the Strip.
Netanyahu thus has had incentives to sabotage the cease-fire agreement before its implementation could proceed to a permanent cessation of hostilities.
Such sabotage is well under way. Israel has frequently violated the cease-fire throughout phase one with air and ground attacks that have inflicted casualties. With Hamas not taking the bait of responding with full-scale hostilities, Netanyahu is now trying to junk the entire second and third phases of the agreement and replace it with something more to Israel’s liking. Instead of negotiating the details of phase two, as required by the agreement, Netanyahu is pushing a formula that includes a 50-day cease-fire, by the end of which all the Israeli hostages would be released.
With no provision in Netanyahu’s proposal for either an Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza or a permanent cessation of hostilities, the formula is an obvious non-starter for Hamas. It would be giving up its remaining bargaining chips for nothing in return. Hamas described Netanyahu’s proposal as “a blatant attempt to renege on the agreement and evade negotiations for its second phase.”
Meanwhile, other Israeli violations of the January agreement continue. Last week Israel indicated that it will not withdraw its forces, as stipulated in the agreement, from the Philadelphi corridor, an area along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. This week Israel began blocking all humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip.
The incentives for Netanyahu to resume Israel’s assault on Gaza rather than see an agreement through to lasting peace are at least as strong now as they were in mid-January. The biggest factor in this equation is the Trump administration’s deference to Israeli preferences, as reflected in Netanyahu’s smiling face after hearing that President Trump is just as much in favor of complete ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip as the extremists in Netanyahu’s government are.
And those extremists are as gung-ho as ever about resuming the devastating assault on the residents of the Gaza Strip after first starving them and cutting off their supplies of water and electricity.
The most likely near-term scenario for the Gaza Strip is thus a resumption of the Israeli military assault. Such a resumption will have no more chance of achieving the declared Israeli objective of “destroying Hamas” than the earlier 15 months of devastation did.
As for the suffering civilian population of Gaza, notwithstanding any resentment against Hamas for its decision to launch the October 2023 attack on Israel, those civilians have been given no attractive alternative to continued resistance. Whoever might someday enjoy Trump’s vision of a “Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza, it will not be the Palestinians who currently live there. They would instead face squalor in exile, and even then would not be safe from more Israeli attacks.
The original January agreement, notwithstanding all its weaknesses, represented the best that international diplomacy could produce at the time for immediate management of the Gaza tragedy. The fact that the accord was reached only after many weeks of mediation and negotiation shows that it was the most that could be squeezed from the parties — including from Hamas, despite the battering it had taken during more than a year of war.
The United States has the leverage, especially given its voluminous military aid to Israel, to create incentives for the agreement to remain in force and for serious negotiations on phases two and three to occur. Clearly the Trump administration is not using that leverage. In fact, Netanyahu says that his alternative formula for a temporary cease-fire with no permanent end of hostilities and no Israeli withdrawal was a framework proposed by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witcoff — the same Steve Witcoff who had been given credit for brokering the original January agreement.
In addition to implications for the suffering people of Gaza, this turn by the administration has implications for U.S. credibility. For the United States to help destroy an agreement that the same U.S. administration — and even the same U.S. envoy — had helped to negotiate will amplify foreign doubts, already present because of the administration’s similar reversals regarding international trade, about the ability and willingness of the United States to abide by its commitments.
If alternatives to the January agreement on Gaza are to be considered, certainly one should look at what the Arab states are doing. The Arabs have had some challenges getting their collective act together, mainly because of different attitudes toward Hamas and political Islamism generally, but at a just-concluded summit meeting in Cairo they endorsed an Egyptian plan that addresses reconstruction and temporary administration of the Gaza Strip.
Egypt’s proposal calls for a technocratic, nonpartisan Palestinian committee to administer the Strip during a six-month transition. Hamas welcomed the proposal, a posture consistent with earlier indications that the group is not anxious to keep administering Gaza itself, even if it will continue to resist unilateral disarmament of its military capability. Israel rejected the proposal, consistent with its opposition to anything that hints at a path toward Palestinian self-governance.
The Trump administration brushed aside the Egyptian proposal and reiterated its support for Trump’s Riviera-in-Gaza idea. The White House spokesman also repeated the administration’s bizarre line that because “Gaza is currently uninhabitable,” this somehow is a reason to support the policies of the state that made Gaza uninhabitable.
The White House confirmed this week that the administration has held secret talks with Hamas, in a contact that evidently focused on release of hostages and especially American hostages. The fact that the U.S. official involved was the special representative for hostage affairs rather than Witcoff implies such an agenda. There is no indication that the broader administration position changed, with President Trump issuing a bellicose statement threatening Hamas and saying that he is “sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job” in Gaza.
Although the Egyptian proposal deserves attention for dealing with the immediate situation, calls for the Arabs to come up with their own ideas are somewhat strange given that the Arab League produced more than two decades ago a peace proposal that offers peace and full recognition of Israel by all Arab states if Israel ends its occupation of Palestinian territories and accepts a Palestinian state.
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.