When Joe Biden made a rare prime-time televised address to the nation on October 19 (drawing a respectable 22 million viewers), his ostensible purpose was to anticipate and rebut the efforts of some Republicans to sharply distinguish between Israel and Ukraine as worthy beneficiaries of urgent U.S. military assistance. But without much question, an underlying motive was to show the 46th president looking very presidential: a national leader standing for American principles and leadership in a world aflame with war. Observers naturally varied in assessments of how commanding Biden looked and sounded in this familiar venue. But it seems likely that foreign-policy themes will become a key part of Biden’s 2024 reelection pitch. The bigger question is, Can it really help him?
The conventional wisdom is that Americans rarely make presidential-election decisions based on foreign-policy differences between the major-party candidates unless the U.S. is actually at war. The classic case, as Politico noted recently, was in 1992, when George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton (and won only 38 percent of the popular vote) just a year and a half after his job-approval rating hit 89 percent in the wake of his successful management of the Gulf War:
Bush won the Gulf War with minimal American casualties and expertly managed the end of the Cold War — and was then defeated by a 46-year-old governor from a small southern state whose most well-known foreign experience was not inhaling marijuana while he was a student in England.
This is a cruel fact of American presidential politics: A bad economy will beat standing up for the liberal international order almost every time. Unless Americans are directly threatened, it can be a tough sell for a president.
Another foreign-policy-focused president whose reelection was spoiled by a bad economy was Jimmy Carter in 1980. Carter did adroitly use the Iran hostage crisis to defeat what had been a powerful primary challenge from Ted Kennedy, but his unsuccessful efforts to end that crisis probably augmented the economic troubles that doomed him against Ronald Reagan.
Trickier examples are provided by Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush. While LBJ’s prosecution of the Vietnam War definitely played a large role in his failure to win the Democratic nomination for reelection in 1968 (he actually withdrew from the race as part of an unsuccessful peace bid), his depressed popularity also arose from conservative anger about civil-rights legislation and urban disorder. The events of September 11 changed George W. Bush from a marginally popular president into a world-beater whose party made rare midterm gains in 2002. By 2004, however, it’s unclear whether positive or negative feelings about the Iraq War predominated in the electorate that narrowly awarded him with a second term.
Perhaps more analogous to Biden’s situation are the presidents who ran for reelection amid fears that the United States might become directly involved in an overseas war. “He Kept Us Out of War” was the slogan that famously accompanied Woodrow Wilson’s reelection in 1916 (which was ironic since he led the U.S. into that same war within months of winning a second term). The approaching shadow of World War II also likely benefited Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third-term campaign in 1940. It’s possible that if world conditions grow more dire in the coming months, voters will become reluctant to “change horses in the middle of the stream” in the White House, to cite a recurrent theme for incumbent presidents.
But probably the best way to understand Biden’s likely deployment of foreign-policy issues in 2024 is that he will use them to amplify other campaign themes that are not primarily about events in Israel, Ukraine, or elsewhere.
It’s pretty well established that given the sour mood of the American electorate and his consistently low job-approval ratings, Biden needs to make 2024 a “choice” election rather than a referendum on how voters feel about his performance. So drawing contrasts between Biden and the equally unpopular (outside the Republican Party) Donald Trump is a must. Depicting Biden as a clear-eyed champion of consensus American values in a turbulent world that Trump doesn’t understand or care about makes a lot of sense.
As president, Biden has a unique ability to command attention by traveling overseas and hobnobbing with global leaders. That’s far better than his usual look: the often invisible, occasionally stumbling president seeking to change perceptions of the domestic economy or the southern border. The adulation with which Biden is regarded in other countries (most notably in Israel right now) may give Americans pause in taking him for granted or underestimating him. A global landscape can also help Biden deal with his most intractable problem: his age. Aside from the vigor he is showing in dealing with the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars, there’s a tendency to value experience during foreign-policy crises (again, particularly when the alternative is an erratic and narcissistic geezer like Trump). And finally, the idea that Biden is a figurehead controlled by “the radical left,” as Republicans incessantly assert, doesn’t comport with his identification with the causes of Ukraine or Israel, particularly the latter, which is near to the hearts of the conservative Evangelical voters at the center of the GOP base.
Barring an actual shooting war in which the U.S. is directly engaged, a foreign-policy focus won’t win Biden a second term if voters are unhappy with other aspects of his record or prospects in office. But it could help him at the margins, if other issues haven’t doomed him to defeat. It is, in fact, the sort of reelection campaign for which Joe Biden may have been training throughout his long career.
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