Commentary: Bringing American prisoners home from Russia will be Biden’s last big win

WASHINGTON DC: Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan have come home, in what is a huge victory for them and their families but also for US President Joe Biden.

His Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, had taken the two Americans hostage by jailing them, like so many others, on what the United States have said are false charges. Now, though, Biden and Putin somehow negotiated a big and complex swap of prisoners involving Americans, Russians and apparently other nationals as well.

Maybe this is what Biden had in mind when, in passing the Democratic baton in the presidential race to Kamala Harris, he said that he would use his remaining time in office to take care of as much unfinished business as he can, especially in foreign policy, which is his love and forte. As though to emphasise that, Secretary of State Antony Blinken added that Biden has six months to go, fully one-eighth of his term.

That still makes for an unusually long “lame-duck” period, as it’s called. The pessimistic take is that this leaves a power vacuum in the White House which rogue actors abroad - from allies such as Israel to foes such as North Korea - could try to exploit.

The optimistic spin, which Biden and Blinken are peddling, is that this premature duck-laming will now cue a swan of a commander-in-chief to sing his last song. For pessimists, the likelier image is some sort of moping mallard, lolling loon or feeble fowl.

POSSIBLE FOREIGN POLICY SUCCESSES

Bowing out of the race for a second term, the administration argues, frees up lots of time (and physical energy) that Biden no longer has to spend on the campaign trail and can instead use for discreet exchanges with world leaders such as Putin.

He can also ignore opinion polls and chatter about his age and frailty, and of course criticism from Democrats, Republicans or anybody at all. Far from lame, he is in instead free at last to make decisions that are wise even if they’re also unpopular. 

And why stop at prisoner exchanges? Biden has been working for 10 months on a ceasefire in the Middle East, so maybe he can eke that out now. Maybe even a breakthrough for the Ukrainians? Or a new grand strategy toward Beijing - a la Nixon-goes-to-China - to defuse conflicts from the Korean peninsula to the South China Sea, perhaps even to begin much needed talks on nuclear disarmament? 

That sort of thing has happened before, kind of. Ronald Reagan, who had entered the Oval Office as a hawk confronting the "evil empire", ignored criticism from his own Republicans in his final year and turned dovish, consolidating his detente with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and clearing the way for the Berlin Wall to tumble and the Soviet Union to dissolve under his successor.

BIDEN IN A BIND

But such lame-duck foreign policy successes are rare. Failures, missteps and frustrations are more common.

In December 1992, Reagan’s successor, George HW Bush, dispatched US troops on a humanitarian mission to Somalia; that became a big mess for Bill Clinton, who had to pull them out again. During his own finale in 2000, Clinton in turn threw a Hail Mary to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians; that fell flat, and instead led to the second intifada.

The nearest and most ominous analogue to Biden is Lyndon Johnson in 1968, another Democrat who voluntarily withdrew from the presidential race in favour of his vice president. Johnson then applied himself to ending the Vietnam War, but foundered on the politics of Indochina as well as America, where the campaign of Richard Nixon sabotaged the peace talks.

Ivo Daalder, head of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former US ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), tells me that Biden is in a bind similar to Johnson’s, and thus anything but liberated.

Yes, Biden would love to secure his legacy. But for that he must pass the torch to Harris, who shares his internationalist philosophy, as opposed to having it ripped out of his hand by Donald Trump, an unpredictable nationalist and diplomatic wrecking ball who would gladly undo Biden’s work shoring up America’s alliances and isolating its authoritarian foes.

In the Middle East, Biden is unlikely to score a late win and will be lucky to avert disaster. His objective is to prevent the wars between Israel and Hamas and Israel and Hezbollah from spreading into a regional conflict that draws in the US and Iran.

But that effort just got harder, after leaders of both terrorist groups were assassinated, one in Beirut, the other in Tehran. Biden will also keep working on a pact with the Saudis, but there’s no way he could get it through Congress before he leaves, and Riyadh may not give him or the Israelis a good deal anyway.

FOREIGN POLICY VICTORY IS UNLIKELY

One difference between Biden and Johnson (who waged a war in Vietnam that he didn’t want to be in) is that the current president isn’t secretly yearning to reverse or alter any of his previous policies.

He’s been “pure Biden” all along, Daalder told me. If he’s seemed excessively cautious in aiding Ukraine, for example, it’s because he’s been constrained by himself rather than by politics or polls. He won’t try new approaches in his final eighth because he’s already executing the ones he deems right.

And a difference between Biden and Reagan is that the latter had, by 1988, found a geopolitical soulmate of sorts in Gorbachev - both men shared a vision of a safer and freer world, with fewer nukes and divisions.

Biden, by contrast, is confronting the likes of Putin, who can’t wait for his strongman soulmate, Trump, to enter the Oval Office. Even China’s Xi Jinping seems to prefer Trump to Harris. So does, probably, Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. None of them has any interest in giving Biden a late-term victory.

The happy news is that Biden can still make a difference in some places and for some people, such as Gershkovich and Whelan. The tragedy is that the world and its hatreds are too complex to fit into the calendar of an outgoing American president whom too many people at home and abroad want to see failing.

This prisoner exchange is not the first note of a trumpeter swan’s song, but the quack of a duck that knows it’ll be limping home from now on.