Biden Thought 2023 Was Bad

Even without the messiness of geopolitics, 2024 was already set to be a pivotal year for U.S. President Joe Biden as his reelection campaign shapes up to be a showdown with his predecessor, Donald Trump. 

But Biden’s challenges don’t stop at the waterfront. The eruption of the Israel-Hamas war, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, and escalating rivalries in tech and energy supply chains have further complicated Biden’s new year agenda. Biden will need to balance the competing challenges of tenuous diplomacy with two U.S. allies, Ukraine and Israel, as well as de-risking ties with China, which has its eyes on a forcible takeover of Taiwan. 

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Washington has backed Kyiv to the tune of about $75 billion in humanitarian and military aid and equipment. But the well may be drying up: Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are trying to figure out how to meet Ukraine’s needs while funding more southern border defense and providing for Israel—and at the same time bolstering America’s fragile allies in the Pacific. 

Amid growing national security concerns, a host of U.S. lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have urged the Biden administration to shrink ties with Beijing. Those concerns have trickled into the tech arena, where the United States and China have been locked in a trade battle, as well as the Biden administration’s push to redraw critical mineral supply chains for the energy transition. 

After a whirlwind 2023, FP’s reporters have unpacked the biggest foreign-policy headaches facing Biden next year. 

Israel-Hamas War

If the biggest land war in Europe since World War II and the prospect of World War III with China weren’t enough for the Biden administration to handle, it ended up with more on its plate than ever after Hamas militants punched through and over the Gaza border wall in October, killing more than 1,200 people, abducting 250 more, and sparking the largest war in the Middle East since the fall of the Islamic State caliphate. 

Israel’s ensuing ground invasion of the Gaza Strip has left more than 21,000 Palestinians dead as bombs have rained on northern and southern Gaza while nearly 2 million people have been displaced, about 80 percent of the population. And it has set up a major clash between two erstwhile frenemies in Biden, a longtime supporter of Israel, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, propelled by a far-right coalition still reeling from the Oct. 7 attacks, wants the destruction of Hamas and the release of hostages before Israeli troops leave the strip. Biden wants Netanyahu to cut down on civilian casualties from dumb bombs and hard-nosed tactics, allow more humanitarian aid, and lower the conflict’s temperature. What Biden hasn’t yet done is put any conditions in place to limit the flow of American weapons to Israel. 

The stakes could not be higher as 2024 looms. Attacks by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels on vessels in the Red Sea have forced the creation of a U.S.-led international mission to secure the shipping corridor. To the north of Israel, Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon is taking shots at Israeli cities and its Iron Dome missile defense batteries. No one is blinking, and this long-simmering conflict threatens to boil over and make a mess all over the stove.

Black Swans and Spy Balloons

In early 2023, the Biden administration was carefully working to ease tensions with China, just for all that work to go off the rails when a Chinese spy balloon drifted over U.S. territory, dunking the relationship, like the balloon, into chilly waters. 

Biden administration officials, and plenty in Congress, continue to see China as the largest long-term strategic threat to the United States—one of the few things that Republicans agree with him on. But the spy balloon incident shows how random “black swan” events can completely derail U.S.-China ties, given all of the high-stakes tensions boiling just under the surface—from rattling sabers over Taiwan to ongoing trade wars to China’s authoritarian drift at home. Biden in 2024 will seek to defrost an icy relationship with routine meetings between senior administration officials and their Chinese counterparts. But if a balloon can throw things off course, what could an accidental shootout in the South China Sea do? 

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A Somber Second Anniversary

The word “knife-edge” fails to capture just how precarious Ukraine’s position is as it enters the new year. A $61 billion U.S. aid package continues to languish in Congress, held hostage by a political scrap over the U.S. southern border. Compounding everyone’s anxiety, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban proved that he is also willing to play politics with aid to the war-torn country as he blocked a 50 billion euro financial package as the EU voted to open membership talks for Ukraine and Moldova. Talks are expected to resume in early January to secure the unanimous vote required to approve the aid deal. 

Should U.S. aid falter, it would send the Biden administration into a diplomatic tailspin seeking to squeeze further assistance for Kyiv from its allies in Europe and beyond. U.S. officials have issued increasingly dire warnings that Ukraine could lose ground and quite possibly the war if further military aid isn’t approved by Congress. Even if the aid packages are approved on both sides of the Atlantic, the respective standoffs have brought the limits of continued Western military aid into sharp focus. This is likely to drive the conversation in 2024 about how—and when—the war comes to an end. 

Electionpalooza

In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a big presidential election next year. It’s lining up to be a Biden-Trump rematch, something most Americans don’t seem to be all that thrilled about, but it will have immense global consequences nonetheless. The elections will sharpen already razor-sharp political divides in Washington, potentially making legislation on national security and foreign policy even harder to pass than in 2023. Election season means Biden will have to devote more of his time to campaigning, leaving less time for foreign travel and statesmanship.

Then there’s the fact that a whole coterie of experts are warning that American democracy is under immense stress after Trump’s false claims of election victory in 2020 and his campaign’s vengeance-fueled vows to retaliate against the media and political opponents if he wins in 2024.

But those aren’t the only elections people are watching. The proverbial stars are aligning as at least 60 countries around the world—including India, the United Kingdom, and Mexico—have national elections of their own, and in Europe, some of the United States’ closest allies and supporters of Ukraine face their own surge in far-right populist politicians.

Bitter Divorce

Washington and Beijing spent much of 2023 escalating efforts to choke the other’s technology industry, locking both powers in a tit-for-tat trade war over semiconductor chips, outbound investment, and other forms of advanced technology. America’s top China commission, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, singled out technology as a key concern in its 2023 report to Congress, further underscoring the severity of the threat with which U.S. lawmakers view Beijing’s tech foreign policy. 

As this fight continues to unfold in 2024—embroiling not only Washington and Beijing, but a whole host of other countries, corporations, and investors—its global ramifications will become more pronounced. Biden is already facing pressure from Republican lawmakers to do more to enforce sweeping export controls against Chinese firms, while U.S. investors have called for more details and warned that Beijing may strike back. 

You Can Call Me AI

Artificial intelligence is an area where the Biden administration was particularly proactive in 2023—following up its 2022 Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Risk Management Framework by securing voluntary AI safety commitments from several leading tech companies, partnering with some of those companies on an AI “red teaming” exercise at a hacker conference in Las Vegas, and capping off the year with a comprehensive executive order that lays out guardrails around the fast-moving technology. 

The real test will come in 2024, when many of those policies will actually need to be implemented—hopefully before they get overtaken by developments in AI capabilities. A string of global elections in troubled democracies with histories of misinformation and hate speech (the United States included) will further raise the stakes. 

Biden needs to prime the United States not only to lead on AI and ensure U.S. democratic values make their way into technological governance regimes, but also to play nice with others. The European Union is inching closer to finalizing its own AI Act, China continues to forge its own path on development and regulation alike, and multilateral forums like the United Nations, G-7, and G-20 are trying to carve out their place in the global landscape. Washington can’t afford to drop the ball or fall behind. 

Supply Chain Snags

The future of critical minerals, the resources underpinning electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, took center stage in 2023 as the Biden administration spearheaded efforts to boost U.S. electric vehicle supply chains and diversify away from Beijing, which currently dominates the sector. 

In the final stretch of 2023, Biden injected new momentum into this push by unleashing new “Foreign Entity of Concern” restrictions that would effectively exclude vehicles with Chinese-manufactured battery inputs from qualifying for Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, dealing a major blow to Beijing and accelerating the shift away from Chinese suppliers. These measures are set to take force in 2024 for battery components; in 2025, they will also apply to the suppliers of raw battery materials. 

While the latest restrictions’ full impact remains to be seen until taking effect in the new year, some experts warn that they could backfire. “Assertive diversification, not decoupling, is needed,” Columbia University’s Kevin Brunelli and Tom Moerenhout wrote in FP. “That requires a holistic industrial policy strategy, not just local content restrictions that will end up sabotaging U.S. automaker interests and the climate in the short term.”