Two years ago, just six days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Biden opened his State of the Union address by pledging to stop Vladimir V. Putin in his tracks. The response in the chamber was a round of applause.
On Thursday night, Mr. Biden reopened his speech by repeating his warning that, if not stopped, Mr. Putin would not stop his territorial ambitions on Ukraine’s border. But the political environment was completely different.
With many Republicans vowing not to vote for more aid and the Ukrainians out of ammunition and losing ground, Mr Biden challenged them to defend former President Donald J. Mr Trump said if a NATO country did not pay enough for its defence, he would tell Mr Putin to “do whatever the hell you want”.
While Democrats cheered Mr. Biden’s straight shot at his 2024 opponent, many Republicans in the room looked down or checked their phones — an example of the changing and multiplying challenges he faces as his foreign policy agenda politics plays a central role in the re-election campaign.
Mr. Biden’s promise to restore American power by rebuilding alliances and “proving that democracy works” is a much more complicated task than it was when he took office.
His problems run deeper than the new thinking of a Republican Party that has moved on 20 years from President George W. Bush’s declaration that America’s mission would be to spread democracy to Mr. Trump’s open admiration for Mr. Putin and quasi emperors such as President Viktor Orbán of Hungary, who is visiting Mar-a-Lago on Friday.
On the progressive side of his party, Mr. Biden has been surprised to find that an entire generation of Americans does not share his instinct to protect Israel at all costs, and is deeply critical of how he has let American weapons fuel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. . The shelling of civilian areas of Gaza continues, where more than 30,000 people have lost their lives, according to local health authorities.
After two Democratic primaries in which the “non-aligned” won significant percentages of the vote in protest of the administration’s Middle East policy, Mr. Biden spent the latter part of his speech trying to let progressives know he was listening. He detailed what the people of Gaza have been through and insisted that “Israel must allow more humanitarian aid.” It was a change of tone for a president loathe to pressure Mr. Netanyahu publicly, even as the two leaders argued bitterly over safe lines.
Mr. Biden sought to use the receding memory of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill to fuse his domestic and foreign democracy agenda, at one point declaring that the surge “was the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War. “
And while he counted on the sound of boos he knew would greet those comments, hoping they would expose the election naysayers in Congress and beyond, the sound was almost certain to be heard from Beijing to Berlin, where leaders are desperate to count which They will deal with America in 10 months.
Ukraine poses the clearest test of Mr. Biden’s ability to declare that he has rebuilt American alliances at the right time.
He opened by recalling Franklin D. Roosevelt’s State of the Union address in 1941, when “Hitler was on the march” and “the war raged in Europe.” He compared that moment to today, arguing that “if anyone in this room thinks that Putin is going to stop in Ukraine, I assure you, he won’t.”
It was part of a strategy to appease opponents of future military aid to Ukraine, accusing Mr Trump – whose name he never uttered, calling him “my predecessor” – of “caving in to a Russian leader”. And he went on to celebrate NATO, “the strongest military alliance the world has ever known.”
Now, after two years in which the alliance has rediscovered its mission — containing Russian power — even that line has left Republicans silent. Nothing that has happened in the last two years, not even the European pledge of $54 billion to rebuild Ukraine and the provision of Leopard tanks and Storm Shadow missiles and millions of artillery rounds, has knocked Mr. Trump off the talking points. He still denounces the alliance as a drain on America, and his former top aides say that, if elected, he may actually pull out of the alliance.
Mr. Biden’s most influential advisers, including Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware who speaks frequently with the president, argued that Mr. Trump’s characterization as sympathetic to the Russian leader is the rare case of a foreign policy issue. that could move the presidential election needle.
And they believe that support for Ukraine runs deeper than meets the eye. Many Democrats argue that if the bill to provide $60.1 billion in additional aid to Ukraine — much of which would remain in U.S. weapons factories — received a clean up or down vote in the House, it would pass. But under pressure from Mr. Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson has so far blocked the vote from coming to the floor.
But if Ukraine is a site of moral clarity for Mr. Biden and his argument that American intervention on behalf of democracies is at the core of the national mission, the Israel-Hamas war is a shambles.
Mr. Biden’s announcement during the State of the Union address that he had ordered the military to funnel emergency aid to Gaza by building a pop-up port in the Mediterranean Sea was at one level a demonstration of America’s global reach as it struggles to stop a massive humanitarian disaster before the starvation of hundreds of thousands.
But in other ways it was also a symbol of Mr. Biden’s global frustration.
The very fact that he had to order the construction of the floating jetty in Israel’s backyard, apparently without his help, was a remarkable recognition of how his repeated pleas to Mr. Netanyahu fell on deaf ears.
Unable to influence Mr. Netanyahu and his war cabinet, Mr. Biden literally circles them, building floating piers designed to land on enemy territory. Biden’s mandate was driven not only by a humanitarian impulse, but also by an electoral need to reconcile his party’s differences on Middle East policy and demonstrate that he is prepared to do much more for the Palestinians than the Mr. Trump.
“To the leadership of Israel I say this,” Mr. Biden said on Thursday. “Humanitarian aid cannot be a secondary issue or a bargaining chip. Protecting and saving innocent lives must be a priority.”
Mr. Biden is not yet where the left of his party is. He did not say, for example, that he would place restrictions on how US weapons supplied to Israel could be used. And while the new maritime effort to rush aid may help, if combined with a pause or cease-fire that allows food and medicine to be distributed, Mr. Biden may be too late for the purposes of recovering disaffected members of his base.
Remarkably, the foreign policy initiative Mr. Biden sees as the most important of his tenure has received the least mention: containing China’s power while competing with it in key technologies and urging it to cooperate on climate and other common issues.
It gave China only seven lines, but officials say it remains at the core of its strategy. But even there, he couldn’t resist a jab at Mr Trump, who during the pandemic railed against the “Chinese virus” but was slow to cut chips and chip-making equipment, as Mr Biden did . “Frankly, for all his tough talk about China,” Mr. Biden said, “it never crossed my predecessor’s mind to do that.”
