Biden looks to burnish foreign policy legacy at the UN as leaders grapple with a world on fire

After more than five decades at the forefront of United States foreign policy, President Joe Biden may have hoped to use his speech to over a hundred world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in New York to burnish both his own legacy and the country’s leadership on the world stage.

But an escalation in what was already a major crisis in the Middle East means the world will be listening for short-term solutions on top of capstone remarks on how his presidency will be regarded by history.

Senior administration officials acknowledge that Biden, both in his remarks to the General Assembly and in engagements with world leaders, must confront that reality as Israel carries out extensive military strikes across Lebanon that so far have killed hundreds, including children, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

In meetings, Biden and top US officials will be discussing what can be done to “stabilize the situation,” one senior official said, while noting that Biden plans to “address the Middle East, especially this very, very difficult year that we have all gone through.”

Biden is expected to firmly plant his message in the need for global partners to solve the world’s most vexing challenges, an antidote to populist ideologies that have risen around the world, including in the United States.

But “peace efforts” – in the Middle East with concerns about a full-scale war breaking out between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, on top of the conflict in Gaza, but also Ukraine – will take center stage, these officials say, highlighting the increasing instability that’s emerged in the last year.

Since Biden’s 2023 message that the world was at an “inflection point,” a new war between Hamas and Israel has wrought an increasingly steep death toll, and US efforts to broker a ceasefire to halt the fighting and free hostages held by the terror group have hit a brick wall in recent weeks. Israel’s audacious attack on Hezbollah last week that triggered an increase in strikes on both sides of Lebanon’s border has only complicated the picture in the region further.

“The world has changed, and the world’s gotten more difficult in many ways,” one senior administration official said.

He will also be expected to address the Russia and Ukraine conflict in a week when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he plans to present his plan to win the war to Biden, with his request to Biden to use Western supplied weapons to strike targets within Russia still outstanding.

All this means the threat from China, which the Biden administration has long described as its “pacing challenge,” has been pushed to the backburner.

In New York, world leaders will find themselves grappling with the growing list of global flashpoints – all while an election just weeks away looms over the US’ role as the democratic world’s champion, benefactor and leading arms supplier. While Biden will be formally representing the US at the table, former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are separately meeting with world leaders to bolster relationships and outline their own goals.

Speaking Sunday, Biden said he was concerned about escalation in the Middle East. But he reaffirmed his view that a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas – which American officials believe would lower temperatures across the region – was still possible.

“We’re going to do everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out. And we’re still pushing hard,” he told reporters at the White House

White House officials say Biden plans to work beyond those worries, elevating long-term priorities like climate change, a topic of a separate standalone speech. The president plans to reaffirm the case for a resurgence in US climate leadership and argue for why those efforts should be maintained in the years ahead as he looks to the end of his presidency.

“What he will show is how the United States has changed the playbook, fundamentally. Not focused on the doom and gloom, focused instead on the massive economic opportunity,” Ali Zaidi, White House national climate adviser, told reporters, adding that the speech will be “an opportunity to deliver that decisive decade half-time report to show the progress we’ve made, the points we put on the board, and the path ahead.”

On Tuesday, Biden will host a summit of the Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats which will include announcements from 11 coalition countries on new initiatives to advance efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking around the world as well as a new pledge from all core coalition members.  The group of 158 countries and 15 international organizations was established by the US last year as part of Biden administration efforts to address the persistent and deadly fentanyl crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans each year.

And on Wednesday, Biden will meet with the president of Vietnam on the sidelines of the gathering which will serve as an important opportunity to talk about their shared interests in the stability and prosperity of Southeast Asia, according to senior administration officials. This will be followed by a meeting focused on Ukraine reconstruction with world leaders – a critical topic ahead of Biden’s meeting with Zelensky later this week.

In just the last two weeks, Biden has embarked on a flurry of diplomatic activity, sitting down with the UK’s prime minister at the White House; hosting the Quad leaders of Australia, India and Japan in his hometown of Wilmington; and welcoming Zelensky of Ukraine and Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates as war rages in their backyard.

Those engagements focused on the threats that loom largest at present. As in recent years, the United Nations is again under pressure from smaller countries to have their voices – and their needs heard. Top US officials say they plan to use the week to raise awareness about conflicts in places like Sudan and around the world.

“We’re putting all of our efforts behind peace and security, not just in Gaza and Israel and Lebanon, but we’re also focusing on Sudan, we’re focusing on Ukraine. And so, all of these will be part of our agenda as well as conflicts elsewhere in the world,” US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said on CNN.

But questions about the UN’s effectiveness are again hard to ignore this year with the body gathering for the third time since Russia invaded Ukraine, no clear path forward on resolving the conflict in Gaza and tensions escalating between Israel and Hezbollah in the north. Russia and the United States are both permanent members of the UN Security Council who hold veto power, which makes it far thornier for the UN to be as involved in either Ukraine or Gaza.

“It’s a reminder that the UN system is not very good at resolving conflicts when a member of the – or, permanent member of the UN Security Council is deeply involved,” said Jon Alterman, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, pointing to the US relationship with Israel as a reason for why the UN is unable to take as direct a role in the conflict as many member states would like.

“As the world gathers in New York and talks about the role of the UN, talks about the role of international cooperation, the persistent inability to use UN structures to make more of a difference in this conflict, which is very, very much on the minds of billions of people around the world, I think is going to be a sober undertone to the week’s discussions,” Alterman continued, referring to the war in Gaza.

Even as US officials acknowledge the impact that Russia’s veto-power has had on the institution’s ability to be more involved in the conflict in Ukraine, they have still defended the United States’ use of its veto around the Gaza conflict.

“My argument to countries is don’t demand what you think is dysfunctional – demand to work within the system to figure out how to change that,” Thomas-Greenfield told reporters last week when asked about criticism of the veto. “We have made a decision like others that we’re not ready to give up on our veto power, but we’re willing to listen to what others have to say on that, and we’ll see where it carries us.”

While not budging on veto power, the US has announced its support for expanding the UN security council by adding two additional permanent seats for Africa and a rotating seat for small-island developing states.

Heading into this year’s gathering, the Biden administration’s policy priorities include ending the myriad global conflicts, revitalizing the UN-led humanitarian system, and creating a “more inclusive and effective” international system, according to Thomas-Greenfield.

“Our three UNGA priorities are ambitious, and some might call them overly ambitious, and even impossible. But this moment demands ambition. It demands urgency. It demands an opportunity to look at the impossible and see how we can make those things possible,” Thomas-Greenfield told reporters last week.