A year ago, Donald Trump and the GOP won total victory. Biden's foreign policy failures were partially to blame. Are those failures still haunting the party?

Foreign policy rarely decides American elections — until it does. 

And in 2024, in many ways, it did.

President Joe Biden’s disastrous, humiliating, and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan tanked his popularity and his polling numbers never recovered.

Back in 2020, Joe Biden entered office promising competence, restored norms, and an administration of “the adults back in charge.” Instead, voters watched a series of foreign-policy failures that chipped away at public trust, unnerved allies, and strengthened the GOP’s case that Democrats simply weren’t serious enough about the world as it is.

Now, a year after Donald Trump and Republicans swept into power, the consequences of Biden’s foreign-policy missteps are still radiating outward. The Democratic Party is now discovering an uncomfortable truth: instability abroad has a long political half-life.

A Trust Erosion Years in the Making

The most damaging ingredient wasn’t a single failure but a persistent pattern: leaks, lapses, misjudgments, and an almost casual approach to national security vetting.

One early and underreported example was the Ariane Tabatabai affair. In 2023, Senator Roger Wicker warned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin about Tabatabai — then a senior Pentagon official — after reporting that she had been involved in the Iran Experts Initiative, an Iranian Foreign Ministry influence network. Emails obtained by Semafor and Iran International showed participants “checking in” with Iranian officials about attending events, drafting op-eds, and shaping Western discourse surrounding Iran’s nuclear program.

The Biden administration brushed off concerns as “smears.” Then came more reporting, more scrutiny, and — quietly — Tabatabai was reassigned. But the damage was already done: the administration looked sloppy, defensive, and unserious about counterintelligence.

By 2024, that impression was reinforced by something far worse.

The Leak Heard Around the Middle East

In October 2024, classified U.S. intelligence on Israel’s planned strike against Iran surfaced on a Tehran-linked outlet. The documents — top secret analyses from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the NSA — detailed Israel’s military preparations, including aircraft and munitions.

A senior U.S. official called it a “deadly serious breach.” Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon adviser, warned that “the broader bilateral trust” had been compromised and that the U.S. was risking blindness in the region.

This wasn’t just about embarrassing Washington. It was about allies — especially Israel — no longer trusting the United States to keep their secrets. The leak landed atop earlier intelligence spills, including the massive Discord leak in 2023. Israeli officials, already wary of the administration’s Iran diplomacy, saw a pattern: Washington couldn’t secure its own house.

You cannot conduct foreign policy if your partners believe your government leaks like a sieve.

Afghanistan Still Casts a Shadow

Voters didn’t need classified documents to conclude that foreign policy under Biden was mismanaged. They saw it in Afghanistan — the images of desperate Afghans clinging to aircraft, the collapse of Kabul, the deaths of U.S. service members outside the airport. The withdrawal may have been inevitable; the chaos was not.

That moment seared a perception into the public mind that never really faded: Biden’s team was reactive, slow, indecisive, and often surprised by events their own intelligence agencies warned about.

Fair or not, that perception colored everything else that followed.

Ukraine: Support Without Strategy

To be clear, Biden’s coordination of NATO support for Ukraine was one of the few areas where his administration earned real diplomatic credit abroad. But at home, the story was muddier.

Supporters felt the U.S. wasn’t doing enough quickly enough. Critics felt the administration was writing endless checks without a clear plan for victory or resolution. The result was a muddled narrative Republicans exploited relentlessly in 2024: Biden was spending too much abroad and achieving too little.

By election day, Ukraine wasn’t a Biden success story. It was an unresolved crisis.

China: Rhetoric Without Coherence

Biden maintained Trump’s tariffs, took a harder line on Chinese tech, and rallied Pacific allies. But policy moved in fits and starts, undermined by confusing public messaging and Washington infighting. Americans didn’t see a grand strategy — just an unfocused rivalry drifting toward something costly and unpredictable.

Trump hammered this relentlessly: Biden was “soft,” “slow,” “asleep at the wheel.” It stuck.

The Democratic Party Is Still Paying the Price

Democrats hoped that foreign policy would fade from the headlines after the election. It hasn’t.

U.S. intelligence agencies are still recovering from multiple high-level leaks, each raising the same uncomfortable question: who exactly was minding the store?

These issues aren’t abstract. They shape how swing voters perceive the Democratic Party: not tough enough, not disciplined enough, not strategic enough, too quick to dismiss legitimate security concerns as “smears,” right up until the day they aren’t.

The Biden-Harris administration wanted to run on competence. Instead, their foreign-policy blunders became part of the GOP’s closing argument: “You may not like Trump’s style, but at least the world was less on fire.”

Voters agreed — enough to hand Republicans full control.

The Democratic Party now faces a hard truth: foreign policy is no longer an afterthought in American elections. If Democrats want to rebuild trust, they need to prove they can secure the country, protect its intelligence, manage alliances, and anticipate threats rather than stumble into them.

Because foreign-policy failures don’t stay overseas. Eventually, they come home — sometimes with deadly consequences, as we saw this week with the terrorist attack against National Guard soldiers in D.C..

And sometimes they land at the ballot box.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)