President Joe Biden will begin his last week in office with a major address foreign policy address on Monday and follow that up with a farewell address to the nation delivered from the Oval Office two days later, the White House has said.
Biden’s final address to the nation as president will be televised at 8 p.m. on Wednesday. That’s five days before he’ll travel to the U.S. Capitol with his predecessor turned successor, President-elect Donald Trump, to witness Trump’s swearing-in.
The address will be a reflection on the 46th president’s 50-plus years in national politics, beginning with his improbable victory in the 1972 Delaware Senate race as a 29-year-old unknown, leading to three decades in the upper chamber, then the vice presidency under Barack Obama, and ultimately the presidency.
Two days before he speaks from the Oval Office, Biden is also set to deliver a speech at the State Department aimed at summing up what he considers his administration’s critical work on restoring American alliances and leadership.
A senior administration official who provided information on Biden’s plans described what he viewed as the bleak situation the United States faced on the world stage as Biden grabbed the reins of government from the outgoing Trump administration, during which U.S. alliances “had been badly damaged” by the then former president, now president-elect’s decision to walk away from “agreements that made America safer.”
“Our adversaries were gaining strength. And the nation and the world were in the midst of a global pandemic,” the official added.
Biden aims to “describe how we reclaimed America’s global leadership as a force of stability, put our adversaries in a position of weakness, effectively navigated turbulence around the world and made America stronger,” the official said.
He added that Biden will highlight how he helped “reinvigorate” the NATO alliance, which expanded to 32 members in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and that he “stood with Israel” after the 2023 terror attacks.
The remarks will be just one of several events the administration has planned to mark Biden’s final week in office, after which he’ll close out more than a half-century in public service by attending Trump’s second inauguration to mark the peaceful transfer of power he was denied four years ago when Trump attempted to overturn his 2020 election loss.
The president’s final foreign policy speech was initially set to be delivered as a bookend to Biden’s final trip aboard as president, a visit to Rome that was scuttled to allow him to oversee the federal response to the wildfires that have devastated Los Angeles and the surrounding area.
It’s unclear to what extent he’ll discuss America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he ordered in August 2021. That move, which ended America’s longest war, was largely viewed as a disaster that sent Biden’s approval ratings plummeting, from which he never recovered, particularly after 13 U.S. Marines lost their lives in a bombing at Kabul International Airport.
