Biden pushed for peace, security and cooperation in his farewell speech to the U.N., highlighting his decades of experience as a politician and push for positive change across the world.
“There will always be forces that pull our countries apart and the world apart: aggression, extremism, chaos, and cynicism, a desire to retreat from the world and go it alone,” Biden said at the summit in New York.
“Our task, our test is to make sure that the forces holding us together are stronger than those that are pulling us apart,” he added, “that the principles of partnership that we came here each year to uphold can withstand the challenges, that the center holds once again.”
The president also highlighted the ongoing wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, calling for the world to work together to address the conflicts.
Biden struck a determined tone in his remarks on Gaza.
“Now is the time for the parties to finalize its terms, bring the hostages home, ” he said, and to “ease the suffering in Gaza, and end this war.”
The U.S. has pushed for months to get a cease-fire and hostage release deal over the finish line, but talks have collapsed in recent weeks between Israel and Hamas.
And now, Israel and Hezbollah are teetering on the brink of war as they escalate tit-for-tat strikes across the border.
Biden, speaking generally about Middle East tensions, said “full-scale war is not in anyone’s interest,” and he called out Israeli settler violence in the West Bank while pushing for world leaders to put their people first.
“My fellow leaders, let us never forget, some things are more important than staying in power,” he said. “It’s your people that matter the most.”
But his Middle East comments attracted scrutiny.
Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the liberal think tank Center for International Policy, said Biden’s remarks on Gaza “repeated the months- or years-old talking points on the crises in the Middle East.”
This was “reflecting a US approach that has helped lead to the suffering in Palestine and Israel and the threat of further conflict in and around Lebanon that we’re seeing today,” Williams said in a statement.
Jordan’s king, Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein, in his own speech before the U.N. decried the “absence of global accountability” that is threatening to “create a future where anything is primitive.”
“Now is the time to ensure the protection of the Palestinian people,” he said. “It is the moral duty of this international community to establish a protection mechanism for them.”
On Ukraine, Biden again called to support the nation in its fight against Russia. “The world now has another choice to make: Will we sustain our support to help Ukraine win this war and preserve its freedom or walk away and let aggression be renewed and a nation be destroyed?”
Read the full report at TheHill.com.
