Following a decade and a half of retreat from the world stage, will 2023 be the year that America returns to leading from the front?

As President Biden enters the second half of his first — and perhaps only — term, a Republican-led House of Representatives threatens to undermine his domestic agenda. So, how about aiming for some foreign policy achievements? 

Mr. Biden is a former chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee who entered the White House after decades of dealing with national security issues. While on the campaign trail, an adoring press described him as “most qualified” to lead America in the global arena.

Yet, a national security adviser to several presidents, Robert Gates, declined to retreat from his assessment that Mr. Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” 

In reality, and despite a vow to undo everything President Trump did before him, Mr. Biden early on barely strayed from his two predecessors’ vow to “end endless wars” and reduce America’s global footprint. 

To achieve that aim, President Trump wrote love letters to North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, negotiated with the Taliban, and repeatedly said Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a “genius.” Mr. Biden’s former boss, President Obama, was considered a foreign policy naif. 

Shortly after Mr. Obama removed all American troops from Iraq in 2011, ISIS reared its ugly head. A year later, he avoided confrontation in Syria even after Damascus crossed his “red line” by using chemical weapons. Emboldened, Russia moved in. Dragged by European allies into a Libyan war to remove the dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, America limited its involvement and thus helped usher in national chaos that is unresolved to this day. 

As the Libyan debacle became clear, a White House aide spelled out to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza the Obama  doctrine: “Leading from behind.” The term was likely lifted from a Harvard Business School professor, Linda Hill, who wrote that her inspiration was Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. In it, he likened a leader to a sheep herder, who leads his flock from behind it.   

“Leading from behind is not leading. It is abdicating. It is also an oxymoron,” a late Washington Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer, wrote at the time. “Yet a sympathetic journalist, channeling an Obama adviser, elevates it to a doctrine. The president is no doubt flattered. The rest of us are merely stunned.”

Regardless, Mr. Obama stuck with the idea that America was too weak at home and too reviled globally to lead the world. Not so his former vice president. Early on in his White House stint, Mr. Biden said in a speech to an adoring crowd at the United Nations General Assembly that “America is back.” 

Then came the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Taliban’s current reversal of all that was achieved while America was in the country makes a joke of Mr. Biden’s early vow to base his foreign policy on the promotion of human rights. 

Mr. Biden’s kowtowing to the Iranian mullahs in the hope of reviving the ineffective 2015 nuclear deal ended in disaster as well. Tehran now sells arms to Russia, and even the Islamic Republic’s most enthusiastic Washington advocates can no longer turn a blind eye to the bloodbath on Iranian streets since revolutionary protests began. 

Mr. Biden has always been an indecisive politician. He stood alone in opposing the killing of Osama bin Laden, which was the most successful foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration. Similarly, his initial response to President Putin’s instigation of a European crisis betrayed weakness: Mr. Biden said he’d let slide a “small incursion” into Ukraine. 

As an incursion grew into a full-scale war, though, Mr. Biden became more decisive. He urged hesitant Europeans to back President Zelensky’s courageous Ukraine stance, and America became Kyiv’s largest, by far, supplier of aid and arms.

While navel-gazers in both parties criticized his commitment to a European war, Mr. Biden united a congressional majority behind the idea that America must lead in opposing a dictator’s naked aggression. 

Mr. Biden’s emerging doctrine was spelled out in a national security strategy paper issued by the White House in October, after several delays. Far from the clarity of President Reagan’s “shiny city on a hill,” the paper is a collection of empty pieties and self-congratulating grandstand typical of Mr. Biden’s long career.

Yet, it got one thing right: “Around the world, the need for American leadership is as great as it has ever been,” the paper declared. “No nation is better positioned to lead with strength and purpose than the United States of America.”

The chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal and the current mayhem at the southern border lead many here and abroad to worry about America’s competence and ability to lead. In the coming year Mr. Biden, who at least rhetorically aspires to lead from the front, has a chance to prove them wrong. Is he up to it?