What Biden didn't say in his State of the Union

WASHINGTON — It is a truism of politics that what goes unsaid is often just as newsworthy as what officials deem worth mentioning. President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night was no exception.

Several notable omissions — as well as topics that seemed to receive only a passing mention — offer a hint at how the president may approach his expected run for reelection.

1. Afghanistan

When he withdrew American forces from Afghanistan, Biden said the choice before him was “between leaving or escalating” a war begun by George W. Bush two decades ago to root out al-Qaida terrorists responsible for the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Leaving, he argued, was necessary to save American lives and finally allow Afghans to govern their own nation.

But the August 2021 withdrawal was widely seen as chaotic and poorly planned; a bombing at Kabul Airport killed 13 American service members, a brutal punctuation to a conflict that had already taken 2,500 American lives, as well as the lives of 47,000 Afghan civilians.

And the speed with which the Taliban assumed power once more was a disheartening coda to what was supposed to be an experiment in nation building in a country that had for so long known only war.

Neither Biden nor his top advisers could explain why the withdrawal seemed so haphazard or why the Taliban were allowed to take power without any resistance from political leaders in Kabul whom the Americans thought they could trust with the nation’s custodianship. Uninterested in finding out what the Taliban had in store, Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country.

After no more than a few days of questions from reporters and foreign policy experts, Biden and his top deputies simply stopped trying to account for what had gone wrong — and how they could help keep Afghanistan from descending into anarchy or extremism.

The withdrawal also marked the beginning of a rough political stretch for Biden, who continued to face questions about that withdrawal but also encountered a determined resistance to his domestic agenda.

There were new waves of the coronavirus too, requiring continued focus on the pandemic.

By the second month of 2022, the world was focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Afghanistan became a background concern, even though Taliban rule had become increasingly — and predictably — repressive toward women.

Famine, meanwhile, has become so pronounced that helpless parents put desperately hungry children to sleep by sedating them with medication.

2. Abortion

Biden said the word — “abortion” — which, as a general practice, he does not like to do. But he did not say it much, and he did not say it in the opening minutes of the speech, when public focus tends to peak.

To be sure, his stance remains unambiguous: “Make no mistake, if Congress passes a national abortion ban, I will veto it,” he said. He also criticized Republican governors who had passed abortion bans in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court decision that did away with the federal protections for the procedure that had stemmed from Roe v. Wade.

But there is also a limit — and a rather unforgiving one, at that — to what the president can do on his own when it comes to reproductive rights. That has frustrated abortion rights activists, while also providing Democrats with a base-motivating opportunity.

In the run-up to last year’s congressional midterms, Biden made clear that if Americans wanted abortion rights protected, they needed to vote against Republicans who wanted to impose ever stricter bans, and instead elect Democrats who would protect reproductive rights and appoint judges who would do the same.

That approach seemed to work, especially when it came to the Senate, with Republican candidates facing questions about whether they would outlaw the procedure. Similar questions are already hounding potential Republican presidential candidates, who must negotiate between a conservative movement that wants abortion to be illegal in all circumstances and moderates who generally want abortion to remain legal, especially if the pregnancy is the result of rape or if the mother’s health is at risk.

Though he sparred with Republicans on Social Security and Medicare on Tuesday night, abortion did not turn out to be a major flashpoint in the president's speech.

Without forcing the issue — and thereby highlighting his own relative powerlessness — Biden seems to be laying the groundwork for a reelection argument that highlights his ideological support for reproductive rights while pointing out that it is voters who will ultimately decide if, and how, those rights are delineated.

3. Returning to the office

In last year's State of the Union, Biden called on workers to return to the office, arguing that doing so would help revitalize American cities.

“It’s time for America to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again with people,” he said in 2022. “People working from home can feel safe and begin to return to their offices.”

But with the remote-work culture war as intense as ever, Biden simply put the issue aside, not mentioning it a single time in his address on Tuesday.

Overall, he mentioned the coronavirus markedly less than he did last year. Criticized for declaring the pandemic “over” last fall, Biden appears to have concluded that when it comes to matters like masking, vaccines and other measures, both elected officials and private citizens have made decisions from which they can no longer be swayed.

The controversy over remote work is not one that can be easily resolved, given that it sits at the nexus of difficult questions about economic opportunity, technological access, urban policy, government support for working parents, demographic change and transportation.

And the controversy isn’t going away, especially not in Washington, where Biden presides over an enormous federal bureaucracy that has largely continued to work from home.

That has frustrated Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, who used her third inaugural address last month to ask Biden to bring federal workers back to offices, thus helping to presumably revive a moribund downtown. The Biden administration has quietly opposed Bowser’s request.

The president’s silence regarding office work on Tuesday night could also not have been encouraging to the mayor.

4. The balloon

The Chinese surveillance balloon that floated over the United States last week before being blasted out of the sky by the U.S. military has become something of a celebrity, starring in the cold open of “Saturday Night Live.”

The massive balloon loomed large in headlines and on social media, where it became a source of humor, consternation and, inevitably, political recrimination.

Republicans condemned Biden for not destroying the device more quickly, though defense officials downplayed it as a potential threat while also pointing out that similar balloons had entered U.S. airspace during the Trump administration.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., even brought a white balloon to the Capitol to draw attention to the debate.

But when it came to the State of the Union address, the balloon was snubbed, with exactly zero direct mentions from the president.

Biden did allude to the balloon, but only indirectly. “As we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country,” he said. “And we did.”

5. Israel

Nobody expected Biden to put forward a plan for peace with the Middle East — and he didn’t surprise Americans by offering one on Tuesday.

It was an expected omission, for reasons of both domestic political realities and geopolitical dynamics.

With war continuing to rage in Ukraine and tensions with China deepening, getting involved in one of the most intractable conflicts in the world — between Israel and the stateless Palestinian people — would require more diplomatic resources and political energies than a single president could muster.

Israel was not mentioned by Biden a single time in Tuesday’s address, but tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nationalist government and militant new Palestinian groups are only deepening. And the administration may be forced to address the crisis in the near future, given that the United States is Israel’s closest ally, while the Palestinians’ political and humanitarian plight is also a concern.

Biden’s onetime boss, Barack Obama, reassured critics of his own Middle East policy by using his 2014 State of the Union address to call Israel “a Jewish state that knows America will always be at their side.” But he made no significant breakthroughs there during his eight-year presidency.

Former President Donald Trump helped broker the Abraham Accords, a series of treaties between Israel and previously hostile Arab neighbors. He also introduced a Middle East plan ahead of his final State of the Union address. “We must be determined and creative in order to stabilize the region and give millions of young people the chance to realize a better future,” he told members of Congress.

Not long after that, the coronavirus shut down much of the United States — and the rest of the world. Trump’s peace plan was shelved. Biden is unlikely to introduce one of his own in 2023.