Members of US President Joe Biden ’s diplomatic team have launched an effort to burnish their checkered record at the administration’s one-year mark. The basic message during a flurry of public events involving Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield was that the administration was dealt a tough hand by former president Donald Trump and has accomplished more than it receives credit for. “You ask about failures. I’ve learned over 35 years in the Foreign Service having done [performance reviews] and being asked by my bosses to tell them my weaknesses. That is not for me to tell you our failings,” Thomas-Greenfield said on Thursday, one year after Biden’s inauguration. “But again, I think we’ve made tremendous strides in spite of all the challenges that we were confronted with when President Biden took over on January 20.” The administration drew on the cabinet members as criticism mounted that it has fallen short on messaging, if not execution. Blinken gave a major foreign policy speech in Berlin on Thursday, Biden gave a rare, two-hour press conference on Wednesday and Thomas-Greenfield made three appearances in 48 hours addressing a news organisation, a think tank and the business community. This comes as the outlook is increasingly complex for an administration that vowed to bring experience, competence and well-conceived policy amid a series of setbacks. In an indignity for a president who desperately wanted to distinguish his tenure from the mercurial, disorganised style of his predecessor, Biden’s job approval rating, at 35 per cent in a recent Quinnipiac poll, ties him with his predecessor for the lowest in some seven decades at the end of the president’s first 12 months. “The attempt is to try and portray the last year as being more successful than perhaps it was, having multiple people saying the same thing, trying to create an echo effect and dominate the news cycle away from the discouraging results,” said Brett Bruen, a former White House head of global engagement who is currently working in international crisis management. ‘I do not regret my decision’: Biden defends US exit from Afghanistan The administration argues that it has accomplished more in a year than four years under Trump, including US$1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package and a US$1.2 trillion infrastructure measure, a sharp drop to 3.9 per cent in the employment rate, with three-quarters of American adults fully vaccinated. Biden has also faced tough opposition in an evenly divided Senate, a very slim majority in the House of Representatives and a Supreme Court that has struck down his Covid-19 vaccine mandates for government employees. And he has worked to re-engage with the world, repair ties with allies, rejoin the World Health Organization, shore up ties with Nato and restart nuclear talks with Iran, in the wake of Trump’s America First policies. Indeed, Biden’s legacy could be significantly better than his popularity at the one-year mark suggests, some said. “Americans are impatient. The expectations they have are that you can just flip a switch, the supply chain will be fixed, Covid over, inflation done,” said Richard Levick, who heads the public relations firm Levick. “I think history is going to be charitable to this president.” That said, most Americans see the glass as half empty, tired of two years living with the pandemic and facing mounting inflation as supply chains from China contort. “For all this progress, I know there’s a lot of frustration and fatigue in this country,” Biden told reporters, highlighting Covid-19. “While it’s cause for concern, it’s not cause for panic. We’ve been doing everything we can, learning and adapting as fast as we can, and preparing for a future beyond the pandemic.” Last spring, Biden signalled a pivot to Asia, focusing attention and resources away from Europe and the Middle East to Asia. This has been delayed as crises elsewhere continue to demand attention, most immediately amid fears that Russian will invade Ukraine as it masses troops on the border. “These are difficult issues we’re facing,” Blinken said on Thursday. “The United States and our allies will continue to stand with Ukraine and to stand ready to meet Russia on either path.” The administration said on Thursday that it did not know whether Beijing was conferring with Moscow over the Ukraine crisis. But China has always made clear its support for sovereignty and not interfering in other nation’s affairs, and a Russian invasion would certainly demonstrate a lack of respect for sovereignty. Ukraine bristles at Biden remarks on Russian invasion: ‘No minor incursions’ “I’m hoping they’re playing a constructive role,” Thomas-Greenfield told the US Chamber of Commerce. “So my expectation is that China is quietly having conversations with Russia to discourage Russia from making this mistake.” On other fronts, Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has fed a storyline of a leader who had the right idea – pulling the US out of an “endless war” – but fell short on execution. Some analysts suggested the pullout could dent confidence among allies such as Taiwan over the depth of US commitments. The administration’s China policy – which it sought to distinguish from its predecessor’s – has retained many of Trump’s priorities. While there is less public sniping and chest-thumping than witnessed during the Trump years, bilateral relations remain in the deep freeze and tensions over Taiwan are acute. Punitive trade sanctions, which many economists say have hurt the US as much as China, remain in place with Beijing failing to live up to its commitments under the phase one agreement. As of November, China had purchased only about 60 per cent of what it promised to buy last year, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. That said, Biden has made progress rallying allies in a collective bid to counter China’s aggressiveness and has engineered a new defence pact with Australian and Britain expected to position more US-designed nuclear submarines in the Indo-Pacific flying the Australian flag. “I would give the administration stronger marks on how they’ve handled China,” said Bruen. “In some ways, China has become a bright spot for the administration’s foreign policy, achieving what they haven’t done elsewhere.” The administration is also grappling with ballistic missile launches by North Korea and nuclear talks with Iran that are going nowhere fast. Bruett, who worked with many current administration officials while at the State Department during Barack Obama’s presidency, said the Biden team needs to better reflect a changing nation. “America’s word is not what it used to be, it doesn’t reverberate and send shivers down the spines of adversaries and warm the cockles of our allies. “They continue to make a whole lot of assumptions on how things are going to happen, how things will go down, that just doesn’t reflect the reality of the world today.”