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Biden’s Weakness on Foreign Policy

One of Biden's most important weaknesses on foreign policy is that he has repeatedly gone along with whatever the prevailing consensus at the time happened to be.
Joe Biden

Spencer Ackerman reviews Joe Biden’s abysmal track record on Iraq. He concludes:

When asked about overthrowing Middle Eastern dictators, he said, “I don’t think we should use force unless it meets certain basic criteria. Is it in the national security interest of the United States, are our interests directly threatened, number one, or our allies? Number two, can we use it efficaciously, will it work? And number three, can it be sustained?”

For someone who has been for decades a pillar of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, Biden’s criteria are notably generic. They are flexible enough that every presidency, including Trump’s, portrays itself as meeting them. It wasn’t so long ago that Biden thought the Iraq war met his tests. It yielded an America far less able to shape the world it wants but unrepentant in its right to do so.

One of Biden’s most important weaknesses on foreign policy is that he has repeatedly gone along with whatever the prevailing consensus at the time happened to be. When it was considered the politically safe and conventional thing to support invasion and regime change in Iraq, that is what Biden did. Biden has acquired a reputation for poor foreign policy judgment in no small part because he has followed the consensus view of the foreign policy establishment more often than not. The former vice president leans on his decades of experience in government and specifically on his foreign policy experience to support his presidential bid, but this is a very shaky foundation on which to build a candidacy.

It was notable that when Biden delivered his first big foreign policy speech as a candidate that he passed over the Iraq war in silence. There isn’t much that Biden can say about the war or his record on Iraq that would reflect very well on him, and so he chooses to ignore it, but he won’t be able to get away with that indefinitely. His vote to authorize the Iraq war remains a liability for him, and he doesn’t know how to overcome it because he still clings to talking points from the mid-2000s that his vote to authorize the war wasn’t actually a vote for war. As incredible as it seems, the mindless Democratic hawkish line of “Bush fooled me” is still the only defense that Biden and his allies can come up with after all these years. What does it say about a presidential candidate that his main defense for one of the worst votes he ever cast is that he was duped by George W. Bush? Nothing good.

Ackerman revisits the arguments that Biden used in the early years of the war, and we can see the dangerous hubris that informed Biden’s support for the war:

Convenient as it is to blame Bush—who, to be clear, bears primary and eternal responsibility for the disaster—Biden embraced the Iraq war for what he portrayed as the result of his foreign policy principles and persisted, most often in error, for the same reasons.

Biden contextualized the war within an assertion that America has the right to enforce its standards of behavior in the name of the international community, even when the international community rejects American intervention.

In practice, this amounts to running roughshod over international law while pretending to be its defender. Assuming that Biden still holds the same assumptions about U.S. power and the U.S. role in the world, his foreign policy judgment can’t be trusted. Biden has built his campaign on nostalgia for the Obama years, but a Biden presidency would be a throwback to an even earlier era of discredited Democratic hawkishness.

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