8 Times Biden Was Wrong About Foreign Policy Issues
Joseph R. Biden, Jr., was first elected to the US Senate in 1972, the year Richard Nixon won his second term as president. Over the subsequent half century, he adopted many public, and often paradoxical, personas, ranging from an apologist for Dixiecrat segregation to a purportedly lifelong civil rights crusader. But he has been remarkably consistent in one respect: he has been wrong on every major foreign policy issue he confronted, from Vietnam, Cambodia, and China to Afghanistan and Russia.
1. “No Obligation”
“Biden’s initial foray into foreign policy as a thirty-year-old senator ominously foreshadowed the crisis that would unfold under his watch five decades later. In April 1975, the South Vietnamese government was collapsing under a sustained offensive by communist forces from the North. Only a few thousand US soldiers remained in the country, and President Gerald Ford ordered a massive rescue effort to save thousands of South Vietnamese who had helped the United States during the war. Ford believed that the United States had a moral obligation to honor its commitment to its South Vietnamese allies, who ‘had been very loyal to the United States’ until the bitter end. It was a foreign policy imperative as well: if the United States’ allies were to trust US leadership in the future, our government needed to keep its word.
Biden, a foreign policy novice, disdained Ford’s moral concerns and dismissed the potential damage to the United States’ relationships with her allies. Too late to play a prominent role in the antiwar movement, he made his mark by becoming the Senate’s most strident opponent of US assistance to South Vietnamese refugees.”
2. A Blind Apologist
“Vietnam was Biden’s first foreign policy failure, but it was hardly his last. In 1979, the future commander in chief visited China, beginning a decades-long campaign of arguing that the totalitarian nation’s rise would be a plus for the United States.6 Over the next forty years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) showed little interest in cooperation and outright hostility to any notions of freedom and self-governance.Ten years after Biden’s visit to China, the CCP massacred thousands of pro-democracy protestors in Tiananmen Square. But his conviction was as unshakable as it was unfounded.
In a press conference with Chinese state media in Shanghai in 2000, Biden declared that ‘China is not our enemy’ and there was “nothing inevitable about China and the United States not being as cooperative as other nations.’ As vice president, he lavished praise on China during a state visit in August 2011: ‘Let me be clear: I believed in 1979 and said so then, and I believe now, that a rising China is a positive development not only for the people of China but for the United States and the world as a whole.'”
3. Blundering Along: “I’m Groping Here.”
“Biden’s response to the 9/11 terror attacks presaged his reaction to the fiasco in Kabul twenty years later. In both instances, his first instinct was to lie about his own foresight and to project blame outwards. Hours after the World Trade Center collapsed, he falsely (and shamelessly) claimed to ABC News that he’d predicted the attacks the day before. Less than a month later, the future president launched into a rambling ‘stream-of-consciousness monologue’ in a meeting with Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffers before finally conceding, ‘I’m groping here . . . but it seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran.’ He apparently believed that the unsolicited payment to the Middle East’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism would buy the United States some “goodwill” in the Muslim world. The 9/11 Commission later concluded that the Iranian regime had facilitated the travel of several 9/11 hijackers and was protecting al-Qaeda leaders. Iran’s alliance with the al-Qaeda leadership continues to this day.”
4. “The Military Doesn’t F*** Around with Me”
“[Biden] has consistently voiced distrust of military leaders. Ahead of a key meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff early in Barack Obama’s presidency, Biden warned the new commander in chief, ‘You’ve gotta stand up to these guys, because if you don’t, they’re going to treat you like you’re their puppy for the next three years.’ Obama coolly replied, ‘You know, Joe, it’d be fun to let you be president for just five minutes to see how you’d handle it.’ Biden told others in private in 2009 that ‘the military doesn’t f*** around with me.'”
5. “F*** That”
“In hindsight, Biden’s fateful decision to break faith with tens of thousands of Afghan interpreters…was predictable. According to Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Biden insisted, as far back as 2010, that the United States needed to leave Afghanistan the same way it did in Vietnam. When Holbrooke responded to Biden with concern for the plight of women under a Taliban regime, ‘Biden erupted,’ Holbrooke wrote. Visibly angry and almost rising up from his chair, Biden said, ‘I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights. It just won’t work. That’s not what they’re there for.’ Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015, figured prominently in Biden’s withdrawal decision as president. Biden’s refusal to keep the United States’ promises to foreign allies was deliberate—and emotion driven.”
6. Russia Reset
“Biden’s ineptitude in foreign matters was not restricted to the Middle East and Asia; it extended to Russia, too. In 2010, FBI director Robert Mueller informed the White House that the bureau had identified four Russian ‘spy couples’ living in the United States and asked permission to arrest them. Vice President Biden forcefully opposed the idea, arguing that ‘our national security interest balance tips heavily to not creating a flap’ with the Russians. Biden was speedily overruled. The Russian sleeper agents were arrested and sent back to Russia in a prisoner exchange.”
7. Rewriting History: From “Don’t Go” to “Go”
“‘I said, among—with others, we’d follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell if need be,’ President Biden boasted in April 2021 as he announced his disastrous withdrawal. ‘That’s exactly what we did, and we got him.’ Except that was not what had happened, and Biden had admitted it nine years earlier.
At a House Democratic Party retreat in January 2012, Biden had said that when Obama had been making his decision about whether to authorize Operation Neptune Spear, he had told the assembled advisers, ‘We owe the man a direct answer. . . . Mr. President, my suggestion is: Don’t go.’ By 2015, Biden had fully reconstructed his account of the events, changing his advice from ‘Don’t go’ to ‘Go.'”
8. Dead Wrong on Iraq
“As vice president, Biden spearheaded the Obama administration’s Iraq policy. He confidently predicted in 2010 not only that Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose reelection he had supported, would extend the status of forces agreement but also that Iraq would be ‘one of the great achievements of this administration.’ Both predictions were dead wrong. The agreement with Iraq didn’t materialize, and Obama pulled all US troops out of the country the following year. ISIS swiftly capitalized on the power vacuum and seized control of large swaths of Iraq and Syria.”
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