Biden’s Foreign-Policy Folly

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Thursday, October 15, 2020

 

Early on in his first term as vice president, Joe Biden asked for a private meeting with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates had been appointed to the job by President George W. Bush in the shake-up after the 2006 midterm election, and President Obama kept him on for continuity. Biden had abstained from voting for Gates’s confirmation under Bush, making him one of only five senators who hadn’t voted to confirm him.

 

Besides shoring up Obama’s reputation as a man who could work with longtime moderates in the Democratic Party, Biden’s addition to the ticket was meant to give Obama some extra credibility on foreign policy; Biden had been the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee since 1997. But the White House is different. Gates was serving his eighth president. So Biden solicited his advice on how to play a constructive role as part of the administration’s foreign-policy team.

 

Gates told Biden that there were two models for a vice president. Under Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush had his team attend all relevant national-security meetings and brief him afterward. Bush gave his opinions and advice only to Reagan himself, usually privately. By contrast, Dick Cheney attended most meetings and was a forceful advocate for his own views. Gates said that the Bush approach was more fitting to the dignity of the office and would also protect Biden. Cheney’s approach came with a price; it eventually became obvious to outsiders when Cheney was losing the argument in the administration, and it diminished him. Writing in his memoir of this time, Gates recalls that Biden “listened closely, thanked me, and then did precisely the opposite of what I recommended, following the Cheney model to a T.”

 

Biden would later be diminished by leaks revealing that he had opposed the raid that led to Osama bin Laden’s capture and death. And Gates would teach Biden the hard way; he later confided that he was often uncomfortable sitting next to Biden, given how often they disagreed. Gates would also write in his memoir that Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.”

 

Gates himself wasn’t right about everything, but he was right about Biden. Biden had styled himself a seasoned hand on foreign-policy issues, but his failures in this area are career-defining, in their way. His previous run for president, in 2008, cratered during the primaries, in part because it was shaping up as a foreign-policy election and Joe Biden couldn’t defend his own record. His ascent in the 2020 field was possible only because this year’s election is not about foreign or domestic policy. But make no mistake: Joe Biden has almost infallibly opposed American escalation when it would lead to peace and supported war when it would lead to chaos and disgrace.

 

Biden began his career opposing aid to South Vietnam as the U.S. was withdrawing from that conflict. Biden was on the wrong side of this policy, and it would not be the last time he opposed a strategy that would have enabled a proper exit from a war he had given up on fighting. This grew out of Biden’s overall dovish position in the Cold War. He would go on to propose military-spending cuts so drastic that even Walter Mondale opposed them.

 

Biden voted against Reagan’s defense build-up at every turn. He voted over and over to strip funding from the B-2 bomber project. While Ronald Reagan was encouraging the collapse of the Soviet Union through deft diplomacy and an increase of hard power, Biden was racking up high ratings from the Council for a Livable World, a peace-at-any-price group.

 

It’s not just that Biden is frequently wrong, it’s that he compounds his wrongness on foreign policy with dishonesty and exaggeration — for example, he claimed to be the sole figure responsible for ending genocide in Bosnia. But no­where is this tendency more apparent than in his record on the Iraq War. In a 2019 interview with NPR, he tried to explain his votes that had been supportive of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. He blamed Bush for misleading him. Bush “said he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program,” he explained. “He got them in and before you know it, we had ‘shock and awe.’”

 

Except, Biden had argued since the late 1990s that Hussein would never give up his weapons program peacefully. In hearings before the war, he had openly mocked a weapons in­spector, saying that “as long as Saddam is at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other in­spector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam’s program.” He would go on to say that everyone knew that, in the end, U.S. troops would have to take Saddam out. By 2004, though, he was telling the Council on Foreign Relations, “I never believed they had weapons of mass destruction.”

 

When the mission in Iraq was overwhelmed by chaos, George W. Bush put forward a successful surge strategy aimed at quelling violence and giving America a decent chance of exiting Iraq and leaving behind a functioning government. This was far short of the dream of a democratic domino theory, but it was an acceptable end nonetheless. Biden opposed it.

 

Biden’s plan for solving tensions in Iraq was to federalize Iraq along sectarian lines. At the time it was often mocked as “soft partition.” Of course there are no clear borders that neatly divide Iraq on religious or ethnic lines. Creating devolved ethno-religious governments meant to serve subnational interests would leave potentially millions of Iraqis as second-class citizens and internal exiles, and would inspire exactly the kind of ethnic cleansing that follows a real partition. That a Kurdish statelet would immediately be perceived as a threat to NATO ally Turkey didn’t bother him either. It was foreseeable, too, that an emerging government in the Sunni triangle could destabilize Syria and Turkey, and that a largely Shiite-dominated Baghdad would become a cat’s-paw of Iran. Despite all this, in the end Biden’s plan for Iraq was partially adopted. The only problem is that it was adopted by the Islamic State.

 

Biden also committed himself to the misguided policy of engaging China to liberalize it. During a 2001 trip to Taiwan, he pronounced, “The more they [China] have to lose, the more they are likely to begin to accommodate international norms.” Others have said similar things, of course, but Biden has held onto this delusion long past its sell-by date. Just last year, while commenting on the Trump administration’s trade war with China, Biden mocked the idea that the Chinese government was a threat. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. . . . They’re not bad folks, folks.” Biden’s fantasy about China’s rulers survived even the firsthand experience of watching Chairman Xi break promises made to the Obama administration not to militarize its artificial islands in the South China Sea.

 

In fact, the dynamic between China and the free world has gone entirely the opposite way from what Biden predicted. An authoritarian China can absorb losses by redirecting their harm onto a captive populace, while democratic states accommodate China’s bad behavior to avoid risking minor perturbations on Wall Street and trade actions. Only in the last ten months, after outrage at China’s abuses of Muslims and its subversion of democracy in Hong Kong, did Biden start to talk tough. But that is all it should be seen as: talk.

 

Biden’s current calls to withdraw troops from America’s longest wars should be seen as concessions to public opinion, unlikely to carry over in policy. As vice president, Biden pressed Obama to further enmesh the United States in Syria’s civil war, a conflict that still hasn’t ended. Last year, he criticized Trump’s intention to withdraw U.S. troops from that conflict. While Biden has claimed he wants to keep troops in Syria only to disrupt anti-American terrorists or protect Kurdish fighters, his chief foreign-policy adviser, Antony Blinken, suggested that U.S. troops use their position near Syria’s oil fields to force Bashar al-Assad to step down in a final negotiation to end the civil war. Assad is in his strongest position in Syria in nearly a decade. The pairing of minimal resources with grander ambitions is preposterous. But that doesn’t stop Biden.

 

When talking about foreign-policy ambitions for his presidency, Biden will mention rejoining the Paris climate accord and the Iran deal — the same dead status quo advanced during the Obama administration. Having chided Trump for upsetting NATO members such as Germany by asking for a greater monetary commitment to the alliance, Biden will upset other NATO allies by holding a “global Summit for Democracy” to condemn members such as Poland and Hungary for electing governments that displease the Washington Post.

 

What does he have to say about our relations with China going forward? He’ll pressure the Chinese to stop polluting. On trade, he gives up the idea of bringing back from China manufacturing jobs or strategic engineering capacity. Wealthy holders of intellectual property, however, will get more protection.

 

But mostly, Biden’s plan for foreign policy amounts to regime change at home. The foreign-policy section of his website begins by promising to “restore the Voting Rights Act,” remake our education system, and reform our criminal-justice system. He throws in expanded asylum policies, campaign-finance reform, and “ending the practice of anonymous shell companies,” along with undoing dozens of other small-time Trump-era policies.

 

It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to talk about foreign policy at all — no surprise after a career of opposing successful interventions and supporting disasters. He has consistently facilitated the security and expansion of the authoritarianism he claims to oppose.

 

Attempting to describe his foreign-policy vision, writers at Vox eventually gave up. “It’s possible Biden has other ideas he’s not fully articulating at the moment,” they wrote.

 

God help us if he does.