Biden’s interconnected foreign policy disasters show his weak leadership puts Americans at risk
How the Obama Administration and Vice President Biden were able to sell the president’s foreign policy vision, but his own lack of experience and judgment make it less clear that this is a plan rooted in America’s interests and strengths.
Biden, an heir to a foreign policy legacy forged by his Vietnam-era predecessor, was a reluctant president, and his foreign policy approach—which, for the most part, has been largely left to his successor—seems to have been influenced by an overbearing mother, a close family friend and a former Democratic Party primary rival. He has tried to compensate for some of these weaknesses by being a quick fix, even in areas that are most important to the U.S. government and national security.
The vice president’s foreign policy experience is almost entirely limited to a single stint in the Senate—between 2009 and 2013—during which he was an outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s Iraq war, in which he was part of a bipartisan effort to end it. His only other international role came during his time in the Obama Cabinet, when he acted as a liaison between the new administration and a major European power.
His first overseas job was in the U.N. after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in which two of his Senate colleagues were killed. While he was serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee, he lobbied for a U.N. resolution condemning Al Qaeda and its chief sponsors in the war on terror.
In fact, his first overseas trip was not as a senator, but as vice president. He accompanied the president on that trip to meet with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. When he arrived in Russia, Biden made a pitch to the country of $400 million in investment in the energy sector, which was then reeling from the collapse of oil prices. The country rejected it.
Despite his service on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Biden has not been in the military, but his lack of experience and judgment are clear to anyone who knows him. His relationship with the Russian president was based largely on Obama’s relationship with Putin