Reports have it that Hillary Clinton is considering Joe Biden for secretary of state in her administration. The bench of popular, high profile Democrats isn’t exactly deep these days and Biden has always been particularly interested in foreign policy, so on a superficial level recruiting Biden for the State Department makes sense.
Or it least it does if you’re willing to ignore the fact that Biden’s recent track record on foreign policy is catastrophic. I would encourage you to read this New York Times report on Biden’s efforts early in the Obama administration to create a stable Iraq. Eyebrow-raising incompetence abounds, but the key bit is Biden’s role in negotiating a Status of Forces Agreement that would allow the U.S. to maintain a significant military presence in Iraq:
Suffice to say, a Status of Forces Agreement was not reached, nor did Joe Biden resign from the White House over his failure to negotiate an agreement. Fact checkers nearly had an embolism earlier this year regarding Trump’s overly literal suggestion that Hillary Clinton and the Obama White House were responsible for creating ISIS, but that obscures a truth that most observers agree on: The power vacuum and political instability created by the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq did allow for the flourishing of ISIS and turned the country into an abattoir. There’s no escaping the consequences of Biden’s failure here.
The rest of Biden’s long career in Washington also doesn’t exactly suggest a great deal of foreign policy competence, as I noted in a short profile for THE WEEKLY STANDARD last year:
The only thing that can really be said in favor of Joe Biden as secretary of state is that it’s hard to imagine that even he would be worse than the man currently filling the position. But given the scope and stakes of our current foreign policy challenges, we desperately need someone who knows what they’re doing.
