About five years ago, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates reached what was then considered a startling conclusion: Joe Biden, who was at that point the vice president, had been wrong about “nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

On Afghanistan, Iraq, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and more, Biden’s influence proved disastrous, Gates alleged in his tell-all, Duty. This was unsettling, in part because former President Barack Obama had selected Biden as his running mate partially because the longtime senator had what he lacked: foreign policy experience. To then hear from your defense secretary, who had stepped down from the Obama administration in 2011, that Biden’s role in the White House helped create a “category five shitstorm”? That surely struck a nerve.