Now that Joe Biden is the Democratic presidential nominee, pundits, foreign policy analysts, and campaign beat reporters will be spending time between now and Nov. 3 deciphering how a hypothetical President Biden views the world, as well as America’s place in it. As is usually the case during campaign season, this crucial storyline will be trivialized into two neat camps. His detractors will label the former vice president as a member of an establishment class that brought us such luminary disasters such as the Iraq War and the 19-year-long war in Afghanistan. Biden’s supporters will try to convince voters that an incoming Biden administration will be calm, thoughtful, and deliberative.
Let no one tell you otherwise: Biden is no dove. His record as a senator is eerily similar to a classic liberal internationalist.
He was one of the first lawmakers out of the gate to press then-President Bill Clinton to not only lift the arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslims, but use air power to pummel the Serbs into negotiations. Biden spent a considerable amount of time in the 1990s speaking to the White House and lambasting Clinton for being passive as Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic deployed Serbian troops to wipe out entire villages. In 1999, when NATO was in the process of debating intervention in Kosovo (again, against Milosevic), Biden was a high-profile senator urging the alliance to drop bombs on Belgrade. And, of course, there was the 2002 Iraq War vote, which Biden voted in favor of in order to send a message to Saddam Hussein that the United States was deadly serious about disarming his supposed weapons of mass destruction. “Ultimately,” Biden said during the Iraq resolution debate, “either those weapons must be dislodged from Iraq, or Saddam must be dislodged from power.” (There were, of course, no weapons.)
Yet, to pigeonhole Biden into the same hawkish camp as Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, John Bolton, or Joe Lieberman would be an unfair simplification. Unlike so many figures in the Beltway who aren’t interested in learning from their mistakes, Biden seems to have found his inner realist over the last decade — at least in some areas.
During the Obama administration’s monthslong internal deliberations about U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Biden was the only senior-level Cabinet officer to push back against deploying tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to the country. Gen. David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen, and the vast majority of President Barack Obama’s national security team supported such a plan. The belief underlying their view was that throwing more American firepower at the faltering war effort would stabilize Afghanistan, provide the Afghan government with space to reform itself politically and address the endemic corruption in its ranks, and demonstrate to the Taliban that negotiating with Kabul was the only way they could salvage some political influence.
Biden saw through all of this and tried to use his personal relationship with Obama to balance out what the generals were selling. Unfortunately, Biden was outnumbered. The surge went ahead — a decision that was, at best, a tactical move to increase the Taliban’s body count. The results over the long-term were dismal. The Afghan security forces remain bloodied and overwhelmed, politics in Kabul are a mess, corruption seeps into all aspects of government, and the Taliban continue to be a major player in at least half of the country.
Then, there was Libya. When Moammar Gadhafi’s forces were bearing down on Benghazi with an anti-government rebellion in their sights, the Obama administration was placed into a dilemma: Should the U.S. form a coalition and intervene with air power despite all the risks and unintended consequences that were attached to such an intervention? Once again, Clinton was a loud proponent for military action. Biden, though, refused to endorse the policy (Others legitimately disagree with this characterization. Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser to Concerned Veterans for America, pointed me to a 2011 article in which Biden told an event in New Hampshire that “NATO got it right.”).
Reminiscing about that period of time in June 2016, Biden said that he was most concerned about what would come after Gadhafi. “My question was, ‘OK, tell me what happens,” the vice president told now-disgraced TV host Charlie Rose. “He’s [Gadhafi] gone. What happens? Doesn’t the country disintegrate? What happens then? Doesn’t it become a place where it becomes a — Petri dish for the growth of extremism? Tell me.”
Fast-forward four years later and today’s Libya looks like a real-life Mad Max hellscape, chalked with mercenaries from Syria, Sudan, and Russia all battling it out for a patch of the North African country’s oil resources. Biden’s remarks turned out to be prescient.
At this stage, nobody can know for sure what a Biden foreign policy would consist of if he wins. There are too many elements we don’t yet have a hold on. The answer will depend in part on the people Biden nominates and appoints to staff his administration and the international environment as it exists in January 2021. There is also a possibility of an unforeseen, earthshaking event upending whatever doctrine he brings into the Oval Office.
But what we can be confident of is that it’s highly unlikely Biden will be the unabashed, unapologetic hawk his critics claim him to be.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
