When Joe Biden addressed the John F. Kennedy Forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School in Boston last Thursday night, he said that the “international order that we painstakingly built after World War II and defended over the past several decades is literally fraying at the seams right now.” Thanks to some of the remarks included in the vice president’s speech, the Obama administration’s relationships with several countries are also fraying at the seams. Biden placed calls over the weekend to the leaders of both Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to “clarify” remarks that suggested those countries’ complicity with al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Syria.
While Biden’s comments regarding Turkey and the UAE were perhaps the most damaging, the countries of the European Union (EU) cannot have been thrilled with his characterizations of them, either. The vice president took a dig at the relative economic weakness of the EU compared to China, though China did not escape Biden’s taunting either [emphasis added]:
Ladies and gentlemen, raise your hand if you think our main competition is going to come from the EU in the next decade. Put your hands up. (Laughter.) I’m not being facetious here now, I’m being deadly earnest. We want — it is overwhelmingly our interest that the EU grow, and that China grows, because when they don’t grow, we don’t grow as fast. But, ladies and gentlemen, relative terms, we are so well-positioned if we act rationally, if we invest in our people.
Biden also chided Europe for reluctance to take steps against Russian aggression, suggesting that President Obama had to shame the EU into action on economic sanctions [emphasis added]:
It is true they did not want to do that. But again, it was America’s leadership and the President of the United States insisting, oft times almost having to embarrass Europe to stand up and take economic hits to impose costs. And the results have been massive capital flight from Russia, a virtual freeze on foreign direct investment, a ruble at an all-time low against the dollar, and the Russian economy teetering on the brink of recession.
Finally, while Biden enumerated the successes of NATO, even then he appeared to suggest America is pulling more than its share of the weight in the alliance:
So far there is no indication from the White House that the vice president will be expanding his list of apology phone calls to include any European nations.
