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]: