At the latest Democratic debate, Joe Biden claimed a vast array of foreign policy accomplishments in an attempt to make the case that his foreign policy experience made him the best prepared candidate to be commander in chief. But all he did was remind viewers that he has an extensive history of getting it wrong.
Don’t just take it from us. In his 2014 memoir, Duty, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates famously shared his view that Biden, then the vice president and previously chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had been wrong about “nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
This amusing fact reared its head again as President Trump celebrated what may prove to be the greatest foreign policy triumph of his administration.
Early on Jan. 7, Biden was savaging Trump as “dangerously incompetent” for the strike that had killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps terrorist leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani a few days earlier. Biden claimed that Trump was close to starting an “endless war in the Middle East” and that “this outcome of strategic setbacks, heightened threats, chants of ‘Death to America’ once more echoing across the Middle East, [and] Iran and its allies vowing revenge — this was avoidable.”
Of course, literally every part of Biden’s statement was wrong. Iranians loyal to the current regime have been chanting “Death to America” for decades and were, in fact, doing so the very day Iran signed the nuclear agreement with Biden and his old boss, President Barack Obama. Much more importantly, as Biden spoke, the Iranians were just hours away from launching a toothless, face-saving retaliatory attack that demonstrated their lack of resolve and their aversion to conflict. For the sake of domestic political theater, the ayatollah and his minions launched more than a dozen missiles that exploded harmlessly at and around a base that had been cleared two hours earlier.
Political scientist Ian Bremmer, certainly no fan of Trump, was unequivocal in describing what a coup this was for Trump. “Literally, the United States has killed the head of Iran’s military in the Cabinet, and the response has been, you know, virtually nothing.”
Trump, aware of his victory, responded the following morning not with the bluster or intemperance often associated with his personality, but with a brilliant and disciplined speech calculated to de-escalate the situation and pave the way to a new nuclear agreement. He may or may not get one. But either way, Biden was wrong — as usual.
This is the man who once tried to dissuade Obama from his operation against terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden; who supported the Iraq War and said in 2003, “I voted to go into Iraq, and I’d vote to do it again”; and who vocally opposed President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup and the Strategic Defense Initiative, which helped bring down the Soviet Union.
At the last debate, Biden claimed he had atoned for his Iraq War vote by spearheading Obama’s 2011-2012 withdrawal from Iraq. But that withdrawal was a disaster, and it led to the rise of the Islamic State. Biden famously boasted at the time, “I’ll bet you my vice presidency [Prime Minister Nouri al] Maliki will extend the [Status of Forces Agreement]” with Iraq to maintain a military presence in the country. Lucky for him, no one took the bet, because Biden failed in his negotiations. Even if the entire thing wasn’t his fault, it was a consequential failure. The subsequent hasty withdrawal from Iraq led directly to the rise of ISIS.
Gates also points to Biden as a chief advocate of the Obama administration’s controversial dependence upon drone strikes and Special Forces raids as a substitute for a broader counterterrorism policy. This is controversial as a question of human rights, given that American citizens were targeted without trial and many civilians were killed. It also raises doubts about Biden’s sincerity in condemning the strike on Soleimani. Where were these humanitarian instincts during the Obama administration?
And then, of course, there is the Iran nuclear deal. Biden defends the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. In excluding from negotiations Iran’s terrorist paramilitary activity in the region and its appalling human rights record, the abandoned deal was chiefly interesting in that it preemptively treated Iran as a nuclear power in negotiations before it even had a bomb.
Thankfully, those currently in power have consistently ignored Biden. As a result, instead of living off the fat of sanctions relief, Tehran now finds itself much chastened for its many provocations. Its militiamen will surely look over their shoulders next time they arrive in foreign countries such as Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen to conduct their terrorist operations.
The theocratic regime is even under fire for the malicious incompetence it showed in shooting down a civilian passenger airliner. Trump has forced it to de-escalate without taking the meaningful “revenge” that Biden wrongly (again) predicted, and we might well be on the way to a real nuclear deal that, unlike the one Biden supported, makes meaningful demands of the ayatollah.
