Joe Biden: Getting Foreign Policy Wrong for 50 Years

In 2014, a former cabinet official from both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations wrote that Joe Biden had "been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."¹  Even though this official likes President Biden as a person and has said President Biden “a man of integrity,” he reaffirmed his statement in an interview in May of 2019. 

And President Biden has continued his string of mistakes and bad decisions since he got into office.  The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster.  President Biden was left with a terrible situation by Donald Trump.  The Trump administration signed what was basically a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020.  While President Biden has said the Trump agreement left him no choice but to go forward with the withdrawal/surrender, that’s not true.  President Biden reversed all kinds of Trump administration decisions.  He could have changed this one, too, but he didn’t want to.  He wanted to get out of Afghanistan, and so we did.  It was the Biden administration that organized, or rather didn’t organize, the withdrawal.  If the withdrawal was a disaster, and if it has damaged the United States’ reputation for reliability and competence abroad, then that was on President Biden and his administration.

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, President Biden came out strongly in support of Ukraine (after we realized Ukraine wasn’t going to just give up).  But while President Biden’s words have been strong, his actions have not.  We have been halting in our delivery of weapons to Ukraine, in terms of both quantity and quality.  When Ukraine has asked for more advanced weapons, the Biden administration’s response has been: no, no, no, okay.  It would take us too long to agree, and then we didn’t deliver it quickly enough.  I understand the Biden administration was worried about Putin’s threats of using nuclear weapons, but what that has resulted in is us giving Ukraine enough weapons to not lose but not enough weapons to win.  Also, President Biden has done such a poor job of explaining to the American people why helping Ukraine is in our national interest that fewer and fewer Americans are supporting aid to Ukraine.  Certainly, Republican politicians bear a lot of blame for this, too (see here), but President Biden hasn’t gotten it right. 

President Biden came into office courting Iran and giving the cold shoulder to Israel (or at least Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) and Saudi Arabia (in the person of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman), none of which has gone well. 

Finally, there is what is possibly President Biden’s biggest failure in foreign policy and national security: Even now, with Putin’s war against Ukraine entering its third year, Iranian proxies attacking us all over the Middle East, the Israel/Hamas war having no end in sight, and tensions increasing in the Far East, the Biden administration has, once again, proposed a decrease in defense spending (after adjusting for inflation) from the year before.  When we need to be building up our inventories of weapons and ammunition, when we need to be rebuilding our industrial base to supply our forces and our allies, the Biden administration is asking for less.

In sum, what we have is, as I said, Joe Biden: getting foreign policy and national security wrong for 50 years.
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¹ Robert Gates wrote this in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (2014).  (See here.)  I don’t mention Secretary Gates’s name above because Secretary Gates likes Joe Biden and I doubt he likes having to say this, but he won’t lie when asked.