The Biden Foreign Policy

Joe Biden was wrong on Iraq, though he sought to limit the authorization for use of force. Prior to 9/11 he openly worried about terrorists threats coming from "inside the belly of a plane" instead of the phantom threats from ballistic missiles. He's been in the national spotlight for long enough to have a lot of hits and misses. But on balance, there are a wealth of sources to draw from to understand Joe Biden's conception of foreign policy and how that would impact an Obama Presidency.

One aspect is clear: Biden believes in the forfeiting of national sovereignty in cases of genocide or humanitarian crisis. The obvious question is where you draw the line and who gets to decide such a boundary. If this is simply genocide I would be somewhat inclined to agree, though whether that means direct military intervention is not clear to me. How genocide or humanitarian crisis is determined is more vague. Biden is certainly willing to use force as part of what he called in 2004 "enlightened nationalism," where American interests are protected in the way he describes here:

And the second thing is, so there's kind of a new standard that has emerged that I think is the combination of what I refer to as this enlightened nationalism. That we operated our national interests in every circumstance where we can under the umbrella of the international rules and the international community. But where the damage and danger is irrefutable, we reserve the right to act in our own interest or in the interest of humanity, if we have the capacity. And that is a different standard than existed the first 27 years I was a United States senator.

That is different than the standard and the rationale of our neoconservative friends. They argue the exercise of force is important because we are at the apex of our power and that we are more enlightened than the rest of the world. And when we have the ability to exercise force it allows us to leverage our power in direct proportion to the moral disapprobation of the rest of the world. So if I say, you guys are going to have a hell of a lot more -- if there's ten people in the room and there's a guy out in the hall screaming and he's bothering us and I say we ought to stop that guy, we ought to stop that guy. And everyone says, "Oh no, no this guy's a bad guy, this is gonna cause all these problems and there'll be dadda dadda da," And if I say, I don't care what the hell all of you think and I get up and I go beat the shit out of the guy, and I come back in and sit down. They're all going to look around. When you misbehave, and then I say, "hey man," you're going to go "whoa, whoa, whoa." These are the nine guys that aren't going to be able to constrain him. He doesn't care what anybody else thinks. That's what they mean by leveraging power [...]

These guys really think -- Paul Wolfowitz is an idealist. He really thinks you can impose democracy. We all agree democracy -- if the world, if all the Middle East was a democratic institution, then in fact we and our interests are greatly enhanced because democracies tend not to go to war with democracies. But that's a far cry from being able to impose it.

The Kerry administration will understand, in my view -- I know this from a long time, I know John well. There is a need for you to work very hard to establish the soil under which the seeds of liberal democratic institutions can take root. That means public diplomacy, that means engaged in economic initiatives, that means political interchange, that means everything from student exchange programs to saying if you step across that line I'm going to blow you to kingdom come. There s a mix of those things. These guys don't think that, they think that all this soft power is useless. If you listen and you read Nye's book about soft power, it is ridiculed by these guys.

This lines up with the Times' interpretation of his foreign policy philosophy as one of diplomacy first and intervention last. He doesn't believe in going to war without popular consensus. And his belief in multilateralism and international treaties (like the ABM agreement) is unquestioned. And certainly, he has the proper perspective on the current situation in Iraq, having stepped off of the ill-conceived partition idea and more toward the Obama plan of phased withdrawal:

Biden argued that the costs of our involvement in Iraq have outweighed the benefits and have ironically strengthened the greatest challenge to U.S. interests in the region: Iran. But “the idea that we can wipe out every vestige of Iran’s influence in Iraq is a fantasy,” Biden said. “Even with 160,000 American troops in Iraq, Prime Minister Maliki, our ally in Baghdad, greets Iran’s leader with kisses—Iran is a major regional power and it shares a long border—and a long history—with Iraq. Right now, Iran loves the status quo, with 140,000 Americans troops bogged down and bleeding, caught in a cross fire of intra-Shi’a rivalry and Sunni-Shi’a civil war.”

Biden explained that by “drawing down, we can take away Iran’s ability to wage a proxy war against our troops and force Tehran to concentrate on avoiding turmoil inside Iraq’s borders and instability beyond them.”

But there's certainly a willingness to use force for what he considers the right reasons which is troubling. We hear a lot about the "right war" in Afghanistan and I truly hope that once the campaigning is over, somebody takes a look at that situation as it is and not as everyone wants it to be and decides to figure out the cost-benefit analysis. I believe we are safer when we are engaged with the world. But that is not the same thing as intervening as the world's policeman whenever we see wrongdoing, and we have a ways to go to restore our moral standing to have any credibility to make those decisions.

Overall, this is why I'm glad the ticket is the way it is and not inverted, but it's worrisome that Biden will have such a sympathetic ear on these issues.