Biden’s Foreign Policy in Foreign Policy
Thanks to a weekend of booze and baseball and emotional nonsense I’d rather not go into here, I’m still playing catch up on Biden. FP’s Passport blog — via a link from Ness this morning — has a really good primer on Joe Biden’s ever-evolving foreign policy views. Yay conditional liberal internationalism:
But as much as he likes to talk, Biden’s actually a pretty nuanced foreign-policy thinker. He doesn’t have strong ideological views, so he’s hard to pigeonhole. Looking over his statements and policies over the years, I’d say he hews to a pragmatic form of liberal internationalism backed by American power. I think he takes his responsibilities very seriously.
He uses the term “national interests” frequently, but he’s not quite a Scowcroftian realist — as his push for action in the Balkans and Sudan demonstrates. Nor is he quite a “liberal hawk,” either. He has little patience for sweeping rhetoric about how the United States is bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq, and he doesn’t (unlike certain other Democratic senators who were passed over for veep) default to the hawkish position on national security just for the sake of sounding “tough”. He believes that some situations call for toughness (Sudan) while others call for engagement (Iran). He understands both the need for and the limits of multilateral institutions, and he doesn’t see multilateralism as an end in itself, unlike some in his party.
That said, Biden doesn’t bat 100 percent. He went ahead and supported the Iraq war despite warning that President Bush was underestimating the risks (he now says he didn’t realize Bush would be so incompetent and that he thought Saddam could be deposed by other means). He called the surge “a tragic mistake” in February 2007 while John McCain has backing it wholeheartedly.
But he has gotten lots of other issues right, in my view: He has been calling for years for more resources in Afghanistan, for a more coherent U.S. relationship with Russia, for engagement with Iran, for a broader U.S. strategy toward Pakistan, and so on.
Like the writer says, you’re not going to agree with Biden every time down the floor. But he does, at the very least, seem intelluctually fascinated and genuinely thoughtful, and he doesn’t want to meekly play defense to the right wing on foreign policy. Nor does he want to dodge the question. He wants to win the argument on the merits. Ergo, yay for Biden.
