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'He needed tremendous self-discipline not to react when he saw his superficial boss being endlessly applauded.' (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
It is fitting that the departure of Joseph Biden Jr. was defined by his trademark stubbornness. For weeks, he held out against those within his party who were calling for his immediate withdrawal. But then came the Republican convention in Milwaukee — an occasion dominated by Trump the Survivor, and witnessed by millions who had never before paid attention to such gatherings — and the decision was made for him.
Until then, Biden’s legendary resilience seemed unbreakable. This was, after all, a quality he acquired at the price of intense suffering. By the time Biden appeared as a newly elected senator on the Washington scene in 1973, he had already suffered two life-altering tragedies. First, the rapid downfall of his businessman father from affluence to poverty when Biden was seven years old; and second, the more terrible blow of the accidental death of his wife and one-year-old daughter some 40 days after he was first elected.
Yet still Biden marched on, winning re-election to the Senate every six years until 2008, when he was concurrently elected Vice President with Barack Obama. It was, more than anything, proof of his mastery of “retail politics”, which allowed him to keep different clusters of voters happy. In Biden’s mini-state of Delaware — whose population in 1974 was just over 600,000 when New York State already had close to 20 million — it was not hard for him to win voters one by one, especially since he chose to live in Wilmington, commuting by train to Washington each day. When I first met Biden during his first senatorial term, the legendary political guru and speaker of the house Tip O’Neill was already saying that he would be a Washington personality for decades.
Many things about Biden’s life are well-known, but only future biographers will reveal what he himself rigorously kept secret from the world: that during his eight years as VP, Obama systematically ignored his excellent advice on foreign affairs. Captive to the latest policy clichés of the NGO world, he ignored Biden’s decades of experience as a very active member and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had heard from and interrogated hundreds of expert witnesses, many of them with valuable, first-hand experience in the world beyond Washington.
On Iraq and Afghanistan, by far the most important foreign-policy issues during his eight vice-presidential years, Biden radically disagreed with the strategy that Obama inherited and continued to pursue. Biden insisted that Iran would control Iraq unless its influence was drastically limited by US support for a Sunni regional government in addition to the Kurdish regional government, thereby confining Iran’s influence to a third, Shi’a, regional government.
But Obama preferred the advice of Dr Susan Rice, his national security advisor, Dr Samantha Powers, his ambassador to the UN, and Dr General Petraeus, whose stock of fashionable academic phrases about the world’s conflicts could never compete with the real-world knowledge that Biden had accumulated. As a result, Iran did what it wanted in Iraq. And it still does, largely because a central proponent of Obama’s deluded appeasement policy outlived his presidency: his personal friend Roger Malley, who was foisted on Biden and kept in the White House, until he was finally brought down by a security breach.
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SubscribeMy only point of disagreement with this article (ok, I don’t fully accept the author’s assessment that Harris is a doomed candidate: Republicans underestimate her at their peril), is that the border debacle is all Harris’s fault. Who can doubt that Biden had no interest in controlling the border until a few months before the election when he changed his position for purely political reasons?
Ya. It’s stretch to blame the border on Harris. It was Biden who basically told the world to come on over.
The 2022 election you mean. And who can deny, in good faith, that the Republicans sounded desperate to reform the border situation until Biden offered them more than they demanded, whereupon they started singing a different tune. Also, the border situation was quite terrible under the Trump administration, compared to that of the so-called Deporter-in-Chief: Obama.
Not to suggest that Harris did anything but a dreadful job at the border, both in substantive and political terms. Just some often ignored context.
What exactly did Biden offer Repubs? Not enforcement. Not improved vetting of who was coming in. Not a stop to funding the NGOs that facilitate the trafficking. What then? All Biden did was push for something that would expedite the entry process, not slow it let alone stop it.
If offered significant latitude for enforcement that was not spelled out, nor ever mentioned in the media you permit yourself to consume.
“… horndog…” Now there’s a word I haven’t heard since…
Slick Willie?
you ok hun? – you seem to be super-snarky today.
Quite well. But thanks for your concern sweetheart.
It’s certainly not very worthwhile, for anyone, to wade in a board of this much one sided self-certainty and onesided discontent. Sometimes I still take the bait.
Why didn’t a President Biden depart from the Obama strategy? I’d like an explanation from Edward Luttwak.
Good question.
Because his mind was gone?
Biden‘s own Middle East policy has hardly been a resounding success.
“And it was a most bitter irony that it was Biden, as the newly installed president, who was universally blamed for America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a few months after his inauguration, following the mass surrender of the Afghan army without a fight.”
Of course he was blamed. Irrelevant that he may have advised against prior policy. The facts were as they were when he was in charge of the withdrawal and so his responsibility.
I find it hard to believe that Biden ever really was President. I’m not even American and I could see clear signs of his cognitive difficulties during his 2020 campaign. I suspect that Harris’ failure/refusal to get a grip on the border arose simply out of a desire to appease the young progressives who were running the show in Joe’s absence.
Don’t sell yourself short: You’ve long professed a remarkable ability to diagnose American woes, individual and collective, from a distance.
You were not the only one. I too am an European observer and his cognitive declined seemed plenty obvious to me back in 2020, with frequent gaffes, memory lapses and others. That this wasn’t apparent to anyone with a few brain cells and two open eyes, it is simply astonishing…
Look at footage of Trump from 2005 or earlier. The cognitive decline— while not a sharp as Biden’s—is also unmistakeable.
And Trump—found liable of sexual assault; a documented fraudster, horndog, and fomenter of election obstruction—remains morally unfit for office in a way that does not apply to Biden, or Harris.
Appalling. Biden has undermined Western security with his abject appeasement of the Mullahs. The man revealed himself as an ignorant bigot in his mischevious crass attitude toward Brexit and Ireland. Senility is now excuse for the horror show of Scarper From Kabul and equivocations toward Israel in its fight against Islamo fascism. History will damn him.
And lionize Trump? Your everyday lens and crystal ball both seem smudged.
Walter never mentioned Trump. You did. Obsess much?
Haha! I’ve been on this site a while and noted the prevailing views of frequent commenters such as Walter, and you. The obsessiveness, when present, is far from unidirectional.
Unfortunately, people of common sense prevail here. You have two options:
1. To change the site.
2. To continue to insult (as you hope) people here to satisfy your ego.
PS. This is personal: I spent about 10 years on a football site. If you know what that is (which I’m not sure), it’s almost impossible for a cheap internet troll to insult me.
Have a nice day!
I’m far from cheap and I rarely troll. I tend to simply push back against some of the most popular diatribes. The fact that you think a post that concludes: “History will damn him” represents any voice of reason or good faith argument reveals your own fixed bias.
On many topics, especially Israel, you are among the most rabidly far-Right commenters here. A majority of outspoken commenters here share some version of your extreme perspective. But not all, and I belong to the broad sociopolitical center that is shouted down more and more often here. You can’t silence dissent. If that ruins your (un)herded safe space, go to a more extreme and one sided website.
Ah, Edward. Ever the Mideast Hawk, belittling a real general and elevating an otherwise exemplary character like President Biden in the one area where he was most self-evidently flawed. A man ossified within and fixated by the Cold War.
Egregious gas-lighting from the lamentable Luttwak.
““Obama systematically ignored his excellent advice on foreign affairs.”
Even Biden’s colleague in the Obama Cabinet, Secretary of Defence Gates, wrote in his autobiography that Biden had been wrong on every foreign policy position in the past 45 years.
Its easy to point to Biden’s idiocy in Afghanistan and draw a straight line from there to his January 2022 comment that the US might not interven in the Ukraine if Putin’s invasion wasn’t too big to see the track record if failure that has cost tens of thousands of lives.
This column goes beyond simply being implausible, its a disgraceful attempt to rewrite the truth.
His own name?
Well sometimes
Edward Luttwak’s articles are like letters to Santa from Israel.
Biden’s pick of Harris for VP was shrewd impeachment insurance. Harris is deeply unpopular in the country. That Biden has been forced out shows how desperate things are.
Harris had better make sure her security team is good, because the Dems know she will harm the party re down-ballot offices. Look for a surprise substitution.
That Harris is a remarkably strategic politician shouldn’t be overlooked:
By all means, let’s overlook how she’s been the border czar and Joey’s point person on Ukraine. How have those worked out? Let’s also not forget that Dem voters summarily rejected her in 2020 before she was anointed as VP for reasons only DEI can explain. And let’s further ignore how the Dem machine is resurrecting Hillary’s “I’m with her” slogan, as if the creative minds on the left cannot be bothered to waste intellectual and creative capital on a half-wit like Kamala.
Brace and pace yourself. You’re only going to get angrier in the coming weeks.
Is the left going to try and take Trump out again?
The Left is not some unified front and they don’t control what some lost kid who was a registered Republican did.
I’m just referring to how how well Harris will do, rising above expectations. And how that will enrage your spirit animal, Trump.
Harris run for the nomination in 2020 had more flips than a Simone Biles gymnastics routine. It was impossible to tell what she was for other than abortion and a desire to be president.
True enough. But people change, just look at JD Vance—and Trump (who donated his to Harris’s AG campaigns in 2011 and 2013).
2020 was a severe “gotcha!”, anti-law enforcement, woke climate among Democrats and, to her discredit, Harris tried to do that dance.
Perhaps you can help me locate Trump’s moral or ideological core.
A belief in the American people and a realisation that manufacturing must return to the USA and an understanding of the threat from China. Napoleon realised the potential threat of China. American leaders who have encouraged the movement of manufacturing to China since the mid 1990s, a communist country which has killed 70M of it’s own people, who had one of it’s generals say ” We can lose 50M in a war and win “, is criminal negligence.
Allowing mass immigration undermines the wages of many Americans in the construction industry, especially along the border. The reduction in the numbers of well paid manual work restricts upward mobility. Encouraging people to be saddled with debt to obtain useless degrees has recreated debt bondage. Bismarcks policy of ” Blood and Iron ” is relevant to any country wishing to become and remain strong.
Trump appears to be the only politician in the Western World who understands that advanced countries need cheap energy and well paid manufacturing and construction jobs. Promoting Shale oil and gas would keep the cost of oil down which would have prevented Russia, Iran and Islamic terrorists obtaining funds to undertake acts of violence agains the West. The fact that Labor, Democrat and many Conservatives do not is mind boggling.
JFK slept with many women when married ; what was important that he understood the threat of communism and acted accordingly.
Luttwak is a zionist. He sees everything through the zionist lens. So no policy that serves the interests of the zionists is going to be worth pursuing, as far as he is concerned.
Good to see someone giving some credit to Mr Biden as VP & P. Yes, Obama was a poor president in foreign relations.
Great article .. thank you for sharing your insight into the heart of America’s leadership ..
Luttwak has the moral compass of a cancer cell.
Biden’s knowledge on Afghanistan has been known for over 170 years.Harris is a product of Democrat city patronage. Both far cries from JF Kennedy.
Has anyone in the Democratic Party made the enemies of the USA scared of the President since JFK ?
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.