Joe Biden is a Foreign Policy Expert: Day 27 of 100 Days of Loving Joe Biden

by GoodNewsRoundup

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Monday, Aug. 03, 2020 Monday, Aug. 03, 2020 at 4:03:12am PDT

Joe and Jill Biden smile broadly at an audience. Joe stands behind a podium which bears the Seal of the President of the USA. Jill is a little to his left. Tags jb

Biden has an enormous amount of experience in foreign policy and he is damn good at it

Biden’s Informal Diplomacy Shaped Foreign Relations

To voters unsettled by President Trump’s disruptive approach to the world, Mr. Biden is selling not only his policy prescriptions but also his long track record of befriending, cajoling and sometimes confronting foreign leaders — what he might call the power of his informal diplomatic style. “I’ve dealt with every one of the major world leaders that are out there right now, and they know me. I know them,” he told supporters in December.

Brett McGurk, a former senior State Department official for the campaign against the Islamic State, said Mr. Biden had been an effective diplomat by practicing “strategic empathy.”

There is that empathy again!

How does he do it?

Mr. Biden’s political trademark was a blue-collar Everyman style that seemed more suited for state fairs than state dinners. But from the start of his Washington career, he had prioritized foreign policy

In 1979, a 37-year-old Mr. Biden met with China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, in Beijing, and later recalled the value of seeing firsthand Mr. Deng’s “very real fear of the Soviets.” The same year he visited Moscow for nuclear arms talks with Kremlin officials including the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. After a senior official was evasive about Soviet tank numbers, Mr. Biden offered a vulgar retort that a translator diluted to, “Don’t kid a kidder,” he later wrote.

Biden forges real relationships that make us all safer. For example, when in office Biden knew all the birthdays and grandkids of every foreign leader.

Mr. McGurk, the former envoy to the coalition against the Islamic State, recalled how Mr. Biden constantly asked after the health of the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a cancer scare. The approach made it easier for Mr. Biden to navigate more difficult conversations, said Mr. McGurk, who stayed on into the Trump administration but quit after the president withdrew troops from Syria.

Mr. Ross said that Mr. Biden’s method “builds a trust, and then you can say really hard things when you need to — and not just get a brick wall.”

But don’t let the relationship building lead you to conclude that Biden doesn’t doesn’t have a problem saying what needs to be said. He knows who are enemies are and he is tough as hell with them.

Mr. Biden has recalled, he told Mr. Milosevic: “I think you’re a damn war criminal and you should be tried as one.” (Whether Mr. Biden uttered those exact words has been disputed, although Mr. Rubin, who was present, called the encounter “the most intense grilling I ever saw an American give to a foreign leader.”) He came away convinced that Mr. Milosevic was “evil,” he later wrote, and that the United States should bomb Serbian forces.

He often recalls a 2009 meeting in Moscow with Vladimir V. Putin, then serving as prime minister, in which Mr. Biden says he placed a hand on the Russian’s leader’s shoulder and said: “Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes. I don’t think you have a soul.” Or the 2004 meeting in Libya with the dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi (“the strangest bird I think I’ve dealt with,” he recalls today), whom he called a “terrorist” to his face.

Mr. Haqqani, the Pakistani diplomat, recalled a 2009 meeting in Islamabad during which Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, suggested that the United States would abandon Afghanistan because its people were afraid to fight there. The comment sent Mr. Biden “into a moderate rage,” Mr. Haqqani said. “Don’t you think we are ever frightened!” he snapped. Mr. Zardari was impressed, but not offended, according to Mr. Haqqani.

“He can be blunt without being rude, which in diplomacy is a great asset,” said Mr. Haqqani, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

and this story

He mentions a famous world leader. He won't say who, but it could have been any number of leaders from any number of countries across the globe—Karzai, Medvedev, Netanyahu—a moment, one of a million moments in a political career spanning four decades. "We were trying to get a world leader to refrain from doing something. He came to Washington, and it was a big deal. Most people thought that if he had done what he was going to do, it would have caused a war to break out." Send in Joe Biden. Arm around the world leader. Talk to the world leader. Soft voice, a few easy laughs, show some Joe Biden empathy to the world leader. "And I convinced him to forgo it and do something else," he says. No big deal. It's what he does. Save a country or two from some miserable war. To the extent that all politics is personal, Joe Biden is the historic monument.

Joe Biden has a smart, emphatic, moral, and ethical view of foreign relations. He will build bonds but also listen to the people around him. Biden has the expertise, personality, and knowledge to lead our relationship with the world. American interests will always be first with Joe. Human rights will always matter to Joe.