Is Biden a Credible War Leader?

The way we see President Biden’s visits to Ukraine and Poland is as the opening démarche in his campaign for a second term — an effort to position himself as a war president and steal the thunder of any Republican who tries to seize the issue. He did a fine job of it, up to a point, with what we don’t mind saying was his courageous visit to Kyiv and his paean to Poland for its exemplary role as a front-line state in this war.Yet there’s something holding us back from full-throated support for this particular president as a war leader. His record in the three wars of his generation — Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — ranges from weak to disastrous. He was with the Democrats who cut off aid to free Vietnam in its last desperate stand against a communist foe. In Iraq, as Sarah Palin put it in 2008, he waved the “white flag of surrender.” It was Mr. Biden who surrendered Afghanistan.All the more remarkable that at the end of year one of the war in Ukraine, no one, Democrat or Republican, has clearly articulated our war aims — or an exit strategy. Our Benny Avni has marked that point well. While Mr. Biden was striding through Ukraine’s capital with President Zelensky, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council was boasting that Ukraine’s tanks “will be parked on Moscow’s Red Square.”Is that where we’re headed as, at the start of the second year since the Russian invasion, we prepare to send Ukraine our Abrams main battle tanks and Germany its Leopards? Is Mr. Biden up for taking Moscow? Is the Congress? We remember the brio with which we went into Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. We supported all three of those wars — and still do. In every one, though, the Democrats fell away from the fight and sought terms with our enemies.Our own view of Mr. Biden as a war leader is that he’d have done better to forgo the trip to Kyiv and instead go up and see if he can, so to speak, take Capitol Hill. It’s amazing to us that just last month he managed to give the longest State of the Union speech in history. Yet out of the oration’s 9,191 words,* only 243 were devoted to the war in Ukraine. And at no point did he ask for a proper war declaration or grant of war powers.The closest Mr. Biden got to that in his State of the Union speech was to turn to the balcony and invite Ukraine’s ambassador to stand “so we can all take a look at you.” Because, he then said, “we’re going to stand with you as long as it takes.” We hope so, and we get that we’re in only the early stages of this war (early Lend-Lease would be, roughly, the WWII analogy). As a war leader, though, Mr. Biden will be running against his own record.________* Exceeding, according to USA Today, President Clinton’s near-record speech in 1995 by “a single word.”

Is Biden a Credible War Leader?

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