Go Figure

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Senator Biden is a difficult man to figure. He is one of the few Democrats to criticize the European Union for its bouts of anti-Americanism. Yet he fell for the theory that France and Germany – two states deeply implicated in the oil-for-food scandal – would have contributed troops and money to rebuild Iraq had they been asked nicely.


Mr. Biden favors unilateral negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, and at the same time has chided Europeans for not supporting Iranian dissidents. Over the summer, when no one in his party seemed to know anything about the Iranian political prisoner Akbar Ganji, the senator released a statement calling for his unconditional release. The Democrat from Delaware calls regime change in Iraq a “war of choice,” but talks as if it were a choice he would make were he president.


Just this week, he told a conference in Washington that America faces two challenges in the new century. “The first is we have to win the struggle between freedom and radical fundamentalism,” he said. “Then the second is we have to keep the world’s most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world’s most dangerous people.”


If that sounds like something President Bush would say, it is no accident. Unlike many Democrats, Mr. Biden shares the administration’s robust vision of American power. His critique of the war and foreign policy is limited to its implementation, not its goals.


In his address to the conference on “Terrorism, Security and America’s Purpose: Towards a More Comprehensive Strategy,” he compared the president’s second inaugural address to the best orations of President Kennedy. He said, “In a world full of liberal democracies we would not only be better off for the people living in those countries, but we’d be better off because liberal democracies tend not to attack each other, abuse the rights of their own people and, in most cases, breed terrorists.”


That is a long way from Senator Kerry, who told the Washington Post last summer that if he were president, the country would focus less on spreading democracy in the Middle East and instead work to heal relations with old allies. It’s also a far cry from the anti-war wing of Mr. Biden’s party, which is content to forget its once-principled opposition to America’s support for Saddam’s regime.


It was significant that Mr. Biden chose to lend his support for the aims of the president before an audience seeking to scale them back. Before Mr. Biden even spoke, his party’s chief financier, George Soros, gave an address suggesting that we should not even be at war with the terrorists. He said, “By using military force, we run the risk of doing the same thing as the terrorists.”


In another session, author Nir Rosen suggested that one of the reasons why the Islamic terrorists hate us is because Americans have not shown sufficient sympathy for Palestinians and see America as “imposing” its political ideology on Iraqis. A former supreme allied NATO commander, Wesley Clark, suggested that America talk with Syria and Iran in an effort to make these enemies of Iraq’s elected government part of the solution in defending it.


The conference was coordinated by Steven Clemons, a former vice president of the New America Foundation, who has for the last two years pursued a campaign against neoconservative influence in the Bush administration and has recently sought to forge at least a policy, if not political, alliance between disaffected Democrats and refugees from the Bush I administration.


Mr. Clemons’s invited speakers this week spoke much about American unilateralism, but little about the failures of the international community to act in the face of genocide in Darfur or the recalcitrance of Saddam. In speech after speech about the war against terrorism, there was hardly any mention of the fact that Iraq has for the first time an elected government that tried in earnest to produce a constitution, however flawed.


Mr. Biden, to be sure, is a Democrat with partisan obligations. Last spring, he led the campaign to derail the nomination of John Bolton because the ambassador may have yelled at some intelligence analysts. In Mr. Biden’s remarks and actions, there is still a lingering belief that, no matter how broken, the international system must be preserved.


But, for Mr. Biden, the preservation of that international system is not an end in itself. In a speech last weekend to European parliamentarians, he suggested a new compact among wealthy democracies to uphold “a duty to protect innocents and a responsibility to prevent terrible acts of destruction.” That is the stuff of Truman and the architects of the current international system, who saw it not only as a way to prevent wars, but as a means to improve the lot of humanity.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use