Tom Cotton: Biden’s Foreign Policy Flip Flops Fail America

You’ve probably heard politicians with muscular and aggressive foreign-policy views called “hawks” and those with timid or hesitant views called “doves.” As a third avian category, I would add the “ostriches,” who stick their heads in the sand to ignore gathering threats. Most politicians belong to one of these flocks. But not Joe Biden. 

Even by the low standards of a politician, Joe Biden has changed positions dramatically and frequently. Elected to the Senate in 1972, in his own words, “as a 29-year-old kid against the war in Vietnam,” he expressed dovish views for the last two decades of the Cold War. But after the Persian Gulf War and well into the Iraq War, he was reborn as an avenging Wilsonian hawk. After setbacks in Iraq, however, he reverted to his dovish past. Along the way, he has also exhibited ostrich-like tendencies, simply sticking his head in the sand about threats, especially those coming from Russia and China. Biden’s erratic, inconsistent views seem hard to square with a coherent, integrated worldview. “I wish I could say Biden was a student of history,” said one senior Obama administration official during the debates about the Afghanistan surge, but “that’s not Biden. He has gut instincts.” Unfortunately, these instincts tend to line up with Democratic political trends, not America’s national interest. 

Having campaigned against the Vietnam War, a young Biden reflected his party’s Blame America First mindset. As North Vietnamese forces advanced on Saigon in April 1975, Biden voted against a bill to give last-minute aid to South Vietnam and to authorize the use of American troops to evacuate our citizens. In an eerie preview of his misjudgments about Afghanistan 46 years later, Biden concluded that “the time has come—perhaps it is past—for a swift, uneventful evacuation of all Americans from South Vietnam before the situation develops wherein it would take large numbers of American troops to bring out our citizens.” Biden understood that an evacuation was necessary, but he opposed the military measures necessary to conduct a safe evacuation. The Senate passed the bill but it failed in the House, and Saigon fell a few days later. American helicopters scrambled to evacuate our embassy. The desperate scenes on a rooftop in Saigon would only be surpassed by those at an airport in Kabul. 

That same month, Biden also foreshadowed his lifelong hostility to defense spending. He proposed to slash more than 10