Biden's role in the AfPak debate suggests that he is not merely a contrarian but a classic foreign-policy realist. Biden first came to Washington in 1970, amid the carnage of Vietnam, as a member of the Democrats' anti-war faction. But he was a centrist and a straight arrow, not a radical. "I wasn't against the war for moral reasons," he told me. "I just thought it was a stupid policy." He invited George Kennan, the grand old man of foreign-policy realism, to come speak to him, and Kennan talked about the absurdity of the "domino theory" and of the monolithic idea of communism. Biden spent the next several decades getting to know the world's leaders as member and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, an experience that tends to produce an appreciation for the status quo. Biden was one of the Democratic senators who voted for the resolution authorizing George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq, but he insists that he never shared Bush's vision of a transformed Middle East and, less plausibly, that he believed Bush wouldn't rush into war. He told me that he loved The Freedom Agenda, my book on democracy promotion -- Biden doesn't merely "like" anything, he loves things -- because it warned against the naïve faith in America's capacity to install democracy in autocratic places. Biden is a rarity: a cockeyed optimist who nevertheless has a streetwise instinct for the harsh reality lurking under grandiose plans.
Like virtually all practicing politicians, Biden disdains ideological labels, but he has in fact given quite a lot of thought to where he stands in the spectrum of American foreign policy. When I asked him about the role human rights should play in U.S. foreign policy, Biden said, "The difference between where I think we should be and where we have been in the past going all the way back to [George] McGovern and when I first came here is you either decry the behavior and cut off relations, or ignore the behavior and enhance your relations. My gut is, you deal with it in realistic terms." What that means, Biden explained, is that you criticize abuses while acknowledging that you can't do much to change them, and continue to pursue a relationship based on national interests.
Biden used the example of the Obama "reset" with Russia. He rejected, he said, the "balance-of-power" approach, which he described as, "you take what you want and you give us what we want." Turning a blind eye to atrocities in Chechnya or aggression against Georgia, granting Russia's definition of its sphere of influence, would constitute, to Biden's mind, amoral realism. At the same time, Biden said, preaching to Russia about democracy or admonishing it about autocratic tendencies, as the Bush administration was wont to do, comes dangerously close to hubris. "I think," Biden told me -- and he slowed down in order to choose his words with care -- "that our administration has a more realistic view of what we are capable of determining or dictating in terms of the behavior, the internal functioning, of other states." Biden argued, with some justification, that the Obama administration had been able to put relations with Russia on a better footing, ultimately leading to the New START agreement and cooperation on sanctions against Iran, without sacrificing its concern with human rights.
Realism, for Biden, is a precipitate of experience, both in the world's capitals and in Delaware hiring halls and coffee shops. I once heard him say, "Foreign policy is just like human relations, only people know less about each other." His boss, of course, tends to dwell in loftier realms than the earthbound Biden. Obama has a soaring sense of what politics can accomplish, and oratorical gifts to match. But he appears to find Biden's advice congenial because he has a deeply cautionary sense of the means available to achieve those great ends. His foreign-policy heroes -- men like Brent Scowcroft and James Baker -- are, in effect, Kennan's sons. And recent experience has reinforced intellectual conviction. As I argued in my column last week, tough sledding in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Israel/Palestine has taken the rosy glow off Obama's hopes that he could serve as a transformative agent in the world. The Obama of 2012 is a more tempered and wary figure than the Obama of 2009.
Over the last few years, and especially amid the Arab Spring, events have forced the Obama White House to choose between its prudential instincts and its great ambitions. In almost every case Biden has sided with the skeptics. In January 2011, massive crowds took to Tahrir Square demanding that Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's hated autocrat, step down. Biden viewed Mubarak as a staunch ally, and opposed those in the administration who wanted Obama to publicly demand that he leave office. He called Mubarak, whom he had known for decades, as well as intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, and implored them to establish a plan for transition. Only when Mubarak proved intransigent did Biden change his view.
Biden also opposed the intervention in Libya (as did Tom Donilon and Robert Gates, then the defense secretary). "It didn't go to core interests," a senior White House official says in explaining Biden's views. "It wasn't something he thought was necessary to do." Biden told me that he had supported a humanitarian intervention in the Balkans in the mid-1990s because chaos and violence in Europe threatened American national security, and because we had "the wherewithal to intervene and determine an outcome." In Libya, too, we had the wherewithal, but not the national interests; by Biden's calculus, that meant that we should stay out. Biden's innate skepticism also led him to advise Obama against conducting the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound until he had a higher degree of certainty that the al Qaeda leader was, in fact, there. Soon afterwards, Biden was telling audiences that you could "go back 500 years" without finding "a more audacious plan" -- precisely because the chance of success had been so low. It was classic Biden: He went from caution to hyperbole in a matter of hours.
Biden has often been on the losing side of major White House debates; that may be the inevitable consequence of playing the role of spoiler. But if you step back, overall Obama administration policy looks very much like Biden's tempered realism, Kennanite but not Kissingerian. Obama has refused to intervene in Syria despite the toll of more than 30,000 dead in its ever-bloodier civil war, and only gently criticized autocratic allies like Bahrain, whose monarchy has undertaken a major crackdown since protests began in the early days of the Arab Spring. The White House has largely stopped pushing on the closed door of Middle East peace. Despite provocations from President Vladimir Putin, it has continued to pursue the reset with Russia -- albeit with much less success than it enjoyed in the first two years of the Obama administration. The result is that while Obama has greatly disappointed human rights advocates and many of his own idealistic supporters, he has left a very small target for his Republican challengers when it comes to his foreign policy. Ryan has preposterously compared Obama's response to the wave of 9/11 attacks this year on American embassies to President Jimmy Carter's response to the 1979 kidnapping of American diplomats in Iran. One can easily imagine Biden's response if Ryan tries out this analogy in the debate: "Look, man, I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1979; you were in third grade."
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