Joe Biden’s failure is Bob Gates’s vindication

One of the most famous criticisms of Joe Biden over the years came from former Bush and Obama secretary of defense Robert Gates, who wrote in his 2014 memoir that “I think [Joe Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” The former SecDef has repeatedly been asked if he stands by the statement — and each time, he does. Of course, we’re a decade removed from that memoir — and in that time, Gates has openly criticized Biden over the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, his administration’s approach to Putin and Russia and the slow walking of military aid to Ukraine. So it seems it’s safe to say we’re at five decades now.

The problem is that for most of those five decades, Joe Biden and his team of advisors were confined to the role of senator, where there’s only so much damage you can do. Voting on the wrong side on every Reagan-era Cold War package is a touch less significant than directing foreign policy of the United States from the Oval Office, and Tony Blinken’s fecklessness is rather irrelevant if he’s limited to being a Senate staffer. Instead, now we have the likes of this:

“Our view is any kind of major Rafah ground operation would actually strengthen Hamas’s hands at the negotiating table, not Israel’s,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby said Thursday. He said more civilian deaths in Rafah from an Israeli offensive would give more ammunition to Hamas’s “twisted narrative” about Israel.

Ah, so Kirby’s now operating from the same position as that famed Norm Macdonald tweet. 

This creates a greater fracture with Netanyahu and tosses the negotiations in Cairo into a cocked hat. There is no way Israel was going to stand by and accept the idea that they had to leave Rafah alone — as Kirby puts it, “any” major operation would be opposed by this administration. And of course, they’re doing this while continuing to deny the military aid Congress overwhelmingly endorsed. Whether you support their position or not, the inability of this administration to understand how leverage works is astounding.

Gates’s vindication may please Republicans on a partisan level. But there are real consequences for this level of hubris — and Biden’s continual insistence that his way is the right way, all else be damned. His irritation at the Gates comment and the rumors that Barack Obama is actually running his foreign policy show now seem a reflection of his earliest famed lie-filled outburst at suggestions he wasn’t sharp enough for the job of the presidency. Joe knows the critics are wrong. He can handle things. He’s smart, not like everybody says… he’s smart and wants respect.