If this is what they think, Biden needs some new senior advisers:
Some Democrats close to the president believe he has become unavoidably bogged down on foreign affairs — including trying to manage Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has frustrated the White House with his conduct of the war. Though Sunday’s attack will place further strain on Biden, his senior advisers believe that foreign policy presents an opportunity to show his decades of experience, which they believe they can contrast with Trump [bold mine-DL].
The president’s poor handling of the war in Gaza and related issues in the Middle East has been a sharp rebuke to the idea that Biden’s “decades of experience” are worth something. If this is what Biden is doing with the benefit of decades of experience, it seems that he hasn’t learned much over the years. The president and his allies have made a big deal out of his supposed expertise and competence in this area, but the reality is that his foreign policy has been defined to a large extent by his poor and/or outdated understanding of the issues and terrible execution. Because Biden’s supporters have made so much out of his foreign policy experience, his poor performance has been that much harder to deny.
The more that the public sees Biden in action, the less impressed they are. One might think that Biden would have relatively better approval ratings on foreign policy than he does in other areas, but that isn’t the case. One survey after another finds that the public doesn’t have confidence in him in a crisis and doesn’t approve of how he has been running things. According to Gallup, Biden’s foreign policy approval rating (32%) is even lower than his overall rating. The more time that Biden spends being consumed with foreign conflicts that he went out of his way to support and join, the more it reminds voters that the president has brought the U.S. much closer to a major war.
No doubt Trump was and is an incompetent and ignorant buffoon, but Biden has made it much harder to run against Trump on foreign policy because so many of the president’s policies have been built on accepting Trump-era policies and then tweaking them to his specifications. Biden could point to Trump’s many failed policies in 2020 and then promise to do things differently. In 2024, he can’t credibly promise to do things differently than Trump on many issues because his policies and Trump’s have been more or less the same.
One of the problems with Biden’s decades of experience is that his thinking remains stuck in the previous century and he seems unable or unwilling to understand how the world has changed. He cites Madeleine Albright’s “indispensable nation” line as if it were a fresh insight and compelling truth instead of the discredited nonsense that it is. He repeats talking points about a two-state solution as if there were still the remnants of a viable peace process. He frames international conflicts in simplistic ideological terms that bring to mind the worst of both the Bush era and the Cold War. Biden keeps pursuing a strategy of primacy as if it were 2004 instead of 2024, and he boasts about America as an “arsenal of democracy” as if it were eighty years ago. His worldview and his understanding of the U.S. role in it are at least twenty-five years behind the times.
Biden has accumulated so much experience in government by being in it for half a century, but for all that experience he does not have much in the way of wisdom. To top it off, Biden is so old and set in his ways that he can’t or won’t appreciate new perspectives and he won’t listen to people that don’t share the same worldview and carry all the same baggage that he does. In that respect, Biden embodies many of the flaws of our gerontocratic political class that refuses to let the next generation take over and insists on mucking things up to the very end.
The president’s predicament is that foreign policy is a serious political liability for him, but he and his allies imagine it to be one of his chief assets. They want to call attention to the very thing that they need to be deemphasizing. They cannot fathom that Biden is sabotaging his reelection campaign with his destructive and reckless policy choices in the Middle East because they still think that he knows what he is doing. The U.S. keeps crashing into the shoals on Biden’s orders and his top advisers want to brag about how many years the president has spent learning to steer the ship. All of this just confirms how out of touch Biden and the people around him are, and that causes more Americans to lose confidence in his leadership.