Biden's philosophy of diplomacy first, force last

By Michael R. Gordon

updated 10:04 p.m. ET Aug. 23, 2008

WASHINGTON - As the Bush administration was fine-tuning its plan to invade Iraq, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. helped draft a proposed resolution that emphasized the need for diplomatic efforts to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs but gave President Bush the authority to use military force as a last resort.

The measure, Mr. Biden wrote in his memoir, was intended to strengthen Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s hand in getting United Nations weapons inspectors into Iraq. But it was blocked, and Mr. Biden invoked the same rationale in voting for the tougher measure authorizing military action that was passed by the Senate in October 2002.

In three decades in Washington, Mr. Biden has been one of the Democratic Party’s most energetic leaders on foreign policy. He has held countless hearings, opined volubly on security issues and, by his own account, advised Mr. Bush on matters like calling for the further expansion of NATO.

But should he be elected vice president on the Democratic ticket with Senator Barack Obama, Mr. Biden would have a role that has eluded him: a seat in the inner sanctum of White House decision-making. He would be advising a president who would take office with slim credentials in foreign affairs — and who, as a candidate, has said he wants a vice president who will offer blunt and dissenting opinions.

Mr. Obama opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, staking out a position against it while still a state legislator in Illinois, around the time Mr. Biden was voting to authorize military force. Even before his unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Biden took a different approach to Iraq from Mr. Obama’s; Mr. Biden called for governing power in Iraq to be decentralized among three largely autonomous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions.

But like Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden has for several years opposed the administration’s handling of the war, especially Mr. Bush’s decision to send additional troops — an administration strategy that military experts say has helped to reduce violence in Iraq. Both of them now support substantially withdrawing combat brigades from Iraq and building them up in Afghanistan.

More generally, both of them fit into the mainstream of Democratic thinking on foreign policy and national security, which emphasizes working with allies and using force as a final recourse.

Mr. Biden is widely seen as a liberal-minded internationalist. He has emphasized the need for diplomacy but has been prepared at times to back it with the threat of force. An early advocate of military action to quell the ethnic fighting in the Balkans, he has not been averse to American military intervention abroad. As the debates over Kosovo and later Iraq showed, he has been loath to give the United Nations a veto over American policy decisions. But he has also sought to ensure that the United States acted in concert with other nations.

During his long Senate career, Mr. Biden has developed an extensive track record. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has presided over more than 50 hearings since January 2007. He oversaw many more during his three previous stints as chairman of the panel’s subcommittee on European affairs.

According to committee records, Mr. Obama, who holds Mr. Biden’s old post as chairman of the Europe subcommittee, has presided over only three hearings: sessions that were convened to approve ambassadorial appointments.

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Much of the focus during Mr. Biden’s early career was on arms control. During the Reagan administration, he argued for strict adherence to the 1972 antiballistic missile treaty with Russia, which President Ronald Reagan’s aides sought to loosely interpret, to make way for a space-based missile defense program.

Mr. Biden’s interest in the former Yugoslavia began in 1991 when a Croatian Roman Catholic monk came to him with tales of Serbian abuses in Bosnia and Croatia. “I was such a supporter of Israel, he reminded me, and these were Catholics who were being killed here, so why didn’t I pay as much attention,” Mr. Biden recalled in his memoir.

As Yugoslavia started to come apart in the early 1990s, Mr. Biden urged American intervention to stop ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia. He was among the first to advocate lifting the arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslims and supporting them with NATO air power, a policy known as “lift and strike.”

That policy was opposed by President George Bush and, initially, by President Bill Clinton; they feared it would mire the American military in a Balkan civil war. But it became the basis of a new policy that was eventually followed by a successful NATO peacekeeping effort.

When President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia cracked down on Albanian separatists in Kosovo, Mr. Biden supported the NATO bombing campaign to force Serbian troops to leave the breakaway province.

“Fundamentally, Senator Biden believes that American engagement in the world can make a big difference,” said James P. Rubin, a former adviser to Mr. Biden and Clinton administration official. “But because he is a realist, he believes it is far better to take such actions with the support of our friends and allies.”

Mr. Biden later supported Kosovo’s independence despite protests from Moscow. Along with Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mr. Biden has supported Georgia’s early admission to NATO, another stance that has put the United States at odds with Russia.

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