It’s time for Biden to take a stand for freedom on the world stage 

Robert Gates, who served as secretary of Defense in the Obama-Biden administration, famously disparaged Joe Biden’s 40-year involvement in foreign policy before he became president: “He has been wrong on nearly every major issue.” 

Biden himself has confessed to poor judgment, in opposing the forcible ejection of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990 and supporting his removal from Iraq in 2002.  

The core problem for Biden has been in understanding the respective roles of diplomacy and military force in the exercise of American power, both to protect its critical national interests and those of its allies and strategic partners. Except for his administration’s sensible adoption of his predecessor’s transformative policy on China and Taiwan, Biden’s career-long paucity of sound judgment has carried into his presidency.  

He largely followed Donald Trump’s ill-considered approach to Afghanistan, where they both condemned what they called the “forever war.” He took a flawed Trump agreement with the Taliban and made it even worse. His precipitous and shameful abandonment of the Afghan government, military and people was a strategic and humanitarian disaster. It severely damaged U.S. credibility in the eyes of friends and foes alike and accelerated the aggressive planning of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.  

Russia was the first to act on the perception that the new sheriff in town was weak, confused and manipulable. Vladimir Putin had already gotten away with invading and occupying Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, when the Obama-Biden administration ignored the greatest act of aggression in Europe since the Nazi invasions in World War II. Barack Obama fulfilled his promise to Putin in 2012 to be “more flexible after my reelection,” and he forgot his “red lines” on Syria, where Putin was helping Bashir Assad perpetrate his atrocities. 

With President Biden in office in 2022, Putin signaled his intention to absorb the rest of Ukraine by marshaling massive invasion forces along Ukraine’s border. Biden responded by saying “a minor incursion” would be acceptable but a large-scale operation would bring U.S. economic sanctions. Putin shrugged off Biden’s mild caution and went for the kill, which the Russian leader, along with Biden and many in the West, believed would be accomplished quickly.  

Biden preemptively ruled out sending U.S. forces to help defend Ukraine despite the U.S. guarantee of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 after Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. 

Biden convinced himself Russia would be deterred by the threat of economic sanctions but not by the presence of American troops — “that’s World War III,” he fretted — even though Putin had backed off after a deadly skirmish in Syria in 2018. He gave the same fearful reason for refusing to establish a no-fly zone when Ukraine and some NATO allies urged that action. 

While he laudably rallied NATO to provide arms to Ukraine, throughout the two-year conflict, he rejected or slow-walked the kinds of U.S. weapons that would enable Ukraine to mount an effective counter-offensive and reverse Putin’s brutal aggression. His concern was always the same: if Ukraine struck too deeply into Russia-occupied Ukraine or even inside Russia itself, or was too successful in driving Putin’s forces out, it could “provoke” Putin.  

That, he feared, would lead to escalation of the conflict — either vertically, by Russia’s use of nuclear weapons, or horizontally, by spreading the fighting to other countries in Europe. Instead, he appears to have adopted a stalemate policy for Ukraine, providing it with just enough help to survive but not enough for it to win.  

This self-limiting posture, caused by his paralyzing fear of escalation, assured a protracted, indecisive conflict, sure to drain U.S. and Western will to resist Russian aggression, no matter the moral and strategic implications. Some in NATO and members of Congress in both parties are already faltering.  

Iran and its terrorist proxies in the Middle East were the next to test America’s will under Biden, before the presidential election potentially brings a new administration with unpredictable policies. Tehran first enabled Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel on Oct. 7. Then, as the world focused on Israel’s counter-attack, its Houthi proxy unleashed an assault on international shipping in the Red Sea and on U.S. forces. 

For months, the Biden administration responded only with diplomatic efforts, verbal warnings, and a couple of pinprick strikes. Finally, after last week’s major escalation of drone and missile attacks that threatened to close the shipping route, Biden ordered a significant military response. 

But the response was limited to the specific weapons systems used in the Red Sea attacks, not to the Houthi organization itself and certainly not against Iran, the sponsor and enabler of the criminal attacks. Presumably, warnings are being sent to Iran that if it foments further escalation, the U.S. and its allies will remove their own constraints and a wider regional war could ensue.  

That message should be broader — Western goals should not be limited to the military arena, and should address the root cause of the rampant aggression and instability in the Middle East: the radical clerical regime in Tehran. Washington would find the Iranian population a willing partner in that effort, since it was ordinary Iranians who rose up against the mullahs in 2009 and beseeched the West to support them. The Obama-Biden administration turned a deaf ear to the appeals and missed a golden opportunity for internal regime change. 

Hamas attacked Israel on Putin’s birthday, and China, Russia’s “no limits strategic partner,” is now contemplating its next move in the multi-front attack on Western interest and values. The election victory of the Democratic Progressive Party’s Lai Ching-te, whom Beijing has called a “separatist troublemaker,” may convince it to declare that “peaceful means” to bring Taiwan under its control are now “exhausted” and the use of force is required. 

To avoid repeating his mistakes on Ukraine and Iran, Biden should state again publicly, as he has already, that America will directly defend Taiwan. But this time it should be done not as an ad hoc answer to a reporter’s random question but as a fully vetted presidential statement of official U.S. policy, without staff or State Department watering-down or “clarification.” 

If the policy of strategic ambiguity continues, China will almost certainly make a fatal strategic miscalculation that will plunge the region — and the world — into the catastrophic war that Biden rightly dreads. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.