Politics often requires adjustments. The recent fighting in Georgia created political pressure on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to strengthen his foreign policy credentials and Senator Joseph Biden, whose paper credentials include the Chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, was chosen as Obama running mate to fill this need. This choice, however, raises serious doubts about Senator Obama’s commitment to change, which was the galvanizing motif of his rise as the Democratic presidential nominee.
Unlike Senator Obama, Joe Biden’s views were shaped in the cold war and differ very little from those of John McCain and George Bush on most foreign policy issues, including the expansion of NATO, US military intervention in the Balkans and Iraq.
Biden, along with Bush, McCain, and most of the foreign policy establishment, supported the transformation of NATO during the Clinton administration, from a defensive alliance designed to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union, into an instrument which US policymakers would use to expand US power to the borders of Russia and gain access and control of oil markets in Central Asia and the Caucusus.
When the Soviet union collapsed, a rare opportunity existed to establish new security alliances that would reach across old divides. President Dwight Eisenhower, a founder of NATO, saw it as a temporary alliance which would protect Europe until the Europeans were able to take over their own defense. No doubt, he would have been dismayed to find that, having won the Cold War, US policy makers chose to expand US military commitments beyond a defense of vital interests. As a veteran military man who famously criticized the military industrial complex, Eisenhower would surely be shocked to learn that the US now maintains 725 military bases in 130 countries.
Joseph Biden was the sponsor of the US resolution to initiate a 78 day bombing of the campaign of former Yugoslavia in 1999 in support of Albanian separatists in Kosovo province. US led military intervention in the Balkans created a new rationale for NATO following the collapse of the Soviet Union and turned the alliance into a force to project US power eastward. Biden is also a strong supporter of an independent Kosovo, though experts in international law say that such recognition violates international law and UN Resolution 1244 which ended the conflict. Biden bought into Secretary of State Condi Rice’s patently absurd claim that "Kosovo cannot be seen as precedent for any other situation in the world today."
However, the European Union, the UN, Spain, Greece, Russia, China, and India have not recognized Kosovo because armed separatists across the globe do indeed see Kosovo independence as a precedent. The Republic of Georgia opposed Kosovo recognition, understanding that if this province of Serbia could be recognized, what would stop its pro-Russian provinces South Ossetia and Abkhazia from seceding?
Does President candidate Obama believe, like McCain, that “we are all Georgians” now, even if we didn’t listen to the Georgians when it counted? Will Obama continue the expansion of NATO’s military reach, risking new confrontations, or will he show the wisdom of his early opposition to intervention in Iraq and focus on vital US interests?
Obama’s theme of change would have been better served by choosing someone like Senator Jim Webb, a former Secretary of the Navy, who saw the folly of intervention in Iraq and questions the over reliance on US military power as a policy tool. Let’s hope that Obama will utilize Senator Biden to reassure voters and the foreign policy establishment while he shapes a foreign policy that pursues diplomatic solutions wherever possible and resists the pressures to expand a military industrial complex Eisenhower could not have imagined.