Rising tensions between Washington and Tehran are testing whether Joe Biden can capitalize on his decades of foreign policy experience as he seeks to challenge a president he derides as “dangerous” and “erratic.” Biden is expected to deliver lengthy remarks Tuesday about President Donald Trump’s decision to approve an airstrike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. His remarks, which would follow several days of campaigning in which he seemed uncertain of how much to highlight his foreign policy resume, would be among his most high-profile efforts to articulate his vision for world affairs and would come less than a month before the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses begin 2020 voting. But the moment presents challenges for a two-term vice president who was elected to six terms in the Senate. While his resume is longer than any of his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, it comes with complications. Progressives hoping to make American foreign policy less militaristic point to Biden’s 2002 vote to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, suggesting it muddies his recent warning that Trump could push the U.S. into another of the “forever wars.” Alternately, Trump and Republicans cast Biden as indecisive or weak, seizing on his opposition to the 1991 U.S. military mission that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and his reluctance about the raid that killed Sept. 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in 2011, when Biden was vice president. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a Vermont senator who voted against the Bush administration’s Iraq war powers request, calls it “baggage.” In a quote that Republicans recirculate frequently, former Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in his memoir that Biden, though a “man of integrity,” has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Biden himself has sometimes been inconsistent about driving home his pitch to voters, seemingly confident that searing criticism of Trump and implicit contrasts with his less-seasoned Democratic rivals are enough to earn another stint in the West Wing. “I’ve met every single world leader” a U.S. president must know, Biden tells voters at some stops. “On a first-name basis,” he’ll add on occasion. On Chinese President Xi Jinping: “I spent more time with him face to face than any other world leader.” On Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who helped persuade Trump to withdraw U.S. special forces from Syria over widespread opposition in Washington and elsewhere: “I know who he is.” The Biden campaign’s most viral moment came last month with a video, titled “Laughed At,” showing world leaders mocking Trump at a Buckingham Palace reception held during a NATO summit in London. Biden says world leaders, including former British Prime Minister Theresa May, have called him to ask about Trump. He told reporters last month that foreign policy isn’t in his Democratic opponents’ “wheelhouse,” even if they are “smart as hell” and “can learn.” Trying to demonstrate his expertise, Biden veered into explaining the chemistry and physics of “SS-18 silos,” referring to old Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. “It’s just what I’ve done my whole life,” he said. He’s since touted endorsements from former Secretary of State John Kerry and members of Congress with experience in the military and intelligence community. Yet Biden doesn’t always connect the dots with an explicit appeal to voters. […]
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