The New York Times published a report on Biden’s foreign policy record last week that annoyed a lot of analysts and other readers because of its original hyperbolic headline about the U.S. being “consumed by war” on Biden’s watch. As Joel Mathis noted, the headline was changed to make it the more defensible “entangled in war,” but by then there weren’t many people interested in what the article said. As often happens, the content of the article was more reasonable than the original headline. The thrust of the story was that Biden’s foreign policy has been defined by the foreign conflicts that he has supported, and no one can seriously argue that this isn’t what has happened.
Michael Crowley, the author of the article, opened by quoting from the president’s speech last month in which he falsely claimed that the U.S. was not at war anywhere in the world. Crowley continued, “But while America is no longer waging a large-scale ground war like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, for much of his tenure Mr. Biden has seemed like a wartime leader.” That seems hard to dispute since so much of Biden’s foreign policy agenda has been taken up (one might even say consumed) by the foreign wars that he has chosen to support.
Continue reading “The Many Entanglements of the ‘Indispensable Nation’”