Biden's Old Worldview

The president’s way of thinking about foreign policy seems to have been frozen in amber a quarter century ago.

Peter Beinart comments on how dated Biden’s worldview is:

So, in that interview, when he was trying to tell George Stephanopoulos why he had been a good president and why Americans needed to reelect him, if you notice the thing that Biden kept coming back to again and again—he mentioned it six times—is NATO. He says, ‘I was the guy that expanded NATO.’ He talked about what he’s doing in Europe with regard to expansion of NATO. ‘I’m the guy that put NATO together,’ he says. ‘I’m doing a hell of a lot of other things, like wars around the world, like keeping NATO together. Who’s gonna be able to hold NATO together like me?’

He talks about NATO again and again and again. And it seems to me somewhat disconnected from reality. Where is the chorus of people in America who want to be expanding NATO?

I noted in my column last week that Biden’s belief that the U.S. is the indispensable nation showed how outdated his thinking was. Here he is running for president in 2024, and he is citing a talking point from the last century about the U.S. role in the world as if nothing has changed since then. The president’s way of thinking about foreign policy seems to have been frozen in amber a quarter century ago. Even if he were up for doing the job for another four years, his ideas are a poor match for the times.