Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said Tuesday that President Donald Trump's escalation of tensions with Iran proves him to be dangerously incompetent and puts the U.S. on the brink of war.
Speaking in New York, Biden said Trump used a haphazard decision-making process to order the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and has failed to communicate the rationale to Congress or U.S. allies around the world. Biden said Trump instead offered tweets, threats and tantrums that prove the Republican president to be dangerously incompetent and incapable of world leadership.
Democracy runs on accountability, Biden said, urging Trump to consult with Congress on acts of war, as required by the Constitution.
No one wants war. But it's going to take hard work to make sure we don't end up there accidentally.
The former vice president's remarks were part of his second major foreign policy address of the campaign. This one comes less than a month before the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses begin Democrats' 2020 voting, with Biden attempting to highlight his international experience in contrast both to Trump and his Democratic competitors.
But the moment presents challenges for the 77-year-old candidate with nearly five decades in Washington. While his resume is longer than any Democratic presidential rival's, it comes with complications.
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Progressives hoping to make the world less militaristic point to Biden's 2002 vote authorizing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, suggesting that muddies his warnings about another Middle Eastern war.
Alternately, Trump and Republicans cast Biden as indecisive or weak, seizing on his opposition to the 1991 U.S. mission that drove Iraq out of Kuwait and his reluctance about the raid that killed Sept.
11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in 2011, when Biden was President Barack Obama's No. 2.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a Vermont senator who voted against President George W. Bush's Iraq war powers request, calls it baggage. Former Bush and Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in his memoir that Biden has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue" for 40 years.
Biden himself has been inconsistent in his pitch to voters, seemingly confident that searing criticism of Trump and implicit contrasts with less-seasoned Democrats are enough.
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.
The Biden campaign's most viral moment was a video last month, titled Laughed At, showing world leaders mocking Trump at a Buckingham Palace reception held during a NATO summit in London.
Biden told reporters last month that foreign policy isn't in his Democratic opponents' wheelhouse, even if they "can learn.
Demonstrating his knowledge, Biden veered into explaining the chemistry and physics of SS-18 silos, old Soviet 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 military combat and intelligence.
Yet Biden doesn't always connect the dots with an explicit appeal to voters.
In Iowa last weekend, Biden called the Iran crisis totally of Donald Trump's making, tracing Soleimani's killing back to Trump withdrawing from a multilateral deal in which Iran had agreed to curtail its nuclear program. As he said again Tuesday in New York, the pact was working, serving America's interests and the region's interests."