Robert Gates: Joe Biden’s Been Nearly Wrong on Every Foreign Policy Decision for 40 Years

‘On most of the major foreign policy issues in the Obama administration the vice president and I actually agreed’

EXCERPT:

MORGAN: "Joe Biden, for example, the Vice President you say that he’s a lovely guy, down to Earth, funny, profane, humorously self-aware of his motor mouth, but you also go on to say, which I think is a fairly damning indictment of Vice President, 'Biden’s been wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.' That is a pretty, as I say, damning verdict on the Vice President."
GATES: "Well, in the context of the book, one of the interesting things — first of all, I stand by that statement, but what is interesting in retrospect and what I make clear in the book is that on most of the major foreign policy issues in the Obama Administration, the Vice President and I actually agreed, whether it was how to handle the downfall of Mubarak in Egypt or our opposition to intervening in Libya and so on. We did disagree and we disagreed deeply on Afghanistan and I did resent the Vice President’s stoking suspicion of the senior military with the President. But, when I go back to the early 70s through the end of the Cold War, Vice President, when he was a senator, voted against assistance for South Vietnam that was going to be the lifeline as we left that country. He voted against virtually every element of President Reagan’s defense buildup and strategy toward the Soviet Union, including most of the major weapons systems the B1, B-2 bombers, the MX missile and so on. And he voted against the first Gulf War when President George H.W. Bush was in office. So I think there’s a pretty strong case there that on a lot of the big issues he was mistaken."

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