Biden puts spotlight on foreign policy

Joe Biden is staking his presidential bid in no small part on the premise that he doesn’t need on-the-job training to lead the United States on a world stage that U.S. President Donald Trump has gleefully upended.

But his more liberal rivals aren’t ceding that ground.

The former U.S. vice president’s entrance into the campaign is reigniting Democratic debates over foreign policy that have largely faded to the background during the chaotic Trump era. Biden, long part of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, is being pitted against progressives more skeptical of the use of military intervention. Biden’s long record — in the Obama administration and in the Senate before that — isn’t necessarily a selling point for many progressives in the party’s base.

“It’s not going to be enough to simply have foreign policy experience and put things back to the way they were before Trump,” said Elizabeth Beavers, a longtime veteran of international nongovernmental agencies and a former top adviser at Indivisible, a grassroots group on the left. “We’ve got to move the United States off the path of needless war, talking about cutting the Pentagon budget, and address the corporate greed that fuels it.”

On Thursday, it was Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders who seemed to be leading the debate. The democratic socialist well to Biden’s left helped push an ultimately failed effort to overturn Trump’s veto of legislation withdrawing the United States from the bloody civil war in Yemen. As a top Sanders aide urged Biden to weigh in, the former vice president made clear that he stood with Sanders on the issue.

Biden has talked in broad strokes about international affairs in the week since he launched his campaign.

“Our standing in the world ... is at stake,” Biden said in his campaign launch. “The rest of the world, they look at us like, ‘My God,’” he added a day later on ABC’s “The View” in his first interview as a candidate.

The specifics have yet to follow.

Biden demurred in Iowa when asked about trade, saying there’d be “plenty of time” for such discussions. He avoided a question about unrest in Venezuela, only later tweeting his support for “legitimate, internationally monitored elections.”