WSJ: ‘Original Sin’ and Foreign Policy
America is paying for having had a severely diminished president during a perilous era.
It came at a high price, but Joe Biden finally drove his successor off the front pages last week. First came the steady drip of devastating stories about Mr. Biden’s closest aides’ conspiracy to conceal his mental and physical decline, culminating with the publication of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” On top of that came the news that Mr. Biden has stage 4 prostate cancer.
The most remarkable thing about “Original Sin” to this reader was the near-total absence of President Biden’s foreign-policy team from the account. This isn’t because they weren’t around or in the know. Messrs. Tapper and Thompson emphasize that both Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan had better and more regular access to the increasingly walled-off president than any other cabinet secretaries or senior aides beyond the inner ring of Biden loyalists that the authors call the Politburo. We also know from many sources that European leaders were worried and puzzled by Mr. Biden’s irregular behavior at international meetings. Yet “Original Sin” focuses much less scrutiny on Mr. Biden’s foreign policy team’s actions and omissions than on those of his domestic advisers.
There are good reasons why the foreign-policy team might have rallied around an ailing president. Mr. Biden reserved much of his fading energy for foreign policy and likely was more effective in foreign-policy staff meetings than in meetings on other topics. And if you are a presidential adviser, you might not think that patriotism required you to broadcast a leader’s failings to the world. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advisers kept their lips tightly sealed in 1944 and 1945; perhaps Mr. Biden’s closest staffers chose to follow their example.
Messrs. Tapper and Thompson suggest that progressive aides on the domestic side took advantage of Mr. Biden’s deteriorating mental condition and understandable preoccupation with the unraveling of his son Hunter’s life to blunt the president’s more-centrist policy instincts on issues like border security. I didn’t see much evidence of that on the foreign-policy side. At the time it seemed to me that Mr. Biden’s intellectual fingerprints were all over foreign policy—that the aides and officials devising and implementing policy were staying within Mr. Biden’s red lines, conforming to his instinctive preferences, and giving us a genuinely Bidenesque policy. Nothing in “Original Sin” makes me revisit that judgment.
But the question remains: what price did America pay for having an increasingly diminished man in the Oval Office at a time of growing international danger?