2011
Libya Intervention

Murtaza Hussain

April 27 2021, 7:14 p.m.

Rebel fighters are seen in downtown Misurata, Libya, on April 20, 2011.

Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Joe Biden has said that he always internally opposed the Obama administration’s decision to intervene in Libya. In a 2016 interview on PBS, Biden told host Charlie Rose that from the outset, he had expressed concerns that the war would create a vacuum in Libya that would be filled by extremists. He also said there had been insufficient planning for what the country would look like after Muammar Gaddafi had been deposed.

At the beginning of the NATO-led intervention in 2011, several months after the uprising in Libya had begun, Biden publicly indicated that the U.S. should step back from involvement and that NATO should handle the war on its own. “If the Lord Almighty extricated the U.S. out of NATO and dropped it on the planet of Mars so we were no longer participating, it is bizarre to suggest that NATO and the rest of the world lacks the capacity to deal with Libya — it does not,” Biden said. “This is about our strategic interest, and it is not based upon a situation of what can the traffic bear politically at home.”

Despite this reticence, once Gaddafi was killed in the fall of 2011, Biden said that NATO had “got it right” in Libya, even describing the war as a model. “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life,” Biden said. “This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.” In a CNN interview, Biden spoke about Gaddafi, saying, “This is one bad guy, one really tough guy. He for 40 years had his folks under his thumb. And he’s dead, and it’s going to give the people of Libya the first chance in four decades to actually put together their own government, have a little bit of freedom. Little bit of opportunity.”

The
Intercept_

1998-2011
Global Targeted Killing Programs

Murtaza Hussain,

Jeremy Scahill

April 27 2021, 7:38 p.m.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden receive an update on the mission to kill Osama bin Laden in Washington, D.C., on May 1, 2011.

Photo: Pete Souza/The White House/AP

At various points in his career, Joe Biden expressed hesitance about U.S. global assassination programs. In 1998, during a Senate debate about the possibility of greenlighting assassinations of terrorist leaders, Biden was reticent, telling FBI Director Louis Freeh that he “would very much like a legal memorandum from the FBI, stating whether or not the prohibition against assassination of heads of state applies to organized crime units, and/or terrorist units.”

During a 1998 TV appearance, he was asked why, instead of launching cruise missiles at Afghanistan, the U.S. did not conduct a surgical mission to kill Osama bin Laden. “It’s against American law to assassinate,” Biden shot back. Biden was not technically correct. While every president since Gerald Ford has maintained an executive order prohibiting assassination, Congress has intentionally never legislated such a ban.

While every president since Gerald Ford has maintained an executive order prohibiting assassination, Congress has intentionally never legislated such a ban.

Congress’s failure to take a stance has allowed several presidents to conduct assassinations while framing them as justifiable and lawful, most prominently President Barack Obama through his targeted killing drone strike campaigns.

In 2009, as Obama’s vice president, Biden reportedly authorized a short paper that promoted a “counterterrorism plus” strategy for fighting Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, supporting drones and special forces raids as a primary means of carrying out war in the region. Biden was a noted skeptic of proposals from U.S. generals to ramp up large-footprint deployments of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Biden opposed the 2011 raid authorized by Obama to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, expressing reservations at the time about the odds of success. He later praised the raid, saying, “You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan.” He also opposed President Donald Trump’s assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. Biden did not cite the illegality of the strike but rather labeled it a “self-defeating” action that he said would make the region more dangerous in the long term.

The
Intercept_

1998-2016
U.S. Policy Toward NATO Expansion

Murtaza Hussain

April 27 2021, 7:39 p.m.

Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels on March, 10, 2009.

Photo: Jock Fistick/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Joe Biden has long been an advocate of expanding membership in NATO, leading efforts in the late 1990s to bring countries including Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the alliance. At the time, he characterized the additions as “righting an historical injustice forced upon the Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians by Joseph Stalin.” In a 1997 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Biden forcefully laid out the case for the United States to uphold a strong NATO alliance over the long term. “The United States is a European power,” Biden said. “We have an interest not only in the lands west of the Oder River, but in the fate of the 200 million people who live in the nations between the Baltic and Black Seas.”

In a 2002 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, reflecting on a world transformed by the September 11 attacks, Biden highlighted NATO’s continued growth as a key U.S. foreign policy interest. During the hearing, Biden also spoke favorably of Russian President Vladimir Putin, an ardent opponent of NATO expansion, describing him as a reformist with whom the U.S. could build ties. “I’m pleased that President Bush is carrying on an important work begun by the last administration of bringing new members into NATO and reaching out to Russia. 9/11 has created historic opportunities to continue to process a reconciliation with Russia,” Biden said, describing Putin as a pro-Western Russian leader of a type “not seen since Peter the Great.”

In 2008, Biden called for expanding NATO membership to countries in the Balkans including Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia. And, as the relationship between the United States and Russia has unraveled in large part over the issue of NATO expansion, Biden continued to push for expanding the alliance even to countries like Ukraine and Georgia, which Russia claims as part of its own historic sphere of influence. In 2009, Biden expressed support for Ukrainian membership in NATO, saying, “We do not recognize anyone else’s right to dictate to any other country what alliance it should seek to belong to, or what relationships, bilateral relationships, you have.” Biden expressed the same sentiments to Georgian leaders a year after a Russian attack on the country.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, NATO became an election issue when then-candidate Donald Trump expressed skepticism about NATO treaty commitments. Biden, using the weight of his vice presidential office, traveled to Latvia, a NATO-member country under serious threat of attack by Russia, to express the United States’ continued commitment to upholding the Article 5 clause of NATO that considers an attack on one member as an attack against all. “I want to make it clear, absolutely clear to all the people of the Baltic States, we have pledged our sacred honor, the United States of America, our sacred honor to the NATO Treaty and Article 5,” Biden said.