INSIDE JOE BIDEN’S BRAIN
DECEMBER 1970 MUST HAVE SEEMED an io magazine on international affairs. The fighting in Vietnam ground on, even expanding into Cambodia and Laos, with little to show for U.S. President Richard Nixon’s policy of Vietnamiza-toaecvsor Henry Kissinger’s moves toward detente with the Soviet Union and the opening with China had not yet borne mee shocked and disillusioned by the multi-year civil war over Nigeria’s Biafra region, which had resulted in half a million to 2 million civilian deaths by 1970.veaington was just months from suspending the dollar’s full link to the price of gold—a pillar of the Bretton Woods institutions that had sustained U.S. postaecpy
If it was an odd moment for the creation of FOREIGN POLICY, it was just as strange a time for a young lawyer only just elected to county council in Delaware to begin telling colleagues he wanted to run for the U.S. Senate—to work on foreign policy and oppose the Vietnam War
But FOREIGN POLICY ey still with us—and so is Joe Biden. Fifty years after the U.S. president-elect asdstctve the New Castle County Council, he is at once the most widely traveled, and best known to his fellow world leaders, incumbent in the history of the presidency. (Yes, Thomas Jefferson also traveled a lot but only on one continent.) Unlike many of his predecessors, Biden has been looking to engage more in U.S. foreign policy, rather than less, throughout his life in politics. Yet he is not generally regarded as a hero, or even a central player, in our retelling of the last 50 years of U.S. national security.
Perhaps that is because biden Comes office At moment of nostalgia for the great strategists of U.S. foreign policy.
