Biden Backs Obama on Talking to Foes

Diplomacy takes 'more than a great solider.' It takes 'a wise leader.'
By Jonas Oransky,  Newser Staff
Posted May 23, 2008 12:40 PM CDT
Biden Backs Obama on Talking to Foes
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Biden.   (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Joe Biden takes on Senate colleague Joe Lieberman in the Wall Street Journal today. Lieberman charged earlier this week that Democrats have lost the thread on FDR-style internationalism; Biden counters that it’s Bush who's lost it, with careless saber-rattling and a poorly targeted war on terror, both of which John McCain would perpetuate. Sending the right global signals requires “more than a great solider," he writes. "It will require a wise leader."

By “lumping together, as a single threat” everyone who uses terrorist tactics, "Bush has turned a small number of radical groups that hate America into a 10-foot-tall existential monster that dictates every move we make." Obama would do as Nixon did in talking to Mao, and Reagan did in talking to Gorbachev, he writes. The only alternatives are "you maintain the status quo, or you go to war.” (More Barack Obama stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X