Joe Biden has had more foreign policy experience than any other president in U.S. history. When he entered the Senate and began dealing with global issues, it was 1973 and Leonid Brezhnev was chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The previous most experienced among our presidents when it came to foreign policy was George H.W. Bush. Add up his time in Congress, as a United Nations ambassador, head of the U.S. Liaison Office in China, head of the CIA, and Vice President, Bush became president with 16 years of foreign policy experience. That is a third of what Biden has had.
It is probably unfair to compare Biden’s early performance to the first months of Donald Trump, the only president in U.S. history to have had zero public service experience of any kind before he took office. In fact, it’s probably unfair to compare him with any of his predecessors since the senior Bush. Former Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, former Texas Gov. George W. Bush and freshman Sen. Barack Obama all came into office with little or no international affairs experience. And it showed.
First-term foreign policy fumbles
George W. Bush oversaw the beginning of the worst foreign policy calamity in U.S. history –– the unwarranted and disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq. As hard to imagine as it is, his decisions in the global arena were even worse than Trump’s.
Clinton’s first-term foreign policy fumbles ranged from the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia and failing…
