Biden's Warning

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Biden's Warning



By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, October 22, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Campaign '08: Like many others, we took it as another gaffe when Joe Biden said he expected Barack Obama to be "tested" shortly after taking office. But when he repeated it, we wondered: What's he trying to tell us?

Glib, voluble and unscripted, Sen. Biden is liable to say anything on a given day. That's why it pays to listen carefully to what he repeats — because it's obviously something he's thought about.

"Mark my words," Biden said in San Francisco last Saturday. "With the next, first six months of this administration, if we win, they're going to — we're going to face a major international challenge. Because they're going to want to test him, just like they did young John Kennedy. They're going to want to test him."

Then, the very next day in Seattle, he said: "Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy . . . Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the metttle of this guy."

And just what would a "generated crisis" be? Could it be as former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said Wednesday — that "leaders around the world see Obama as soft, untested and weak, and they will react accordingly?"

If so, Biden is right: Some aspiring latter-day Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh will no doubt test our new commander in chief.

But there's another angle to this, based on what Biden the senator knows — that Obama's defense policies, once it's obvious how they'll undermine us, are likely to be very, very unpopular. In this case, Biden may be calling on his party's hard, pacifist core — Moveon.org, Code Pink and the like — to stand by their man.

He'll need their support. Like Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, Obama's policies often sound good on the surface, but will in fact materially weaken America's ability to defend herself. That's not just our opinion, mind you; it's straight from the horse's mouth. [Watch Video]

"I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending," Obama told the pacifist Caucus for Priorities last year. "I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems."

Pretty sweeping. That means no more missile defense — although in recent tests in the Pacific and elsewhere, the system has shown itself to be a formidable potential shield against enemy attack.

But it didn't end there. "I will not develop nuclear weapons," he also promised Caucus for Priorities, vowing to seek "deep cuts" in our own arsenal, unilaterally disabling our nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups.

On the diplomatic front, Obama has pledged to talk to the likes of Iran's Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Chavez "without preconditions." But who knows what he'll give up once he sits down to talk?

Obama has vowed to pull out of Iraq soon after taking office — undercutting the hard-won victory now shaping up there, as the U.S. prepares a careful, phased withdrawal of U.S. forces by 2012.

Such policies will create a vacuum that our foes will be only too happy to exploit.

In response to seeing a weakling in the White House, will Russia do something rash in Eastern Europe, like invade Ukraine? Will South Korea develop a bomb, knowing the U.S. won't stop it? Will Iran attack Israel, as it has promised, thinking America has become a paper tiger? We don't know, but maybe Joe Biden does.