Former Vice President Joe Biden delivered a stinging rebuke of the Trump administration’s foreign policy and “moral leadership” in an op-ed published by The New York Times on Thursday.
Biden wrote that “the power of our example” has “stood as the foundation of American policy throughout my political career — until recently.”
The former vice president noted tension in some of America’s key alliances and warned against the Trump administration’s drift towards isolationism.
“Around the world, including in the United States, we are seeing the resurgence of a worldview that is closed off and clannish. President Trump keeps longstanding allies such as Germany at arm’s length, while expressing admiration for autocrats like Vladimir Putin who thwart democratic institutions.”
Seizing on Trump’s roundly criticized response to the racial violence in Charlottesville, Biden wrote that Trump’s “shameful defense of white nationalists and neo-Nazis” had “further abnegated America’s moral leadership.”
Biden also criticized Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for failing to assert American values through the administration’s foreign policy and closed his op-ed writing that “the international community still needs a strong, democratic America leading the way.”
“To succeed,” he wrote, “we cannot abandon the tenets that we fought so hard to defend over the past seven decades — ideals that magnified American leadership and produced the greatest increase in global prosperity in history.”
Biden is widely seen as a potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. He declined to run in 2016, citing the toll caused by the death of his oldest son, but the former VP and those close to him have signaled his interest in another bid.