BIDEN WASN’T REALLY READY ‘ON DAY 1’
Barack Obama was 47 when he became president. Joe Biden joined the Senate 48 years before he became president. As a candidate, Biden emphasized his experiences as vice president and as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to insist that he would be fully prepared “on Day 1.”
But Biden’s first three months show that no new president is totally ready, even after serving for eight years as understudy. At age 78, Biden has spent as much time close to power as anyone in Washington, but he has no meaningful prior experience as a chief executive.
Biden’s recent pirouetting on how many refugees to allow into the United States illustrates how much easier campaigning is than governing. After retreating from his own plan to lift his direct predecessor’s cap on refugees for the rest of this fiscal year, from 15,000 to 62,500, the new president faced more blowback from congressional Democrats on Friday than he has at any moment since taking office.
In a Feb. 4 speech, Biden announced an executive order to rebuild the resettlement program to help address the worldwide crisis of about 80 million displaced people.
But the president never signed the necessary documents to make good on his own announcement and keep his campaign promise, because a surge in asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border sowed fears in the West Wing about the optics of resettling refugees from abroad, even though they go through a separate vetting process.
By late Friday, the White House was backpedaling. Press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden plans to announce a higher cap by mid-May and sought to reframe what Biden had announced in February as “an initial goal” that was found to be impossible to achieve after “consulting with his advisers” because the Trump administration “decimated” the program.
The Oval Office magnifies every president’s weaknesses, and Biden has long suffered from indecisiveness.
Indecisiveness is preferable to impulsiveness, but it still carries a cost. About 35,000 refugees have already been approved and are prepared to travel to the United States as soon as they’re allowed. Biden’s foot-dragging has resulted in hundreds of canceled flights for refugees.
Faced with diplomatic complexities, all presidents also struggle to varying degrees with following through on foreign policy promises from their stump speeches.
In fact, immigration is one of several examples of this tension in Biden’s nascent presidency. He also hesitated over Saudi Arabia. During a Democratic primary debate in November 2019, Biden promised, with passion, to treat the kingdom as a “pariah” for humanitarian atrocities in Yemen and the murder of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Biden complied with a congressional mandate, which President Donald Trump had ignored, to release the intelligence assessment that Mohammed bin Salman approved the 2018 assassination of Khashoggi, a permanent U.S. resident. But rather than directly punishing the Saudi crown prince, the administration sanctioned lower-level officials.
White House officials explained that they wanted to recalibrate, not rupture, relations with Saudi Arabia, which is the largest purchaser of American weaponry. They highlighted the importance of Riyadh to regional stability.
Psaki defended Biden’s reversal by saying a president’s job is “to act in the national interest of the United States — and that’s exactly what he’s doing.” The relationship, she explained, is “complicated.”
Psaki is right that diplomacy is complicated. But it was no less so on the days Biden promised to treat the regime like a “pariah,” attacked Trump for not doing so and boasted that he would take office with more experience than anyone who had ever served as president.