Joe Biden is in Europe this week, meeting with leaders in Berlin, Paris and London. Tomorrow he drops by Downing Street to see David Cameron, and Nick Clegg is also on the agenda. Over the weekend the US vice president attended the Munich Security Conference where he delivered a speech on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, expressing a willingness to sit down in direct negotiations with the Iranian regime over its nuclear programme, an approach that can only be described as naïve in the extreme. On Europe, he spoke about the “unfinished business in our common project of a Europe whole and free,” describing Europe as “America’s indispensable partner of first resort.”
Biden has a well-earned reputation as a gaffe-maker extraordinaire, and this speech was no exception. In a key passage on the Eurozone debt crisis, Biden referred to Portugal, as Poland, a mistake subsequently corrected in the official White House transcript:
We have seen positive steps recently to address the eurozone crisis, with the European Central Bank pledging to stand behind countries willing to launch reforms, and with Greece, Ireland, Poland* [*sic-Portugal], Spain and Italy all taking important steps to put their economies on a sounder path. Governments across the eurozone must also remain focused on growth and jobs. These may be fundamentally European problems, requiring European solutions, but their resolution has tremendous impact on the United States of America and on the global economy.Needless to say, Poland is not even a member of the Eurozone, and its economy is in considerably better shape than that of debt-ridden Portugal. Biden’s blunder is the latest in a series of Obama presidency insults relating to Poland. In May last year Barack Obama was strongly criticised by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk after he described Nazi death camps during World War Two as “a Polish death camp.” Tusk blasted Obama’s statement for its “ignorance, lack of knowledge, (and) bad intentions.” In 2010 Obama chose to play golf on the day of the funeral of the Polish President Lech Kaczynski, the Polish First Lady, and 94 senior officials who were killed in the Smolensk air disaster, an act that was viewed as deeply insensitive by many Poles. In addition, the Obama administration announced the cancellation of Third Site missile defences on September 17, 2009, which also happened to be the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland.
The White House will inevitably laugh off Biden’s latest slip of the tongue as “Joe being Joe.” But it is symbolic of a vice president and possible presidential contender who is often appallingly bad with details (he also mixes up former Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar in the Munich speech), a significant flaw for someone who is supposedly the second most powerful figure in the United States.
Biden’s confusion of Poland with Portugal also reflects the Obama administration’s tendency to treat Europe as one large entity, rather than as a collection of nation states. In the eyes of the Obama presidency, the European Union is Europe, and the Eurozone is the EU. Washington has so much invested in advancing the European Project that it frequently fails to distinguish between key allies like Poland or Great Britain, and fair weather friends like France. Mr. Biden has demonstrated once again that he can be an embarrassment, both at home and abroad, while advancing a foreign policy that weakens, rather than strengthens U.S. interests.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100200701/joe-biden-confuses-poland-with-portugal-in-latest-embarrassing-gaffe-for-the-vice-president/
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