One Last Trip With Joe Biden
How the vice president spent a few of his closing days in office
'When I boarded Air Force Two for Vice President Joe Biden’s final overseas mission, he had four days left in office. His leverage was diminishing by the hour, with every new question at a Trump nominee confirmation hearing, with every new @RealDonaldTrump tweet.
There was no chance of a miracle at that point, a few days away from Vice President-elect Mike Pence getting Biden’s keys to Air Force Two—to somehow rid Ukraine of its debilitating corruption, pull off a Cyprus deal, or stand between Kosovo and Serbia and neutralize the tension between them for good. It’s hard to shame Russian President Vladimir Putin or to inspire him to spiff up his behavior if the president-elect seems to accept Putin just as he is. And of course, there’s Iraq.
I’ve taken trips with the vice president before, and at the start of this last one, I suspected the mission was motored more by inertia than achieving real goals. Most journalist types, in fact, thought this would be a dud journey and were focused ahead of the inauguration on power ascendant, not power quickly fading away. I was the only one there. Biden though, treated the trip as a big deal—he was wound up, energized, shaking hands with those he is leaving, like he had just mastered the craft and was showing off, bounding up the steps to the plane, waving to the crowd as if to promise all of this is going to matter. Really. It will.
Nearing the end of a 45-year career in public service, the vice president kept trying to pack in just one more call, one more crisis, as the clock ticked down. I’ve described Biden in The Atlantic as a kind of “geopolitical therapist;” he’s the one who gets the difficult, unglamorous foreign-policy problems—Iraq and its several parts, Cyprus, Ukraine, sometimes Brazil and a slew of Latin American countries that don’t always rank particularly high in DC. Japan and South Korea with their unresolved tensions over wrongs done long ago. Turkey.
And Biden diplomacy is about relationships, about getting personal with leaders and knowing them and their motivations well enough, in detail and over time, that you know where you can move a leader and where you can’t. It was clear in these last few meetings, with, among others, Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko, whom he calls “Petro;” with China’s powerful and ascending Xi Jinping, whom he introduced to his granddaughter Finnegan in an effort to break new ground when the Chinese leader first took office; and with his old friend who sits at the nexus of many overlaid conflicts, Kurdistan’s Masoud Barzani.
Ukraine could be one test case of whether all of this really did matter. As we neared landing in Kiev in the early darkness of Monday morning, when America was remembering the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Joe Biden was working to help the country survive another day—despite Donald Trump’s nearly simultaneous calls that he might waive America’s sanctions on Russia over its annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in exchange for a nuclear deal. He and his team spent hours discussing the way for Ukraine to stay in the game, presumably despite Trump coming to office.'>>>
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/01/joe-biden-foreign-policy/513758/
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