The nudges from abroad are a reminder of the foreign policy credentials former Vice President Joe Biden would bring to a 2020 Democratic field. | Sven Hoppe/AFP/Getty Images 2020 Elections World leaders tell Biden: We need you The former vice president would bring deep relationships and heavyweight credentials to a 2020 Democratic field lacking in national security experience.

When Joe Biden attended the annual Munich Security Conference last month, the wonky foreign policy confab promised an escape from the nonstop speculation back home about the former vice president’s political plans.

Instead, Biden’s 2020 intentions were the talk of the conference.


When Armenian President Armen Sarkissian ran into him in a hallway, a TV camera captured him asking Biden: “Are you going to run?” (Biden whispered an inaudible answer.)

And in several conversations with European leaders in Munich, Biden heard a repeated refrain, according to a conference attendee familiar with the conversations: The world needs you.

Citing Biden’s long foreign policy track record and longtime commitment to the trans-Atlantic alliance, some of the leaders — echoing views from across the continent — told Biden that his return to the White House would be a sure way to restore western alliances that President Donald Trump has dramatically fractured.

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While Biden was already likely to enter the race even without the encouragement of foreign leaders, one Democratic Party official close to Biden’s circle said that their support had fueled his appetite to run. He is now widely viewed as likely to announce a 2020 bid in the coming weeks.

These nudges from abroad are a reminder of the heavyweight foreign policy credentials Biden would bring to a Democratic field in which they are currently in short supply. None of Biden’s prospective rivals have the global experience or relationships with foreign leaders that Biden enjoys. But neither do they carry the baggage that comes with decades of involvement in controversial U.S. foreign policy decisions.

A former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Biden has specialized in foreign policy for decades — a key reason why Barack Obama, who had modest credentials of his own in that realm as a freshman senator, tapped Biden to be his 2008 running mate. As vice president, Biden was Obama’s ever-present adviser on world affairs and played a leading role in their adminstration's Iraq and Ukraine policies.

Even some prominent conservatives concede that Biden would bring to the campaign a formidable depth of knowledge of global events, especially compared to his would-be Democratic rivals.

“If you look at this field, Biden is a giant in terms of his actual foreign policy experience. They have nowhere near the hands-on experience that he’s had,” said Ken Weinstein, president of the conservative Hudson Institute. “He spent decades talking to world leaders and in that sense, he’s got far deeper contacts.”

But despite more than two years of near-panic among foreign policy elites over Trump’s approach to the world, it’s not clear how much voters will care about expertise in world affairs. In a February Gallup poll, only 5 percent of Americans ranked foreign policy or national security-related issues as the country’s top problem.

“The electorate is going to decide whether [national security experience] is worth something in this period when elites are being rejected,” Weinstein added.

Biden’s long record also brings vulnerabilities. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served in the first two and a half years of the Obama administration alongside Biden, wrote in his memoir that the vice president had been wrong on “nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Biden’s primary rivals might attack him for his support of George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. And Trump might savage Biden’s risk-averse counsel when Obama was weighing the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Still, Biden’s supporters say his national security credentials will be a major net plus — especially in a field dominated by candidates more versed in the Green New Deal than the Iran nuclear deal.

“He’s been doing this for 30-plus years and even the best foreign policy hands end up being tutored by Joe Biden,” said one former foreign policy adviser to Biden who declined to speak on the record until that person’s former boss makes a decision about 2020. “We have a lot of candidates and unfortunately very few of them have any real depth or experience working in foreign policy issues.”

Joe Biden addresses the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2016. “There is little doubt that his name has a favorable ring in European ears,” says former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt. | Michel Euler/AP Photo

While several declared Democratic contenders have served on Senate committees with foreign policy or national security purviews — Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) on the Senate Intelligence Committee and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — none are associated with major foreign policy achievements, and their campaign pitches focus less on issues like North Korea and Syria than on health care or the economy. Another candidate, Pete Buttigieg, a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve, is a veteran of the Afghanistan war.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was criticized early in the 2016 primary campaign for lacking foreign policy advisers and failing to focusing on global issues in his stump speeches. (Sanders did give an address on foreign policy last October.)

When Warren rolled out an economics-heavy foreign policy vision in a speech and long essay last year, some critics dismissed it as “not as much about foreign policy as it is about reorienting domestic policy.”

Doubts about where the Democratic candidates stand may have fueled the love for Biden on display in Munich last month. Biden is a known quantity for many foreign leaders and other diplomats who have many years of experience dealing with him and his foreign policy advisers. He was a proponent of NATO enlargement, for instance, in the late 1990s and early 2000s—which was instrumental in driving democratic reforms in former Soviet states and ensuring security and prosperity in post-Cold War New Europe.

“There is little doubt that his name has a favorable ring in European ears,” former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who was foreign minister when Biden was vice president, told POLITICO.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark and NATO secretary general in the Obama years, has also told Biden that he hopes he will run for president on a platform of strong U.S. leadership and trans-Atlantic harmony, said a person close to Rasmussen.

“Joe Biden is a good friend and I always enjoy our work together — but he knows his own mind and does not need my advice on whether he should run for President,” Rasmussen told POLITICO by email.

Though few dare say so publicly, thanks to a taboo against seeming to interfere in foreign elections, many European leaders shaken by Trump’s repeated disparagement of the EU and criticisms of NATO would likely not mourn his defeat in 2020. (Notable exceptions include Trump-friendly rulers in Hungary and Poland.)

At the Munich conference, Biden gave a full-throated defense of U.S. engagement abroad. He also criticized the trade wars and tariffs that have marked Trump’s presidency.

“I promise you. I promise you, as my mother would say, ‘This too shall pass.’ We will be back. We will be back. Don’t have any doubt about that,” Biden told the crowd, which capped his speech with a standing ovation.

Biden’s speech on the main stage “raised a lot of eyebrows” that he would be given such prominent space in the program, according to another attendee of the conference. It was “a little bit unusual for a former official to have such a prominent role.” At the same conference, Vice President Mike Pence met a lukewarm reception and only polite applause.

At the conference, Biden met privately with the leaders of Ukraine, Greece, Kosovo and North Macedonia. A conference attendee with knowledge of the matter said some of those leaders urged Biden to run. Biden spokesman Bill Russo declined to comment on the content of his discussions with foreign leaders.

Foreign leaders view Biden “as a safe and consistent pair of hands on foreign policy and that’s what they’re looking for,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, who also attended the Munich conference. “They’re comfortable with him. It’s plausible he can win. He’s a known face on foreign policy.”

Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of State in the Bush administration who introduced Biden before his speech in Munich and interviewed him on stage, noted that “Biden is deeply respected by European leaders and respected not just for the many and many decades of service but for the quality of it.”

“He is seen as a firm trans-Atlanticist. He’s seen as an American leader who believes in American power,” said Burns, summarizing his conversations with European leaders he declined to name.

“There was tremendous interest in him [in Munich] because there are extraordinary levels of frustration, I would say even anger, in the European governments about the Trump administration,” said Burns.

After all of Trump’s broadsides against Europe and the world, former Spanish foreign minister Ana Palacio told POLITICO that “the thought of a Biden candidacy and presidency is reassuring. He represents something familiar.

“More crucially he is deeply committed to the trans-Atlantic community and the rules-based international order,” she added. “Restoring that certainty to the White House would be a boon for a Europe which itself faces so much uncertainty in the near term.”