Lee Cohen

Joe Biden’s hostility to Britain only harms the United States

(photo: Getty)

This week Joe Biden is swanning around Ireland in what must be, according to his Irish-American fantasies, the climax of his foreign policy agenda. As part of his trip he is due to spend only half a day in Belfast, before dedicating two and a half days to Ireland.

While most US presidents pride themselves on being ‘American as apple pie’, Biden identifies as ‘Irish as Paddy’s pig’. There are some in America, where those of Irish descent are a significant demographic, who find this quaint. But indulging his distant inherited grievance at the cost of a strong relationship with Britain, our most stalwart of allies, is pernicious and self-indulgent.

For Biden, Britain-hatred seems to be both personal and politically convenient

Joe Biden’s cognitive challenges are now overwhelmingly apparent to anyone not deliberately overlooking them. But his deep-seated animosity for mother England – to whom we Yanks owe everything for setting the foundations of the globe’s once most successful and freest democracy – well predates the onset of this. And his animosity is troubling beyond measure at a time when western values are being assailed by autocracies around the world.

For Biden, Britain-hatred seems to have been both personal and politically convenient. Raised in blue-collar, heavily Irish Scranton Pennsylvania among his mother’s family, the Finnegans, and schooled by nuns at Catholic school, Biden was steeped in the exaggerated but dated folklore of Irish grudge. It then suited his local political rise to push the Irish persona, playing off the popular and political esteem for the Kennedys, even as that family left any anti-British grievances behind.

Highly visible during the Troubles, then-senator Biden displayed staunch solidarity with the terrorist Republican cause. In 1985, he opposed British rule in Northern Ireland – even though it was and remains supported by a majority of people living there – and worked assiduously to oppose an extradition treaty with Britain that would have affected members of the Irish Republican Army who had fled to the United States.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Written by
Lee Cohen
Lee Cohen, a senior fellow of the Bow Group and the Bruges Group, was adviser on Great Britain to the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and founded the Congressional United Kingdom Caucus.

Topics in this article

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in