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S
enator Joseph Biden is the senior senator from Delaware
and Ranking Minority Member of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. First elected to the Senate in 1972,
Senator Biden is now serving his sixth term. In addition to his leadership
on foreign policy, Senator Biden is also active on legal and
victims’ rights issues as Ranking Minority Member of the Judiciary
Committee’s Crime and Drugs Subcommittee. He is a member of
the Senate National Security Working Group, Senate NATO Observer
Group, and co-chairman of the Senate Delegation to the NATO
Parliamentary Assembly.
SENA
ENATOR
JOSEPH
BIDEN
During his three decades in the Senate, Senator Biden has dedicated
himself to improving U.S. security and championed arms
control as crucial to achieving that goal. For Biden, a top security
priority today is stopping proliferation. He recently wrote, “In
the war on terrorism, our foremost long-term objective must be
to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and the
means to make them.” He holds that there is not a single approach to addressing this danger, and
promotes a combination of policies, including deterrence, security assurances, nonproliferation, diplomacy,
and the use of force if necessary.
Senator Biden backed military action against Iraq last March to enforce UN demands that Saddam
Hussein disarm. Although he was supportive of President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq,
Biden has publicly questioned the administration’s prewar planning and its failure to get the international
community more involved. He warned last September that, “losing the peace in Iraq would
mark a major victory for the forces of tyranny and terrorism and a significant setback for the forces of
progress and modernization…If we fail, the impact on our national security would be grave.”
Senator Biden advocates hardheaded engagement in dealing with Iran and North Korea, the other two
members of President Bush’s “axis of evil.” He supports working closely with our allies to end Iran’s
support for terrorism and its weapons of mass destruction programs. He also favors direct dialogue with
the Iranian government. Biden calls for putting more details on the table about what the United States
would offer North Korea in return for a verifiable dismantlement of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons efforts
and ending North Korea’s exports of ballistic missiles and missile technology.
Senator Biden is sharply critical of two Bush administration proposals for addressing proliferation
threats: building strategic missile defenses and potentially using new nuclear weapons to deter adversaries
or destroy their arms stockpiles. Arguing in May 2003 that nuclear weapons are of a “wholly
different order and magnitude” from all other arms, he said any benefits derived from developing
new types of atomic arms would be “far outweighed by both the risk that they will actually be used
and the dangerous signal that they send to other countries—intentionally or not—that we intend to
fight nuclear wars.” He also views the Bush administration’s strategic missile defense deployment plan this
fall as counterproductive, stating: “The push to deploy that system has been at the expense of making an
effective defense.” In general, Biden rejects unilateral U.S. approaches to dealing with proliferation, and
believes, “We cannot close down proliferation traffic by ourselves.”
Before his election to the Senate, Senator Biden worked as an attorney in Wilmington, Delaware, and
served on the New Castle County Council. He was elected to the Senate before his 30 th birthday, and
is viewed by many congressional experts as the only current lawmaker capable of surpassing the late
Senator Strom Thurmond’s 48 years of Senate service. A constitutional law expert and former Judiciary
Committee chairman, Senator Biden has been an adjunct professor at the Widener University
School of Law since 1991.
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