‘Original Sin' and Foreign Policy

It came at a high price, but Joe Biden finally drove his successor off the front pages last week. First came the steady drip of devastating stories about Mr. Biden's closest aides' conspiracy to conceal his mental and physical decline, culminating with the publication of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's 'Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.' On top of that came the news that Mr. Biden has stage 4 prostate cancer.
The most remarkable thing about 'Original Sin' to this reader was the near-total absence of President Biden's foreign-policy team from the account. This isn't because they weren't around or in the know. Messrs. Tapper and Thompson emphasize that both Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan had better and more regular access to the increasingly walled-off president than any other cabinet secretaries or senior aides beyond the inner ring of Biden loyalists that the authors call the Politburo. We also know from many sources that European leaders were worried and puzzled by Mr. Biden's irregular behavior at international meetings. Yet 'Original Sin' focuses much less scrutiny on Mr. Biden's foreign policy team's actions and omissions than on those of his domestic advisers.

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