By Alexander Kostyuk

In August 2016, three months before the presidential elections, Vice President Biden published an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “Building on Success: Opportunities for the Next Administration.”

At that time, Vice President Biden addressed his message to the US presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Foreign policy, where the US faced the growing challenges, was the main component of that address.

According to Henry Kissinger, the second decade of the 2000s, during the Obama administration, was a continuous challenge to the world order. In 2015, Kissinger said: “The United States has not faced a more diverse and complex array of crises since the end of the Second World War.” In 2016, Mac Thornberry and Andrew Krepinevich went ahead and declared that “during the last eight years, as a result of Obama administration’s ineffective strategy, the United States has seen its influence decline and the threats to its interests grow”.

In 2015, Kissinger addressed a message related to the US foreign policy and Russia from the point of view of the strategy: “Still, Russia is mounting an offensive on the border on which, paradoxically, it is least inherently threatened…We need to address the immediate challenges Russia poses while also defining a context for its long-term role in the international equilibrium.”

While giving advice to the next US President in 2016, Vice President Biden could not fail to remember Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Russia’s hybrid aggression in Ukraine in 2014, as well as the challenges to the world order in Syria and the US mission in Afghanistan, which had already crossed into its second decade.

As time has shown, the challenges of the second decade of the 2000s were only a prelude to the problems of the third decade, and Vice President Biden’s advice in 2016 was actually addressed to him, but as president of a country that faced these challenges in the early 20s.

So, what did Vice President Biden advise President Biden in 2016? What advice did he give regarding Russia? How did Vice President Biden incorporate that message addressed by Kissinger in his foreign policy advice in 2016?

“The same is true with regard to Russia, with which the United States should continue to pursue a policy that combines the urgent need for deterrence, on the one hand, with the prudent pursuit of tactical cooperation and strategic........

© Eurasia Review