Promise Me, Dad:, by Joe Biden: on Foreign Policy

Joe Biden: Repair US relations with Central America's Northern Triangle

At one point soon after, the president asked me to take over the job o repairing our wobbly relations across the entirety of the Americas--the Northern Triangle, Brazil, the Caribbean, everything.

A few weeks after that I was headed to Guatemala for a two-day summit with the leaders of the Northern Triangle countries. My job was to persuade them that they had to make the hard political choices that would convince the United States Congress to fund their Alliance for Prosperity.

Joe Biden: Russia vs. Ukraine: Big country beating up a smaller one

I was the point man for our administration on the crisis, which was exactly where I wanted to be. There were academics in the news saying Ukraine was bound to be a defeat for the West, & it would be an unwelcome albatross on my neck if I ran for president in 2016. "He's tied to Ukraine policy," a presidential scholar from Pennsylvania told a reporter. "So he could be vulnerable." I didn't much care. There was an important principle at stake: big countries ought not to beat up smaller ones, especially after they had given their word not to. Ukraine had given up its nuclear weapons program years earlier--in return for a guarantee from the U.S., the United Kingdom, AND RUSSIA to respect its borders and its sovereignty. Two of the three larger countries had kept that promise.

Joe Biden: Create secure, democratic, middle-class Western Hemisphere

"The changes under way give all of us an opportunity to look at the hemisphere in a very different way: I think we should be talking about the hemisphere as middle class, secure, and democratic. From Canada to Chile and everywhere in between."