WASHINGTON — The White House defended the voluble vice president Monday, after Joe Biden spent the weekend apologizing for remarks he made that offended key allies in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State extremists.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Biden is someone “who has enough character to admit when he’s made a mistake.”
And Earnest dismissed suggestions that Biden’s remarks had damaged the coalition or that the administration had feared it could, absent an apology.
“We feel confident in the depth of the commitment that countries in the region feel to this strategy that the president has laid out,” Earnest said.
He said that President Barack Obama retains trust in Biden, noting the vice president had twice acknowledged his missteps, when he picked up the phone and called to apologize and when he acknowledged publicly that he’d made the calls.
“The fact of the matter is, the vice president is somebody who continues to be a core member of the president’s national security team,” Earnest said. “He is somebody who has decades of experience in dealing with leaders around the globe, and the president is pleased to be able to rely on his advice as we confront the variety of challenges that are so critical to American national security.”
Earnest wouldn’t say if Biden had apologized to the president for the remarks that infuriated the allies.
Biden was answering questions at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government on Thursday when he veered off script to declare, “Our allies in the region were our largest problem” in preventing the spread of al-Qaida in Syria.
Biden apologized to the United Arab Emirates Sunday for charging that the oil-rich ally had been supporting al-Qaida and other jihadi groups in Syria’s internal war. He also raised ire in Turkey by quoting from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during their meeting during the U.N. General Assembly.
