It is not unusual that a presidential incumbent has a campaign advantage in his second election. President Barack Obama’s supporters liked to say, “GM is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead.” To beat an incumbent president, a rare historical occurrence, the challenger’s foreign policy bona fides must be solid, especially when troops are deployed around the world.

That is the considerable advantage that former vice president Joe Biden has in the Democratic primary race against contenders with little foreign policy experience or with irresponsible, extreme views that put off a lot of voters. In New York on Tuesday, Biden delivered remarks seeking to capitalize on that advantage.

“Make no mistake: this outcome of strategic setbacks, heightened threats, chants of “Death to America” once more echoing across the Middle East, Iran and its allies vowing revenge — this was avoidable,” he said. “The seeds of these dangers were planted by Donald Trump himself on May 8, 2018 — the day he tore up the Iran nuclear deal, against the advice of his own top national security advisers.” Biden argued that the trouble started “the day [Trump] turned his back on our closest European allies and decided it was more important to him to destroy any progress made by the Obama-Biden administration than build on it to create a better, safer world.”

Biden’s argument is that careful diplomacy and measured use of force had kept Iran at bay. Now, however, “a president who says he wants to end endless war in the Middle East is bringing us dangerously close to starting a new one,” Biden warned. “A president, who says he wants out of the region, sends more than 18,000 additional troops to deal with a crisis of his own making. And an administration that claims its actions have made Americans safer in the same breath urges them to leave Iraq because of increased danger.”....

If Biden’s aim was to sound like the adult in the room, the one with every ally on speed dial, he largely succeeded. He will benefit in making a clear distinction between himself and candidates who promise to bug out of the Middle East immediately or sound as though they are making excuses for an evil regime. Biden understands that average Americans do not want a war with Iran, but neither do they want to feel as though the terrorists have free reign. Just as in health care — as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) recently learned from her fumble on Medicare-for-all — Democratic candidates who get themselves too far to the left on matters of war and peace risk viability in the general election. Biden — who boasts the biggest lead over Trump in head-to-head matchups, according to the latest Morning Consult poll — seems to understand this. Whether the others do will determine whether their electability argument collapses.

Joe Biden on Tuesday ripped into President Donald Trump’s handling of the growing crisis with Iran, demanding the president provide evidence showing the drone strike that took out a top Iranian military official truly was aimed at preventing what the administration has insisted was an “imminent threat.”

In a speech in New York following a fundraiser, Biden slammed Trump for offering “tweets, threats and tantrums” and “shifting explanations” rather than “levelheaded words meant to dial down the tensions” with Iran. Pointing to the president’s rocky history with the truth, Biden asserted that “if there was an imminent threat that required this extraordinary action, then we are owed an explanation, and the facts to back it up.”

The former vice president, now a frontrunner in the Democratic race to challenge Trump for the White House in November, blasted the president, accusing him of isolating America on the international stage while potentially bolstering Iran, China and Russia and threatening to severely limit Washington’s options for de-escalation if the U.S. gets bogged down in yet another conflict in the Middle East.

Tensions between Washington and Tehran have quickly reached a boiling point in the days since last week’s U.S. drone strike, which killed Iran’s top military commander at the Baghdad airport, with worries rising that the U.S. is on the brink of war with Iran.