Biden charting new course for America
WASHINGTON—Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden announced the end of his country’s 20-year involvement in the war in Afghanistan. A day later, he appeared to ramp up a re-emerging cold war with Russia.
Experts I spoke with warned against concluding too much from the juxtaposition of those two events. “I’m always a little reluctant to be in the unified theory pool of foreign policy, you know, ‘Are we seeing the emergence of a Biden Doctrine?’ There’s always so much more pragmatic ad-hockery to these things than I think is suitable for that,” said Laurel Miller of the International Crisis Group.
Still, combined with recent more hostile relations with China, the two announcements mark the closing of one chapter of U.S. foreign and national security, and an emphasis on the next one.
Biden announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan would begin by May 1 and be complete by the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attack that launched the country on the road to that war.
“War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking. We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives,” Biden said in a speech Wednesday. “It’s time to end the forever war.”
Despite Biden’s claims of objectives achieved, no one is declaring victory for the U.S. — after 20 years, $2 trillion (U.S.), and 2,300 U.S. deaths, nothing resembling victory appears possible at this point. “We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create the ideal conditions for our withdrawal, expecting a different result,” Biden said.
The timing of the announcement coincides with an agreement former president Donald Trump had made with the Taliban to withdraw by May 1, and comes despite warnings that a U.S. withdrawal now could lead to a renewed Taliban takeover of the country and a brutal humanitarian crisis.
“There were no good decisions,” Miller says of the choice Biden faced. “There’s no decision he could make that would widely be regarded as a good decision.”
As an insight into Biden’s emerging foreign policy, Miller says “ripping the bandage off” now shows he’s clearing the decks of an issue he doesn’t want to come to own as three former presidents have.
“On a hard decision, the easiest thing to do is something that feels more like doing nothing,” Miller says. “He’s certainly more decisive than Obama in that regard. I think that’s something to watch for when the inevitable crises of foreign policy happen.”
Then on Thursday, Biden announced economic sanctions against Russia and the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats from Washington. It is a response to Russia’s attempts to influence the 2020 U.S. election, the Crimean occupation, and the hacking of SolarWinds. Bloomberg has said the sanctions on buying Russian foreign debt announced by Biden have been viewed as a diplomatic “nuclear option.”
Though Trump’s administration did impose sanctions on Russia, the former president refused to openly condemn the country. On Thursday, Biden aligned his rhetoric with the announced government policy.
“If Russia continues to interfere with American democracy, I’m prepared to go further,” Biden said Thursday afternoon at the White House. He said he hoped Russia would de-escalate and allow a more stable relationship between the two countries, but that, “When Russia seeks to interfere with the United States, we will respond.”
Miller said this move shares, with Biden’s Afghanistan decision, the quality of “cleaning up.” “There’s clearly an interest in the Biden administration separating itself from how the Trump administration managed Russia, and being clear about being more decisive,” Miller said.
The more aggressive posture toward Russia threatens to ramp up tension in a re-emerging cold war between the countries, something senior administration officials said Biden hopes to avoid. Earlier this week Biden sent an invitation to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin for a summit in a third country.
“We hope for de-escalation. We hope for a stable and predictable way forward,” one said. “But that’s — that’s really a matter for Russia.”
This comes at a time when the U.S. relationship with China has also become more openly confrontational — a U.S.-China summit in Alaska last month saw accusations of “grandstanding” and “gunpowder and drama” traded between diplomats.
University of Toronto U.S. foreign policy expert Seva Gunitsky sees a long-emerging change in U.S. priorities. “It’s part of a shift in the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy from counterterrorism to great power competition. It’s a pivot that has been building for a while, but it also means Afghanistan becoming a lesser priority than China and Russia.”
As for what that might mean for Canada — which is joining the U.S. alongside the EU, UK and Australia in imposing some sanctions in response to Russia’s ongoing occupation in Crimea — Gunitsky says it’s not clear.
“Very hard to speculate what it means for Canada. Relations with China and Russia aren’t great anyway, and if the U.S. takes a more adversarial stance in places like Ukraine, where Canada has already shown a willingness to step in, then I expect Canada and the U.S. will continue in even closer lockstep together on these issues.”
The Afghanistan decision might have a more obvious effect in Canada, according to U of T historian and international relations expert Robert Bothwell. As others have noted, the U.S. withdrawal is likely to lead to tens or hundreds of thousands of refugees being displaced. Eliot A. Cohen of Johns Hopkins University has argued the U.S. has a moral obligation to welcome them. Bothwell says Canada may wind up doing so.
“A lot of them will come here,” he says. “Plainly, as with the Vietnamese refugees, a lot of them will consider coming here, whether it’s because the Americans won’t let them in or whether they actually prefer it. So we’ll be bearing the cost. I don’t think it’ll be like Syria. But I’m sure that we’re looking at something like 10,000 or 20,000 for Canada.”