Afghan angst erodes America’s global standing
With the end of the US-led airlift from Kabul, many searching questions are being asked about what the chaos in Afghanistan means for US military power amid claims that the “American era” of leadership is drawing to a close. It is too early to definitively answer such questions, but much clearer is that US soft power and moral credibility have taken a significant short-term hit with allies from Asia-Pacific to the Americas. This is troublesome for US President Joe Biden as he seeks to rebuild the country’s global reputation after the travails of the previous era.
While Biden claims he has no regrets about the handling of the US pullout from Afghanistan, key mistakes were made. The US president is correct that not all Afghan forces distinguished themselves on the battlefield in recent weeks, but that only raises the question of whether a slower-paced, calibrated US withdrawal might have forestalled such a precipitous victory by the Taliban.
Inevitably, this is heightening concerns about the credibility and reliability of the US as an ally, particularly in nations such as Taiwan and Ukraine. It is also emboldening US rivals, and not only global terror groups such as Daesh.
In China, for example, the Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper wrote that “the fall of Kabul marks the collapse of America’s international image and credibility.” An editorial in the same outlet forecast that the Afghan withdrawal contains an “omen of Taiwan’s future fate” in that “once a cross-straits war breaks out, while the mainland seizes the island with forces, the US would have to have a much greater determination than it had for Afghanistan, Syria and Vietnam if it wants to intervene.”
While Biden has few strong defenders of his Afghan policy, it is noteworthy that he is framing his actions in the context of wider US national security interests, arguing that
“if you are sitting in Moscow or Beijing, are you happy we left? They’d love nothing better than for us to continue to be totally occupied with what is going on there.”
Far from being the end of the US era of global power, this points to the Afghan withdrawal being a key enabler, rather than impediment, of US overseas engagement, especially in the Asia Pacific. However, even some of Biden’s allies acknowledge that the events of recent weeks, including the chaotic Kabul evacuation, might now mean that the US will not — in the short term — fully recover from the soft power nadir of the last administration.
A Pew poll during the previous presidency, for instance, found that around three quarters of the thousands surveyed internationally had little or no confidence in the previous administration’s global leadership and policies. That is significantly less support than George W. Bush enjoyed at the height of his own foreign policy travails after the controversy of the
Iraq invasion in 2003.
Biden now will seek to course-correct US foreign policy not only by re-embracing alliances and multilateralism but also by becoming a voice of conscience and moral clarity again — a complicated position in the eyes of many in the wake of the Afghan withdrawal.
Yet, while the challenges ahead are huge, the US president is persuaded by the importance of soft power. That is, the ability to achieve goals by attracting and co-opting others, rather than by coercing.
At a time when Washington is facing a series of complex foreign policy challenges, Biden recognizes that his administration will benefit from more engaged, strong and supportive allies. The president is also trying to learn from the successes and failures of Barack Obama’s presidency in this area.
Coming into office in 2009, Obama confronted a situation in which anti-US sentiment was at about its highest level since at least the Vietnam War amid the unpopularity of the Bush administration’s policies. During the Obama years, there was a substantial increase in people outside the country regarding the US as the most admired country in the world again.
Yet, while Obama made progress with global public diplomacy, the scale of the challenge meant that he had left much undone eight years later. Some international observers, for instance, were disappointed by his failure to close Guantanamo Bay, which still remains open for about three dozen inmates, and which Biden hopes to close during his presidency.
In the wake of the Afghan withdrawal, the Biden team now will seek to make a sustained, significant push on these issues in order to turn around the spike in anti-US sentiment that occurred during the previous administration. Despite the recent chaos in Kabul, there is still significant upside opportunity in the next three and a half years as the White House seeks to create a more fertile environment for international covert and overt policy cooperation and information sharing with US officials.