Leave policy execution to the president
The late U.S. Senator Arthur Vandenberg put it eloquently when he said that U.S. politics must stop at water’s edge. Vandenberg understood that United States has little to gain by presenting a divided front in its dealings with foreign actors and must project its international commitments with credibility and resolve.
This does not imply that we cannot change our foreign policy course or make necessary adjustments to our diplomatic and military strategies, but that we should do so with level-headedness, grounded in objective reality, and after careful assessment of both costs and benefits to our national security.
Once the U.S. government articulates its official position on an issue, we have little to gain by trying to score political points through partisan grandstanding and demagoguery aimed at direct engagement with foreign actors.
Most notably, in 2015, in grotesque breach of the foreign policy protocol, the Republican-led House and Senate invited then Israeli Prime-Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to U.S. Congress without properly notifying the Obama White House. In a sense, they put a foreign leader above the national interests of the United States by giving him the microphone to lobby against the White House’s official position on the Iranian Nuclear Deal.
I am not suggesting that we must not question the foreign policy decisions of our leaders, but that doing so on highly partisan grounds where members of U.S. Congress or statelevel officials take it upon themselves to speak directly to foreign leaders and go on spontaneous international trips representing the United States (in contrast to our official government position) is naïve and amateur at best and dangerous at worst.
The making of foreign policy, especially when you wield the world’s most powerful military, is incredibly complex. This is true because most issues have a multifarious historical background and are not predisposed for off-the-cuff analysis based squarely on current events.
Nevertheless, this is exactly what is happening in our dealings in the Middle East and Central Asia. America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has dominated our TV screens and newspapers for some time, and the Biden administration deserves its fair share of blame for the withdrawal’s botched execution.
What is concerning is how quickly the GOP’s leadership is willing to forget the recent history of the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban which stipulated that the U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan by May 1. By moving forward with the withdrawal, the Biden administration chose what appears to be the least bad option out of the box of terrible choices. It failed, however, to evaluate the Taliban’s ability to gain ground so quickly, and to create a logistical pipeline by which civilians, military personal, and military equipment would be extrapolated out of the region.
Our military and intelligence establishment has some reckoning to do on this topic, and hopefully such efforts are already underway. If the legislative branch wishes to benefit our future foreign policy endeavors, they need to be focusing on two things: 1. asking good questions regarding the decisionmaking processes that led to our miscalculations regarding the withdrawal while demanding that causes be found and addressed, and 2. working to create the infrastructure for smoother, bipartisan transitions between future presidential administrations.
What is not helping is members of U.S. Congress making rogue trips to Afghanistan in an effort to score political points while criticizing the U.S. federal government from foreign soil. Our past and hopefully future foreign policy decisions are rarely partisan. The theories which guide the decision making of our foreign policy are generally not allocable across partisan lines, yet elected officials seem rushed to score cheap points by engaging in partisan “us versus them” rhetoric.
This is especially true in the case of Donald Trump. Although he is within his rights to criticize the sitting administration, his actions deviate from long-established norms abided by former U.S. presidents. Additionally, most of his rhetoric is just that: cheap talk. Contrary to his assertions, there is simply no evidence to suggest that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would have been safer or more efficient under his leadership.
To the contrary, he is mostly responsible for the fiasco. Not only did the Trump administration negotiate a poor deal with the Taliban, but he left the execution of the deal to his successor. Combine this with Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of a free democratic election where the Biden transition team was prevented from having access to crucial national security information, and it is hardly a surprise that the new administration was left to pick from a basket of terrible options with an impossible deadline.
As American citizens and voters, we need to educate ourselves on the topics of foreign policy while realizing that most simple headline-grabbing explanations are not generally accurate. We should aspire to choose level-headed analysis over highly partisan rhetoric advanced by demagogues like Trump.
Our affiliation as Americans should supersede our affiliation as Republican or Democrat or independent. While debating our policy preferences thoroughly and passionately, our elected officials should strive to present a united front when dealing with foreign actors.
The best way of doing this is by responsibly exercising the advise and consent powers enumerated in the constitution, while leaving the actual execution of foreign policy to the White House. Politics should stop at our water’s edge.