Biden follow-through of Trump’s desire a catastrophe
WASHINGTON – Can it be that Donald Trump really didn’t leave the presidency? And if he did, why are we left with his foreign policy?
It was Trump’s fondest hope – or dangerous obsession – in his final days in office to withdraw the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan, as the fulfillment of his “America First” ideals. In November 2020, as Trump fought his flailing battle to void the results of a presidential election, he signed an executive order mandating that U.S. troops leave Afghanistan by Jan. 15, 2021.
In an Oval Office meeting with Trump, acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, national security adviser Robert C. O’brien and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all opposed the plan. “They painted a vivid picture,” according to an Axios report, “of Kabul falling to the Taliban if U.S. forces withdrew precipitously in the final days of the Trump presidency.” Trump backed down, later reflecting that he had concerns about leaving behind billions in military equipment to the Taliban. “You remember those scenes [in Vietnam] with the helicopters, right,” he told Axios, “with people grabbing onto the gear? You don’t want that.”
Now, there are reports of Taliban fighters seizing vast supplies of military equipment – including drones, Humvees and mine-resistant vehicles – from the Kunduz airport alone. “Billions of US tax payer $ going to Islamist extremists,” German journalist Julian Röpcke tweeted, “thanks to the administration’s hasty withdrawal without a peace deal or follow up mission.” How long will it take for the Taliban to sell such equipment to China, allowing free access to current U.S. military technology?
This is just a sliver, a fragment, of the strategic and moral disaster President Joe Biden has wrought in Afghanistan. The military and foreign policy establishment was strong enough to resist Trump’s mania for global abdication because the 45th president was a buffoon. The 46th president got his way because he is not. Biden had the foreign policy experience and standing to insist on implementing Trump’s buffoonery – to abide by Trump’s shameful “peace” deal, betray our Afghan partners, and abandon Afghan women and girls to comprehensive repression.
How did the last gasp of “America First” foreign policy become the first priority of the Biden administration? Clearly there is some strange affinity between populist isolationism and the anti-idealism of both President Barack Obama and his former vice president. Obama, you might remember, campaigned for the presidency on a promise of “nationbuilding here at home.” At the height of his betrayal of the Syrian people, he famously argued that the United States had no duty to intervene in “someone else’s civil war.” Biden’s old boss presented his serial abdications as weary realism: “It’s not the job of the president of the United States to solve every problem in the Middle East.”
Obama and Biden have often used the language of progressive internationalism. Yet much of their foreign policy was formulated as a rejection of President George W. Bush’s moralistic internationalism. And if intervention has serious risks, so does unwise disengagement. Obama and Biden’s 2011 withdrawal of U.S. troops from their supportive role in Iraq created a vacuum of power filled by the Islamic State, requiring the return of U.S. forces a few years later. From this, Biden learned absolutely nothing.
The United States’ war in Afghanistan formally ended in 2014. The maintenance of a few thousand troops to support the Afghan military and conduct counterterrorist operations had a cost. But that cost was minimal compared with the price of the Taliban’s complete triumph in Afghanistan – the humanitarian disaster, the harm to American credibility, the destabilizing flow of refugees, the morale boost for Islamism and the likely incubation of new terrorist threats. Over the weekend, I learned, intelligence briefings to members of Congress stressed the possible resumption of al-qaida and similar activity. Some members feel they were previously misled about the pace at which this could happen.
Keeping our commitment in Afghanistan – a small commitment for a superpower – would not have been “kicking the can” down the road. It would have been the wise, sustainable, realistic use of U.S. resources to avoid disaster. The United States has many foreign policy and military commitments that are useful but not ideal or final. There are currently about 6,000 to 7,000 U.S. troops in Africa, as well as hundreds in Honduras and Kosovo. Are these excessive burdens for the United States as well?
There was no political uprising demanding an end to our supportive role in Afghanistan. Our Afghan partners and NATO allies wanted us to stay. The abandonment of that country to some of the worst, most dangerous people on Earth was a decision of ideology, not of necessity. It was a symbolic rejection of America’s post-9/11 global role, obscenely timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of 9/11. This is Biden’s voluntary defeat – and the spiritual victory of Trump’s “America First.”
Michael Gerson’s email address is michaelgerson@washpost.com.