After the collapse in Afghanistan, the questions for many are: Why did it happen so quickly1 and why we weren’t prepared. Which are good questions. But I have a different question: What’s next for American foreign policy? In that regard, I was surprised by the very negative reaction from Europe to our quick and unilateral pullout from Afghanistan. One might have expected concern from Asia, but the comments from Europe were very interesting. Here are excerpts from an article Wednesday’s Financial Times (behind the FT paywall):
“European allies had hoped Joe Biden’s election to the US presidency would bolster Nato’s relevance after Donald Trump’s acrimonious years. Washington’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan is prompting a rethink.
… EU defence and security officials are publicly and privately voicing criticism of the US decision to repatriate its 2,500 troops, which has precipitated the end of the transatlantic alliance’s longest-running mission. …
‘This kind of troop withdrawal caused chaos. Chaos causes additional suffering,’ Artis Pabris, Latvia’s defence minister, told local radio yesterday. … Unfortunately, the west, and Europe in particular, are showing they are weaker globally.’ He echoed Ben Wallace, UK defence minister, who appeared on the verge of tears on Monday as he reckoned ‘some would not get back’ from the war-torn country. …
Armin Laschet, Germany’s conservative candidate to succeed Chancellor Angel Merkel, called the allied troop withdrawal ‘the greatest debacle Nato has experienced since its foundation.’
‘It looks like Nato has been completely overtaken by American unilateral decision,’ Lord Peter Ricketts, the UK’s former national security advisor, said. ‘The Afghanistan operation was always going to end some time, it was never going to go on forever, but the manner in which it’s been done has been humiliating and damaging to Nato.’ …
Lord George Robertson, who was Nato secretary-general on the day of the twin towers attack in New York and who triggered article five [of the NATO treaty] a few hours later, suggested the US decision to withdraw even as other allies were mounting objections was damaging. ‘It weakens Nato because the principle of in together, out together seems to have been abandoned both by Donald Trump and Joe Biden,’ he said.”2
I always wondered how secure the Baltic states felt with Donald Trump as president.3 Given: (i) our disregard for the opinions of our NATO allies about when and how to leave Afghanistan, when they went in to support us and lost lives there, too; (ii) President Biden’s almost contemptuous comments about the Afghan fighting forces, when we were the ones who cut off support for them on short notice;4 and (iii) the incompetent way we have handled matters over the last few weeks, one wonders how comfortable the Baltic states feel with Joe Biden as president. If President Biden didn’t want to risk American lives to stay in Afghanistan, why would he go into Estonia or Latvia?
Even more than Europe, one wonders how the countries of Asia feel today. Supposedly, one of the reasons the Biden administration wanted to get out of Afghanistan was so they could focus on China. Except I wonder what China thinks about a country that wouldn’t even keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan and then left in such a rushed and incompetent way. Xi Jinping has been reported as seeing the United States as a declining power. I would expect the way we left Afghanistan may be confirming him in that view.
Which leads me to Taiwan. As with the Baltic states, given how President Biden handled Afghanistan, would he handle Taiwan any better? Perhaps more importantly, how does China now view any U.S. commitment to help Taiwan defend itself? If they see us as a declining power and Afghanistan as further evidence of that decline, we may have a real problem. The best way to defend and protect a friend or ally is to make sure there is never a question that you will defend and protect them. Because if there is no question as to what you will do, then you are very unlikely to have to do it. It is when the other side begins to think you might not follow through on your commitments, that things get dangerous. If the other side does something because it thinks you won’t respond, that’s when you can be forced to act. But if there is never a question as to what you will do, the other side won’t take the risk.
Which is my concern about how the Biden administration left Afghanistan: That it may encourage China or Russia to think they can do things or take risks they would not have otherwise done, whether with respect to the Baltics or Taiwan – or someplace else. That is where danger really lies. And that is what made Donald Trump such a dangerous president – and what may be making Joe Biden a similarly dangerous president.
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1 While I compared the situation in Afghanistan to South Vietnam in 1975 (see here and here), I didn’t think it would happen as quickly as it did, although whether it took a week and a half or a couple of months hardly matters. The end result for the Afghan people is the same. As for how many people we will be able to get out, it’s up to the Taliban. While we control the military side of the Kabul airport, the Taliban controls the flight paths. A couple of SAMs, or the threat of a couple of SAMs, would shut down our flights very quickly.
2 Helen Warrell, Guy Chazan, Richard Milne, “Nato allies urge rethink after Biden makes ‘unilateral’ exit,” Financial Times, August 18, 2021.
3 It was one of the reasons I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
4 In complaining about how the Afghan forces fought, President Biden did not mention that, when we left the Bagram Airfield, our main air base in Afghanistan, on July 1, we did so in the middle of the night, turning off the electricity and leaving – without telling the Afghan commander at the base that we were going. The Afghans knew we would be leaving, but we didn’t give them advance notice of the date and time. And yet President Biden criticized the morale of the Afghan forces. (Amy Kazmin, Katrina Manson, “Mistrust and secrecy present gift to Taliban,” Financial Times, August 19, 2021.)
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