The View from Right Field

Harris? Trump? A Depressing Foreign Policy Election

We’re back from a trip to Berlin and Hamburg, and the Presidential race is as bad as when we left.  Actually, I think it may be worse because the Biden administration is doing even worse in foreign policy now than before we left – and there is no reason to think Kamala Harris will be any different than the Biden administration. 

But first, Donald Trump still doesn’t have the character to be President and that is not going to change. 

On the other side, Joe Biden, and the Biden administration, is still getting it wrong.  In 2014, Robert Gates wrote, of Joe Biden, “I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."  He reaffirmed that statement in 2019.  Since Joe Biden became President, he has continued to get these things wrong on foreign policy and national security.

Joe Biden: Getting Foreign Policy Wrong for 50 Years

In 2014, a former cabinet official from both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations wrote that Joe Biden had "been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."¹  Even though this official likes President Biden as a person and has said President Biden “a man of integrity,” he reaffirmed his statement in an interview in May of 2019. 

And President Biden has continued his string of mistakes and bad decisions since he got into office.  The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster.  President Biden was left with a terrible situation by Donald Trump.  The Trump administration signed what was basically a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020.  While President Biden has said the Trump agreement left him no choice but to go forward with the withdrawal/surrender, that’s not true.  President Biden reversed all kinds of Trump administration decisions.  He could have changed this one, too, but he didn’t want to.  He wanted to get out of Afghanistan, and so we did.  It was the Biden administration that organized, or rather didn’t organize, the withdrawal.  If the withdrawal was a disaster, and if it has damaged the United States’ reputation for reliability and competence abroad, then that was on President Biden and his administration.

Are We Going to Help Ukraine Win? Or Will We Quit Because It’s Too Hard or We Don’t Care Anymore?

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “[t]he U.S. fears Iran is preparing to provide Russia with short-range ballistic missiles for its military campaign in Ukraine”.  At this point, we don’t know if Iran is going to do this, but every expectation is that Russia is planning on another winter of attacks on Ukraine’s cities and power plants; i.e., on its people, its women and children.  This past weekend, they hit Kyiv with the biggest drone attack since the war began.  The addition of Iranian ballistic missiles would only add to the danger.

The problem is that, while the United States, and other countries, have provided Ukraine with a lot, we haven’t provided them with enough weapons and with the right weapons to beat Russia and get this thing over with.  I understand the concern.  Russia has nuclear weapons, and Vladimir Putin has, at times, threatened to use them.  As Constance Stelzenmüller noted in last Wednesday’s Financial Times: “[H]ow can one not empathise with [Jake] Sullivan’s [, Biden’s National Security Adviser,] conviction that he has ‘an obligation to the American people’ to prevent escalatory scenarios?”¹

The U.S. and Russia Are Meeting, But Are We Prepared?

The first year of Joe Biden’s presidency has been taken up with the pandemic, trying to pass big spending bills through a very closely divided Congress, and an economy nobody expected (jobs going begging and inflation we were told couldn’t happen).  There wasn’t much in it about foreign affairs, except the debacle that was the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But the Biden administration’s second foreign policy crisis is coming up this week, and it is unclear how prepared the Administration is.¹  Russian President Vladimir Putin has assembled 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border, a country Russia has already invaded and taken territory from.  President Putin has also issued a series on ridiculous demands (no additional countries can join NATO, NATO can’t base troops in eastern NATO members, and more). 

Famine in Afghanistan: 100 Years Ago Herbert Hoover Showed Us the Way

Reports out of Afghanistan are that famine is coming, if it is not already there:

“[T]he near complete unraveling of the economy has been sudden and dramatic as the US and its allies enforced sanctions after the Taliban swept through the country and seized control. …

Nato members face re-engaging with Afghanistan or watching civilians starve in a famine that the International Crisis Group warns could kill more people than the two decades of fighting that has raged since a US-led coalition first ousted the militants in 2001. …

Biden Said No One Advised Him to Keep Troops in Afghanistan. Top Generals Say They Did.

Joe Biden said, back in August, that, as far as he could recall, his military advisers did not recommend to him that we should keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.  Yesterday, top generals, including Gen. Kenneth "Frank" McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, testified before Congress that they recommended that exact thing to President Biden.¹ 

Obviously, I could see Donald Trump doing something like this.  That is one of the reasons he needed to lose last November.  But Joe Biden wasn’t supposed to do this kind of thing.  He was supposed to be better than former President Trump. 

Who’s Worse on Foreign Policy: Biden or Trump?

Donald Trump did a bad job on foreign policy.  I talked about that a lot, though, eventually, I got tired of saying it over and over, so I mostly stopped.¹  Even though I felt that way about former President Trump, I did not vote for Joe Biden because, in Illinois, I did not need to.  President Biden was going to win Illinois.  And I was very concerned about President Biden’s domestic policy – or, rather, the domestic policy of his supporters.  Still, when President Biden won, I was hopeful American foreign policy would be better than it had been under former President Trump.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t been.

On February 19, President Biden told the Munich Security Conference that “America is back.”  That was the hope: President Biden would restore, or at least start to restore, America’s credibility and reliability around the world.  But the way we left Afghanistan was a disaster.  Obviously, President Biden was handed a terrible mess in Afghanistan.  President Trump signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020, under which we were to leave on May 1, 2021.² 

September 11 – 20th Anniversary

Lots of people will be writing lots of words about the 20th anniversary of September 11.  President Biden will probably talk, inter alia, about how victory over al Qaeda and the death of Osama Bin Laden meant we could get out of Afghanistan.  The Taliban will be talking about how their victory forced us to get out of Afghanistan.  And I am sure former President Trump will have something to say, too.

I will just link to two posts, one that I posted on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, mostly about our visit to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, in 2006.  The other is something I wrote about the movie “United 93” after seeing it, also back in 2006.

Nancy Pelosi Criticizes Representatives’ Trip to Kabul While Apparently Forgetting Her Trip to Damascus in 2007

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been very critical of House members Seth Moulton, a Democrat, and Peter Meijer, a Republican, for their visit on Tuesday to the airport in Kabul.  Representatives Moulton and Meijer said they flew in “crew-only” seats on a plane with empty seats.  Among other things, Speaker Pelosi said, "It's not just about them to Afghanistan, going into the region, there's a cost on our resources as well.  This is deadly serious."

I don’t know if Representatives Moulton and Meijer should have gone, though I do understand their desire to see what was going on for themselves.  In any case, I find Speaker Pelosi’s criticism of the visit a bit funny.  She may not remember 2007 when she led a group to Syria and met with President Bashar al-Assad, even though President George W. Bush said she should not do so.  Because of Syrian support for Hezbollah and interference in Iraq, among other things, the United States had a policy of not meeting with President Assad.  But Speaker Pelosi felt she could decide for herself what was right and the heck with President Bush’s policy.  

After Afghanistan: What Next for American Foreign Policy?

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.