The View from Right Field

Big Changes Coming?

Monday is the Democrats’ self-declared day of decision, the day Democratic leaders in Congress have set as their deadline for passing a huge package of new social programs.  Whether it is going to pass – and/or what’s going to be in it – is unclear, but Monday is supposed to be the day. 

The programs include things that European countries already have, so we should have them, too, we are told.  Of course, Democratic leaders don’t explain that Europeans get these benefits because they, i.e., the middle class, pays more taxes than we pay in the United States.  Joe Biden has said that all these new benefits are “free,” by which he means “free” for the middle (and upper middle) class, because taxes are being raised on corporations and the rich and not the middle (and upper middle) class.

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 

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.

The Afghan People Deserve an Apology for What Joe Biden Said Yesterday

At some point in the future, I hope we have a president decent enough and honorable enough to apologize to the Afghan people and the Afghan armed forces, for comments made by Joe Biden yesterday.¹  In defending his decision to leave Afghanistan and the way we are doing it, President Biden said:

“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. …

We gave them every tool they could need. …  

We gave them every chance to determine their own future.  What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.”

“An Indelible Stain on His Presidency”

That was is what Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who was ambassador to Afghanistan under Barack Obama,¹ said of Joe Biden’s policy in Afghanistan a week ago.  As I said on Saturday, Donald Trump deserves much of the blame for how our involvement in Afghanistan ended.

However, President Biden is the one who has been in office for the last seven months.  He is the one who could have changed or modified the policy former President Trump set (he did it in many other areas).  He is the one who could have prepared better for what actually happened, as opposed to what he hoped would happen.  Ultimately, he wanted to leave Afghanistan, and he made the final decision for us to leave as we did.  As Ambassador Crocker said, that decision and what has happened is, and will be, “an indelible stain on his presidency.”
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¹ As well as ambassador to many other countries under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

We Have Been Reduced to Almost Begging in Afghanistan

As the collapse happens in Afghanistan, the United States has been, in effect, reduced to begging the Taliban not to attack our embassy in Kabul.  While the sub-headline in The New York Times talks of our “demand” that the Taliban not attack our embassy there, what we really said was, in effect, if you attack our embassy and we have to close it, we won’t give you money after the war is over

While Joe Biden doesn’t seem to care what happens in Afghanistan, he very much wants to avoid a helicopter-off-the-embassy-roof end to our time there.  That, and apparently only that, would be an unacceptable end of our war in Afghanistan.

Does China Really Think They Can Get Women to Have More Babies by Changing Some Law?

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that China will be removing the last legal barriers to families having as many children as they want.¹  In 1979, China was worried about over-population, so it instituted a strict one-child policy.  Enforcement got quite nasty.

By the 2010s, China had a problem: not enough babies.  The population was aging.  The workforce was going to start shrinking.  In 2015, the one-child policy was changed to two children.²  The increase from one child to two children didn’t work, so earlier this year, the limit was increased to three children.  Now, all of the birth limits will be repealed.

The End State in Afghanistan

Lt. General H.R. McMaster (ret.) and Bradley Bowman wrote in today’s Wall Street Journal about “How to Avert Disaster in Afghanistan” (July 27), but I fear it may be too late.  Afghanistan is beginning to look like South Vietnam in 1975.  When the North Vietnamese attacked in 1975, South Vietnam couldn’t defend all of its territory because of U.S. aid cutbacks.  So President Thieu tried to withdraw to what could be defended.  But once the retreat started, it developed a momentum of its own.

This may be occurring in Afghanistan now.  The Taliban probably isn’t as strong as the North Vietnamese, but once people lose faith in their government to protect them, as happened in South Vietnam and appears to be happening in Afghanistan, it is hard to get it back.

Biden Has Defined Success in His Afghan Exit: Nobody Pulled Off an Embassy Roof By Helicopter

When Joe Biden was asked last week if there was any similarity between Kabul today and Saigon in 1975, he said no:

“None whatsoever.  Zero.  What you had is you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our Embassy.  Six if I’m not mistaken.  The Taliban is not the South, the North Vietnamese army.  They’re not – they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability.  There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy [in Afghanistan].”

He also defended the withdrawal by asking: