Joe Biden's Imperfect Theory of Foreign Policy
Joe Biden's Imperfect Theory of Foreign Policy
A few thoughts on Franklin Foer's Afghanistan retrospective
Two years ago this month, the Biden administration was consumed with the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, leading to the rapid evacuation of over 124,000 Americans, allies, and Afghans who supported the generation-long U.S. presence in Afghanistan.1 This happened despite the preference of many national security elites to maintain a U.S. military presence in the country. It is ironic to note that despite the bipartisan popularity of criticizing foreign policy elites for being out of touch with the common man, it seems pretty clear that the Afghanistan withdrawal was the moment when Joe Biden’s approval numbers went underwater.
It’s not hard to see why. Even though Americans supported withdrawal in theory, the practice was a mess. Thirteen U.S. soldiers died in a suicide attack at the Kabul airport; a U.S. drone strike killed 10 innocent civilians. The chaotic implementation of the withdrawal is a blemish for U.S. foreign policy.2
On this two-year anniversary, The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer has a cover story, “The Final Days,” that discusses what went down in August 2021. It’s an extract from Foer’s forthcoming book entitled, “The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future.”3
The whole extract is worth a read. You can feel the anguish of Jake Sullivan, Lloyd Austin, and other members of Biden’s national security team as things go south. You can see how the foreign policy bureaucracy badly misread the evolving situation.4 You can see that these same foreign policy professionals had a lot of skin in the game when it came to Afghanistan.5 You can also see what makes Joe Biden a good politician: being able to absorb the relatives of dead soldiers yelling “I hope you burn in hell” at him, or sticking by his beleaguered national security team even as outside critics were piling on.6
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts, however, would instead like to focus on Joe Biden’s working theory of foreign policy. Here are the relevant passages:
Amid the crisis, a crisis that taxed his character and managerial acumen, the president revealed himself. For a man long caricatured as a political weather vane, Biden exhibited determination, even stubbornness, despite furious criticism from the establishment figures whose approval he usually craved. For a man vaunted for his empathy, he could be detached, even icy, when confronted with the prospect of human suffering.
When it came to foreign policy, Joe Biden possessed a swaggering faith in himself. He liked to knock the diplomats and pundits who would pontificate at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Munich Security Conference. He called them risk-averse, beholden to institutions, lazy in their thinking. Listening to these complaints, a friend once posed the obvious question: If you have such negative things to say about these confabs, then why attend so many of them? Biden replied, “If I don’t go, they’re going to get stale as hell.”
From 12 years as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—and then eight years as the vice president—Biden had acquired a sense that he could scythe through conventional wisdom. He distrusted mandarins, even those he had hired for his staff. They were always muddying things with theories. One aide recalled that he would say, “You foreign-policy guys, you think this is all pretty complicated. But it’s just like family dynamics.” Foreign affairs was sometimes painful, often futile, but really it was emotional intelligence applied to people with names that were difficult to pronounce. Diplomacy, in Biden’s view, was akin to persuading a pain-in-the-ass uncle to stop drinking so much. (emphasis added)
I may be just a small-town political scientist trafficking in some minor foreign policy theories, but I reckon that Joe Biden might not be completely correct in his assessment of foreign affairs.7
To be fair, he is partially correct. When dealing with friendly actors with plenty of common interests, Biden’s implicit theory works pretty well. This might explain why Biden has excelled at the “gardening” element of his foreign policy — i.e., tending to allies and partners. NATO is stronger than ever, expanding to include Finland and soon Sweden. The trilateral partnership between Japan, South Korea, and the United States in Northeast Asia has been strengthened; the Camp David summit between the three leaders of those countries would have been unthinkable during the Trump years. The Quad, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, the imminent strategic partnership with Vietnam — all concrete wins! Even in the areas where U.S. foreign policy has ruffled the feathers of friends — AUKUS, the Inflation Reduction Act — Biden and his team have been pretty deft at not letting those wounds fester.
That said, the notion that foreign policy can be reduced to gladhanding diplomacy is absurd, and elsewhere in the article Biden betrays the fact that he knows there are other factors. Consider this paragraph from Foer:
Biden took pride in ending an unhappy chapter in American history. Democrats might have once referred to Afghanistan as the “good war,” but it had become a fruitless fight. It had distracted the United States from policies that might preserve the nation’s geostrategic dominance. By leaving Afghanistan, Biden believed he was redirecting the nation’s gaze to the future: “We’ll be much more formidable to our adversaries and competitors over the long term if we fight the battles for the next 20 years, not the last 20.”
This is a solid strategic insight! I agree with it! But it also means telling a lot of folks across the Greater Middle East that U.S. priorities are pivoting elsewhere. This was bound to trigger strategic responses by these actors, responses that probably complicate U.S. strategic interests. Countries like China can exploit such opportunities. So even if the Afghanistan withdrawal was a net strategic gain, there were going to be costs.
If Biden dismissed observations like that from his staff because it sounded too theoretical, well, it might explain why Biden’s team has not had the greatest track record with countries like, say, Saudi Arabia.
I think Biden can justify the big decisions he made regarding Afghanistan in the first six months of his term. The notion that it was flawlessly executed or above critical reproach is ludicrous, however. Furthermore, I hope someone in the White House has the gumption to tell Joe Biden that it’s not a bad thing to have a working theory of U.S. foreign policy. Rather, it’s a bad thing to believe that you are somehow above theory. Rules of thumb are often just a piss-poor substitute for thinking systematically about the world.
Kevin Drum hates the association of the word “chaotic” with the Afghan withdrawal. I get that the evacuation of over 120,000 people from Kabul in about ten days is a marvel of logistics. That said, give me a fucking break. There is no way to read Foer’s article without coming away with an appreciation for the monumental shitstorm that was Afghanistan in August 2021.
Whatever the merits of the book, the folks at Penguin outdid themselves with the book cover.
Foer writes, “Within the State Department there was a strongly held belief: Even after August 31, the embassy in Kabul would remain open.” He also notes, in a perfect sentence summarizing what it’s like when analysts are overtaken by events: “Intelligence assessments asserted that the Afghan military would be able to hold off the Taliban for months, though the number of months kept dwindling as the Taliban conquered terrain more quickly than the analysts had predicted.”
Foer writes, “Sullivan sometimes felt as if every member of the American elite was simultaneously asking for his help…. When Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, went to check in with members of a task force working on the evacuation, she found grizzled diplomats in tears. She estimated that a quarter of the State Department’s personnel had served in Afghanistan. They felt a connection with the country, an emotional entanglement. Fielding an overwhelming volume of emails describing hardship cases, they easily imagined the faces of refugees. They felt the shame and anger that come with the inability to help.”
Foer writes, “Some critics had clamored for Biden to fire the advisers who had failed to plan for the chaos… to make a sacrificial offering in the spirit of self-abasement. But Biden never deflected blame onto staff. In fact, he privately expressed gratitude to them. And with the last plane in the air, he wanted Blinken and Sullivan to join him in the private dining room next to the Oval Office as he called Austin to thank him. The secretary of defense hadn’t agreed with Biden’s withdrawal plan, but he’d implemented it in the spirit of a good soldier.”
The fact that this worldview sounds eerily similar to how Donald Trump thinks about foreign policy is… interesting, to say the least.
How in the name of the FSM do you look at Biden's worldview and say it has any similarities, much less eerie ones, to Trump's? Unless you mean they both see FP as something shaped by individuals and therefore you gotta figure out how to deal with those individuals - and if that's the case, allow me to utter a ringing "Duh!"
It's like saying there are eerie similarities between Trump and Biden because they are both carbon-based lifeforms.
When terrible things happen, there is a natural desire to believe they could have been avoided. However, that doesn't mean that they could have. Dr. Dresner heaps blame on Biden, with not a word about the real culprits, beginning with the Bush administration, who stupidly refused to negotiate with the Taliban and instead embarked on a witless, half-hearted attempt to turn Afghanistan into a semblance of a bourgeois democracy and instead created an oppressive kleptomaniac state that systematically robbed the Afghan people, resting entirely on American military power than routinely murdered hundreds of Afghan civilians every year. When Obama came in, the Pentagon, refusing to admit failure, blackmailed him into continuing the war, despite Biden's correct advice to the contrary. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was foremost in refusing to accept responsibility for the ongoing disaster that our presence in Afghanistan had become, but he had a great deal of assistance, from the whole great military intellectual complex--the State Department, the defense contractors, the DC think tanks dependent on the Pentagon and the defense contractors, and even a few "independent" academics. The Pentagon even succeeded in bullying Trump, who naturally lacked the energy to do more than harange his generals when the mood struck him. I would point out that when the Soviets left Afghanistan, the puppet government they set up lasted several years. Biden was told our puppet regime would last, well, months. Instead, it lasted minutes. Criticizing Joe Biden for the final few days of what amounted to a twenty-year travesty, not a Potemkin village but a Potemkin country, is like blaming him for not having a crystal ball. Try harder, professor.