Countdown to Catastrophe

How the Biden Administration trashed American foreign policy

“How can we screw this one up?” The Biden team plots its next debacle.

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Introduction

The period 2021-24 spanned a low point for America on the world stage: The presidency of Joe Biden, which was disastrous for the country in terms of its global reputation. America was shown to be an unreliable, faithless ally whose foreign policy was marked by fecklessness, timidity, incompetence, and magical thinking. America’s adversaries around the world took note of this and conducted themselves accordingly. The good times rolled for the Taliban, for Iran, for China, for Russia—whose leaders saw in the American president a hollow man, easily intimidated. Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza: The countdown to catastrophe began on that day that Joe Biden took the presidential oath of office. Here’s how it went…

Three…

It began with the great Afghanistan skedaddle, the most disgraceful episode in the annals of American foreign policy since the fall of South Vietnam in 1975.

It was Donald Trump who, in his first term, cobbled together the original Afghanistan withdrawal plan. No doubt he wanted to reap the plaudits attendant on ending a ‘forever war,” though in fact the United States had long since ended its ground combat mission. There were around 2,000 troops still stationed in Afghanistan, but theirs was a “presence” mission, and there was no real reason why they needed to be withdrawn.

Trump had no opportunity of executing his plan, however: In 2020 he lost the White House to Joe Biden, who inherited America’s Afghanistan commitment. Under his leadership, if that’s the word for it, the US exit from Afghanistan unfolded as an epic debacle, during which thirteen US service members lost their lives in a suicide bombing outside the Kabul airport. With the clarity of hindsight, we can see that Biden’s hubris, incompetence, and stupidity in the summer of 2021 was the undoing of his presidency.

Subsequently, Biden’s apologists claimed that the Afghanistan disaster was really Trump’s fault: Hadn’t it been him with which the withdrawal plan originated? This excuse skated past a couple of inconvenient facts.

(1) The panicky chaos attendant on America’s exist from Afghanistan was due solely to Biden’s abysmally poor judgement. His military advisers warned that the hasty withdrawal he ordered would undermine the Afghan National Government and bring the Taliban back to power. He ignored them.

(2) Despite the criticisms that his apologists directed at Trump, the truth was that Biden embraced his predecessor’s plan and even accelerated it. In other areas, for example border security, Biden didn’t hesitate for a nanosecond to reverse Trump’s policies. But on Afghanistan, he went along with Trump’s policy. And he made a mess of it.

The fallout from the Afghanistan skedaddle spread far and wide. Domestically, President’s Biden’s approval rating with the American people took a hit from which it never recovered. Around the world, it signaled to allies and bad actors alike that America’s word was worthless. Returning to power, the Taliban was justifiably confident that all Biden’s talk about looking out for the women and girls of Afghanistan & etc. was so much hot air. And in Russia, V. Putin was an appreciative spectator of America’s humiliation. Nor was he hesitant to take advantage of it.

Two…

When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, President Biden’s first reaction was typical of him: He offered Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a plane ride out of the country. Only after Ukraine turned back the Russian offensive in the Kiev region, inflicting severe losses on the Russian Army, did Biden sound a note of bellicosity. And for a few months it really did seem that he intended to give Ukraine the support it needed to capitalize on its early successes and inflict a significant military defeat on the invader. The Russian armed forces had proved themselves far less formidable than many people expected and the Ukrainians, though outnumbered, were putting up a skillful and spirited defense.

But it was not to be.

Right from the beginning, V. Putin had Joe Biden’s number. He knew that threats and saber rattling would intimidate the American president, making him second-guess himself and flinch from backing up his tough talk with tough action. And hag-ridden as he was by fears of “escalation,” Biden performed just as the Russian despot expected.

As the war dragged on, Biden and his national security team descended into confusion. They dithered and debated among themselves over the scale of military aid to Ukraine: Which weapons systems would be “provocative”? What might Putin do if the US and NATO supplied Ukraine with long-range missiles, modern tanks, modern combat aircraft? And instead of weighing those questions in terms of actual Russian capabilities, they tried to read Putin’s mind. They seemed particularly frightened of the possibility that if pushed too far, he might resort to the use of nuclear weapons.

But since anything is possible, psychoanalyzing the enemy is a recipe for paralysis. The proper approach is to weigh the question in terms of the enemy’s capabilities: not what he might do, but what he could do. Approaching the question from that angle would have made it clear that Putin’s nuclear option really was no option at all.

The net effect of Biden’s pusillanimity was to reduce American policy on the Russo-Ukrainian War to incoherence. What was that policy? To enable Ukraine to win the war and recover its lost territories? To bring Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table? Who could say? The military aid that the US and NATO were supplying was sufficient to keep Ukraine in the fight, but insufficient to move either the strategic or the diplomatic needle. It produced nothing but stagnation and stalemate. Now the war is entering its third year, with the possibility of an outcome favorable to Ukraine, NATO, and the US much reduced. Biden’s apologists run around yelling that Trump is Putin’s puppet—but the record reflects that the Russian despot pulled Joe Biden’s strings with great skill.

Subsequently Biden, seconded by his apologists, congratulated himself for making the NATO alliance “stronger than ever.” He meant by this that Finland and Sweden had decided to join NATO, claiming the credit that really was due to V. Putin. His aggressive behavior so alarmed the Finnish and Swedish governments that they decided to abandon their long-maintained policy of neutrality and seek membership in NATO.

One…

When Hamas invaded southern Israel on October 7, 2023, President Biden’s professions of all-out support for the Jewish state ought to have been viewed askance. By then he had a track record, after all. But his resolute rhetoric was, in the moment, taken at face value.

There seemed to be good reasons for doing so. Over the long course of his career, the President had acquired the reputation of being one of the Democratic Party’s staunchest supporters of Israel. And how could an American president not take a strong stand against the pogrom that Hamas had carried out: a bloodbath featuring sadistic murder and torture, rape, hostage taking?

Biden being Biden, however, he soon remined people that talk, especially his talk, is cheap.

In some ways the President’s response to 10/7 replicated his response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: ringing statements of support followed by a policy of caveats, half-measures, and hand wringing. But it was a far more despicable performance than the Biden Administration turned in over Ukraine. In that instance, though Biden & Co. were craven and cowardly, they had excuses, however specious, for their behavior. This could never be said for their behavior over the Hamas pogrom and the Gaza war, for it arose from the basest political motives and was designed to appease some of the very worst people in America and around the world.

His initial strong support for Israel presented Biden with a vexing political problem. A significant faction of the Democratic party is “anti-Zionist”: hostile in varying degrees to the Jewish state. In some cases, this hostility amounts to outright antisemitism, as was exhibited by the members of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Squad in the House of Representatives, as well as by members of the wider House Progressive Caucus. Then there were the hordes of progressives on American campuses and city streets, whose response to the Hamas pogrom was a horrifying outburst of antisemitic hatred and support for Islamofascist terrorism. And finally, there were various communities, especially in the electoral swing state of Michigan, with large Muslim populations—communities where hatred of Israel and the Jews was freely and often viciously expressed.

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party leadership tried to solve their political problem by catering to those elements. The former strong supporter of Israel morphed into a bitter critic of the Jewish state, constantly whining and complaining about the intransigence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, wringing his hands over Israeli “carpet bombing” in Gaza, demanding a “humanitarian pause” in the fighting that could only benefit Hamas, withholding military aid to Israel, and generally behaving as if the Jewish state bore sole responsibility for the war. And he did this to shore up his position with the progressive Left in advance of the 2024 election.

Fittingly, this policy of appeasement on the home front availed him nothing. Biden could never be sufficiently “anti-Zionist” to placate his progressive critics and the river-to-sea campus genocide movement. And diplomatically, the Biden Administration’s support for a ceasefire followed by the implementation of a “two-state solution” reduced the US to irrelevance. Nobody on the spot took this fantasy seriously, it being obvious that among the victims of Hamas’s vicious pogrom was the two-state solution itself. Later he was forced off the Democratic ticket, his senile decay having become apparent, and his replacement, the hapless Kamala Harris, who similarly strived to placate the Jew bashers, lost to Donald Trump.

Conclusion

Joe Biden likes to point to the fact that nobody in American public life had made the acquaintance of more foreign leaders than he had. Given his gross and often shameful mismanagement of American foreign policy, this boast is about on a par with that of the traveler who has visited all fifty US states, spending a day or two in each one. Quantity is far less important than quality, and the dismal record of the former president’s public career reveals that all those handshakes left him none the wiser. They certainly did nothing to bolster America’s reputation as a reliable ally or as a power to be feared and respected.

The Democratic Party is the unhappy inheritor of this foreign policy train wreck. No doubt one reason for their comically hysterical denunciations of Führer Trump and his MAGA stormtroopers is a desperate attempt to distract attention from the mess that the Biden Administration left behind. They say that Trump’s Mideast peace plan is crazy. They say that his policy on Ukraine is tantamount to treason. Well, when did Joe Biden ever had a better idea regarding those or any foreign policy issues? Pretty much never.