Foreign Policy Follies

On the long march to global incoherence with Obama/Biden/Harris

Kabul, August 2021: A scene from Biden’s Great Afghanistan Skedaddle

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Most of what Kamala Harris has to say on the campaign trail is highly processed, spiked with artificial colors and flavors, full of empty calories. A case in point is her rote response to any question touching on the current crisis in the Middle East: We need an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the safe return of the hostages held by Hamas, and a two-state solution.

Gee, thanks for that.

Left out of the Vice President’s answer is any description of the means by which she proposes to get there from here. And the same goes for the Biden Administration whose policy, if you can call it that, comes down to the same thing as her memorized line. The intransigence of Hamas has scuttled every US attempt to obtain a Gaza ceasefire; the President tells his foreign policy team to Keep fucking trying. One is reminded of the classic definition of insanity.

Much is made of Donald Trump’s disorganized thinking and fabulism, but even he’d be hard pressed to cook up the pig’s breakfast that passes for American foreign policy today. Biden & Co. were disastrously wrong on Afghanistan, their efforts to placate and appease the Islamic Republic of Iran verged on the farcical, they made a mess of their policy on the Russo-Ukrainian War, and they’ve reduced themselves to irrelevance in the Middle East. It was as if in January 2021, the principals got together in a State Department conference and room and asked each other: How would we manage US foreign policy if we were a bunch of fools?

But though Biden and his minions deserve plenty of blame for the current mess, its origins go back to the reign of The Greatest President Who Absolutely Ever Was, He of the Perfect Trouser Creases, His Eminence Barack H. Obama. It was he who first embraced the grand illusion of a rapprochement with the Islamic Republic, while putting “daylight” between America and its closest Middle East ally, Israel. All subsequent errors and catastrophes flowed from this misbegotten policy.

Obama, who could never be accused of underestimating his own brilliance, came into office with the intention of putting an end to the war on terrorism. He was not foolish enough to think that the US could simply wash its hands of the Middle East, but he wanted to reduce America’s footprint in the region. America must therefore distance itself from Israel, liquidate its military commitment to Iraq and, above all, induce Iran to forego its support for terrorism and its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. The Islamic Republic was to become a reliable negotiating partner in pursuit of peace. Hilariously, this was compared to the Nixon/Kissinger opening to China.

It was a policy based on the idea that there exists a party of moderates in the Iranian regime, which could be empowered by American concessions. That this was a delusion was shown clearly by the Obama Administration’s attempt to negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The ayatollahs of course had no intention of giving up their atomic ambitions. They simply pocketed every American concession until the proposed agreement was to their liking, i.e. until it left Iran free to reach the threshold of nuclear capability, with the ability to cross it at any time.

The Administration’s policy toward Israel was the mirror image of its policy toward Iran: The Jewish state was pushed away, lectured and chided, denounced for its obstructionism over the implementation of a “two-state solution” to the long-running conflict between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs. Obama & Co. embraced that hardly perennial of progressive policy on the Middle East: that everything else depended on a resolution of that conflict. In reality, the converse was the case. By the time Obama entered office, the two-state solution was a dead letter. The Administration’s daylight policy served only to poison US/Israeli relations while encouraging Palestinian intransigence.

Finally, Obama decreed a military pullout from Iraq—for no better reason than to claim bragging rights. The President crowed that he has “ended a war,” a claim that was undermined by the rise of ISIS and the return of US forces to that country.

It will be noted that the mistakes made by the Obama Administration have been faithfully replicated by the Biden/Harris Administration. Just as Obama strove to be the un-George W., Biden has striven to be the un-Trump. Though Trump’s foreign policy was erratic, in the Middle East it eventually achieved coherence and produced positive results. Biden undid it all, returning to the Obama playbook.

As Obama abandoned Iraq, Biden abandoned Afghanistan, with similarly catastrophic results. Biden’s Middle East policy both before and after 10/7 has been a marvel of incompetence and magical thinking, whose chief result has been to pile up Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s frequent flier miles. Biden resumed the attempt to appease the Islamic Republic, persisting despite the open contempt with which the Iranian regime treated its overtures. And finally, The Biden/Harris Administration botched its policy on the Russo-Ukrainian War. Let us examine these epic fails in more detail.

Seeking like Obama to get credit for “ending a war,” President Biden decreed an abrupt pullout of the American troops remaining in Afghanistan. He did so against the advice of his civilian and military advisers, who cautioned that such a move would destabilize the Afghan government. And that‘s exactly what happened. The August 2021 withdrawal not only of US troops but US of logistical support kneecapped the Afghan armed forces. The conduct of the withdrawal was disorderly and ultimately deadly, with thirteen American service personnel and hundreds of Afghan civilians killed by a terrorist suicide bomber. It was a humiliating spectacle and a stain on the honor of the nation.

Thanks to President Biden, the Taliban is back in charge in Afghanistan, hunting down and murdering officials and supporters of the previous government, reimposing its medieval religious government on the country—and re-enslaving the women of Afghanistan. Incidentally, American feminists have had nothing to say about that last point. The Sisterhood seems not to encompass women in icky Third World countries.

In the Middle East, the President’s tough talk after the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel soon morphed into an attempt to save Hamas from the consequences of its crimes. All too often, Administration officials talked as if Israel was the aggressor. Yes, they said, of course Israel has the right to defend itself. But really, can’t they do so without all this death and destruction? Vice President Kamala Harris, claiming that she had “studied the maps,” declared that an Israeli move into Rafah would result in a massacre of civilians. There were dire warnings that if Israel failed to toe the line, it might face a cutoff of US military aid.

By inducing Israel to pause its military operations for weeks, all the US nagging, second-guessing and threats merely prolonged the war in Gaza. And when Israel did move on Rafah, the massacre predicted by Harris didn’t happen. Nor, incidentally, has the famine about which so many hands were wrung inside and outside the Administration.

Then there’s Ukraine. V. Putin’s designs on that country have long been obvious. In 2014 he seized Crimea and invaded Ukraine’s eastern territories, a provocation to which Barack Obama responded with a finger-wagging lecture: Such things, he declared, simply aren’t done in the twenty-first century. Well, the Russian despot begged to differ, and he paid no attention to Obama’s blandishments.

When Donald Trump became president, he was excoriated by Democrats and progressives as Putin’s hand puppet—but curiously enough Russia made no further move against Ukraine during his term of office. It was not until Biden became president—and not until he’d given the world a demonstration of his weakness and incompetence with his Afghanistan skedaddle—that Putin resumed his program of aggression. And when the Russians launched their invasion in February 2022, the Biden Administration assumed that Ukraine would collapse in a matter of days. Thoughtfully, America offered Ukrainian President Zelensky a plane ride out of the country.

But the Ukrainians put up a spirited defense, turning back the Russian advance toward Kiev from the north, and this induced the Administration to change its policy. As he was to do after 10/7, Biden talked tough at first, and military aid was given to Ukraine by the US and its NATO allies. But soon enough, the Administration began to temporize. Hag-ridden by fear of “escalation,” unnerved by Putin’s nuclear saber rattling, Biden & Co. imposed delays and restrictions on military aid to Ukraine. The upshot was that the Ukrainians received enough support to stay in the fight, but not enough to win the war. As it was later to do over Gaza, the Biden Administration prolonged a conflict what could well have been terminated earlier.

It’s dispiriting to see how the foreign policy mistakes made by Obama—which were serious enough—have been replicated with even worse results by Biden. And there’s no reason at all to think that Kamala Harris, if she’s elected president, would profit from this tale of incompetence and woe. Where foreign policy is concerned, Democrats and progressives resemble the Bourbons who, Talleyrand quipped, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Nor has the replication of failure ever deflated their gaseous sense of self-esteem. One has only to listen to Jake Sullivan for confirmation of that.

Donald Trump may be bad on foreign policy—but could he really do worse than Obama/Biden/Harris? I find myself wondering about that.