The damage caused by whatever mistakes Biden made during the withdrawal pales in comparison to the damage caused by Trump’s deliberate actions. Get back to me when Biden starts mouthing off about Canada being a threat to US national security.
And he didn’t just mouth off. He openly abused an emergency clause in NAFTA just to screw around, which basically devalues every treaty in existence, and even the idea of allowing some emergency clauses in case of extreme crises.
Agreed, but if we start listing all the ways Too Weak Trump damaged the US’ reputation, we’ll be here all day.
I just find the declaration that Canada was a threat to be the epitome of such nonsense. There’s simply no way anyone with any sense could actually make that argument, and yet, there it was. No other single action could possibly encapsulate his insanity so perfectly.
Modnote: This is a hell of a first reply. Avoid this in the future.
Further, @Czarcasm & @madsircool Stop the fighting between you two. If you want to continue the Pit is available. But no more in P&E.
Big talk from a nation of shopkeepers brought up to administer an empire that no longer exists.
To be fair, the British don’t have any basis from which to criticize other nations’ failures to achieve victory in Afghanistan, Tony Blair doesn’t have any basis from which to criticise other people’s strategic decisions on wars, and Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson definitely have no basis for complaining about foreign policy incompetence in anyone else.
I don’t really buy into the premise that Biden damaged foreign affairs with the Afghanistan withdrawal. Trump had clearly established that the United States was leaving Afghanistan over a year ago, if there was any “damage” done, it was done by that decision. It looks like some of our European allies, particularly Britain and Germany, expected Biden to reverse course. I will note that Germany is a country that spearheaded a recent trade deal between the EU and China that brings the EU closer to China, over U.S. objections. Germany also has continued to advance a natural gas pipeline deal with Russia that keeps Europe close to Russia. Germany isn’t exactly a great ally. Germany is asking us to reopen a larger scale military deployment while the good people of Germany have chosen to essentially have a military that is only a minimally capable defensive force–in fact it is likely not even viable at that without American support.
The British at least have a real military and have indeed supported in money and blood, to a significant degree, our long-term wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m willing to take their criticism a little more seriously than those of Merkel, who has rarely found an autocrat or Islamist she isn’t willing to cut deals with for German businesses. But even that being said, I fundamentally disagree with the British position, and I think Biden does too.
I think Biden has repaired some of the functional damage that Trump did to our diplomatic relationships, he’s shown he’s going to respect treaties, he’s shown he’s going to maintain diplomatic norms and not act like every treaty relationship is a Mafia protection racket under the hood etc. But there’s a longer-term trend that is not likely to change, in which America is rejecting post-WWI Wilsonianism.
For over 100 years the speech that Wilson gave to advocate for a declaration of war against Germany in WWI (a war we chose to engage in, we were not brought into via a direct attack ala WWII) has been seen as setting the ideological tone for our entire foreign policy. Wilson’s famous phrase was that the world must be made safe for democracy, and that this lofty liberal goal justified abandoning a policy going back to the time of Washington that we were to avoid overseas entanglements and primarily keep our interests restricted to our immediate geography region.
At core much of our overseas adventurism for nearly one hundred years was informed by this stance. I think that era has frankly ended. I don’t think it ended due to Trump or Biden, or even Obama. I think it’s bigger than any one President. I do think that Bush, whose wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started under different pretexts (WMDs and al-Qaeda, respectively), he eventually evoked Wilsonian principles to justify why we needed to stay. No one President necessarily rejected it, but the American people seem to have, and the political establishment largely seemed to move away from it. The Democratic party is well removed from this view now, and in the GOP you find some of the last defenders of this concept–in the form of guys like Lindsey Graham, Mitt Romney etc, who still have an older school Republican view on foreign policy. But it’s a minority position even with the GOP now. This is reality, and it’s not “bad diplomacy” that our country has made the fairly reasoned decision that it isn’t our job to try and force democratic systems of government onto people and in places where it just doesn’t work.
Anybody who thinks our allies would prefer to have Trump back in the White House rather than Biden is seriously deluded.
Bear in mind, however, that our (Canada’s) government grossly dropped the ball on this issue. Though I believe that Biden could have done things much better, it’s disgusting to me and a lot of Canadian military and ex-military how our government essentially waited until the last minute.
Your whole post is well-reasoned, but I think you’ve hit on a particularly key point here. The beginnings of the end were the war in Vietnam, in which America’s failure to make the country “safe for democracy” put a serious dent in our sense that we (as a beacon of freedom) were definitely doing the right thing, and the end of the Cold War in which we had - and then lost - a clear antidemocratic foe to push back against and provide justification for our own don’t-call-them-imperialist foreign efforts. The idea that we could just keep fighting the last war (whichever war you believe that to be) has become increasingly unsustainable.
These last two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have further highlighted the fact that worldbuilding via military dominance isn’t a viable strategy (if ever it was post-WWII), and that Russia and China accepted this long ago and have left us in their dust as they extend their spheres of influence globally to America’s detriment. Whatever we hoped to do in Afghanistan beyond taking down Bin Laden and his network was never feasible, and the insistence of some that we can just bomb a country into democracy remains a fantasy that they cling to to avoid accepting that we live in a different world now.
Ever single Thiessen article is exactly the same. DEMS BAD! Doesn’t matter what happened. No need to read or respond, just like I don’t care what Stephen Miller says.
The US has not been a reliable ally since January 20, 2017. It will take a lot to repair the damaged relationships. I won’t soon forget that Canada was suddenly a national security risk because we made things out of Aluminum.
Agreed with both posts here. I also think that a lot of the CIA skullduggery came to light especially after the end of the Cold War, with lots of info about the US overthrowing democratically elected governments for it’s own ends (Chile, Iran, etc) which make the whole making the world safe for Democracy ring hollow.
That and the Iraq War being predicated on a lie, really caused the American people to ask what in the world are we doing.
Do you think that he was tortured into having to write it? Similar to the torture that he defended? Or did he have no say in defending the Bush administration’s use of torture either?
Does anyone have any agency anymore?
I’d note that in the immediate sense of both WWI and WWII there was a big correlation between America’s realpolitik interests and the Wilsonian desire to make the world safe for democracies. Both wars featured countries that had vigorously supported democratic governments by their native populations, fighting against powerful, evil autocracies. Autocracies that had strategic goals directly oppositional to that of the United States. In those wars fighting to protect democratic government was a “happy accident” that went along with fighting Imperial Germany and later Nazi Germany / Imperial Japan.
During the Cold War, arguably we strayed from Wilsonianism in deed many times, albeit not in word. But another thing that was a “happy accident”, at least arguably, is that much of our actions in the Cold War to prevent the spread of Communism often overlapped with actions that directly hurt the USSR, directly hurting the USSR was good for our strategic position vis-a-vis our largest rival. The fact that in some instances it also promoted democratic government…simply a happy accident. It was certainly not always at the forefront–for example our first involvement in Afghanistan was to funnel fuck tons of money to the Mujahideen fighting the USSR; we did not seriously expect a stable democracy to emerge from that effort–we just expected it to hurt the USSR, and it did.
I’d argue if we need to recalibrate anything in our foreign policy it’s that we need to shift to a more deliberate targeting of both Russia and China, and determine strategies and policies that hurt both countries. These countries have been behaving this way toward us for about 20 years, and frankly it’s probably long past due we start playing the same ball game they are. A series of U.S. Presidents and foreign policy big-brains have seemingly wanted to operate under a “pleasant fiction” that at core we don’t really have a conflict with Russia or China, and we have/had economic relationships with both (very significant ones with China), so it’s not really a low-grade conflict. That fiction frankly has increasingly been difficult to persist under the light of scrutiny.
I’ll frankly give Trump a little bit of credit for being willing to break out of the box. I think elements of his trade war with China frankly came from the right perspective–the implementation was slapshod and poor, and lacking in consistency and willingness to maintain it long term. I also think Trump did more to push on Russia than Obama did. For example Obama considered it a “red line” to give lethal aid to Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, out of fear it would escalate the situation. Trump didn’t give a fuck, and gave lethal aid to Russia. What happened? Nothing really. It shows that Russia isn’t any more willing to escalate to crazy levels over moderate escalations than we are, so being afraid to even take the same steps Russia takes, is not wise.
I’ll note that neither in the case of China or Russia do I think Trump did a good job. I just think that in the areas where he was willing to sometimes buck “received wisdom” he was hitting on pretty valid and probably necessary ideas. But implementation is important. With China, Trump was always just looking for something he could call a victory, he didn’t have the breadth of knowledge or the political patience to handle it in a way that would bring about any lasting results. With Russia, Trump despite the common narrative around him, frequently took more belligerent actions against Russia than any recent President. But like Trump’s thinking in general, it was wrapped up in his disordered thinking and weird behaviors. Any tough actions he took against Russia were continually undermined by fawning praise for Putin, excusing other Russian bad actions etc. But taken in isolation some of Trump’s steps toward Russia are frankly things Obama should have done and even Bush before him, and that Biden should be following up on now. Unlike Trump Biden should make it part of a coherent and consistent policy, not part of a schizophrenic mess of contradictory decisions.
FWIW as a Washington Post subscriber I read all of Thiessen’s op-eds. Frankly he hasn’t said anything in years that couldn’t be meaningfully summarized as “Democrat bad, Republican good”, as @Snarky_Kong said. If he breaks that pattern maybe his specific words and opinions will be worth evaluating, but as far as I’m concerned, he’s simply an unabashed partisan hack.
This single event…
…fixed a great deal of our relationship to foreign nations, all by itself. I can’t even come up with a plausible scenario in which Biden could erase all of that good will.
And that is precisely the criticism of Biden. He could have, and should have, started planning for the withdrawal long ago. At least 95% of the shambles regarding the withdrawal have come about because of either laziness or incompetence on his part.
What happened in Afghanistan is that democracy won. The people of Afghanistan got the leadership they wanted. It’s just too bad for us that the leadership they wanted wasn’t the leadership we wanted… that sounds like a pretty good reason to cut off any involvement with the country, no?
To the OP:
“Objection! Assuming facts not in evidence, your honor.”
“Objection sustained.”