The High Stakes for Foreign Policy in the 2024 Election
Biden’s record is mixed—but at least he wants to preserve the international order. Trump wants to tear it down.
The Internationalists
The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump
by Alexander Ward
Portfolio, 368 pp., $32
WE ARE FAST APPROACHING a historic moment of choice. If Donald Trump returns to the White House next January, odds are he will pull out of NATO and abandon Ukraine to the Russian wolves. A chain of other ills will follow. Vladimir Putin will be a menacing force on the doorstep of a diminished NATO. American deterrence in Asia will be shredded, putting the independence of Taiwan at heightened risk. The prospects for freedom and democracy will be severely impaired around the globe.
Against this grim possibility stands President Joe Biden. But is he up to the task? Recall that, before coming to the White House, he amassed decades of foreign policy experience, first as a longtime senator—including a dozen years as the top Democrat on and sometime chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee—and then as Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years. But did all that experience confer wisdom? Biden, remember, was the man about whom former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had said in 2014, “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Are we in terrible shape no matter which direction we turn?
The obvious way to answer that question is to look at Biden’s conduct of American foreign policy during his presidency. We are aided in that effort by a new book by Politico national security reporter Alexander Ward, The Internationalists, which surveys American foreign relations during the first two years of Biden’s time in the White House.
Though the book examines policy toward the Middle East, China, and other regions, the two episodes that dominate the narrative are the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The book went to press before the eruption of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, 2023, in which Biden’s diplomatic skills have been severely tested.
No matter which way one looks at it, the Afghanistan situation that Biden inherited in coming to office in January 2021 was a clusterfuck—I am at a loss for a better word. A year earlier, Trump, excluding the Afghan government from the negotiations, had consummated a lopsided deal with the Taliban known as the Doha Agreement. Under its terms, Washington agreed to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 2021. In return, the Taliban pledged not to attack U.S. troops or threaten Afghanistan’s major cities. As part of the agreement, Trump leaned on the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, including some high-ranking commanders. In the words of the former national security official Michael Vickers, Trump’s Doha accord was not a peace treaty at all but a “surrender agreement.”
The incoming Biden administration was immediately confronted with its predecessor’s agreement, with the deadline for complete American exit from Afghanistan a mere three months away. It had the choice of carrying out the unfavorable terms to the letter, attempting to renegotiate them, or, if necessary, abrogating them.
A fierce internal debate ensued. Ward guides readers through its contours. On one side was Biden himself, who “had walked into the Oval Office with an immovable sense that it was time to end America’s adventure in Central Asia.” But, to his credit, Biden was open to debate, and even during the presidential transition, his incoming national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, was organizing a process in which all key players of the nascent administration would have their say.
In that debate, top-ranking military officials were insistent that the United States should retain 2,500 American troops in the country—down from the existing 3,500—as a stabilizing force. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, warned that a complete withdrawal by the Trump-set deadline meant that the Afghanistan government of Ashraf Ghani would fall to the Taliban by the end of the year, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sided with Milley. Biden was not persuaded. But with the May deadline looming Biden sought to extend the timeline, reopening negotiations with the Taliban—who proved unyielding. In the end, Biden decided, unilaterally, that all troops would be out of Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
This decision, as the entire world knows, proved to be a fiasco. Ward’s narrative walks readers through the collapse in riveting detail. Our NATO allies who had sent their own forces to Afghanistan were not consulted and were livid. Much worse, the Taliban were energized, and the Afghan government and the Afghan military entirely demoralized. What was intended to be an orderly exit, and what was expected to be a decent interval of at least a year or two for the Afghan government to survive, turned into a rout.
“There’s going to be no circumstances where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” said Biden in July. In August, he was forced to swallow those words. Embassy personnel were indeed evacuated by helicopter, and American troops were compelled to escape the country in scenes of complete chaos, with thirteen U.S. soldiers killed in a suicide bombing attack in the process. Thousands of Afghans who had supported the U.S. effort as translators and in other capacities were left behind, along with their families, to face harsh retribution. In short order, the Taliban captured the capital Kabul and reimposed their draconian version of sharia law on a population that deserved far better.
Biden earns a grade of F for his handling of the Afghan endgame. The decision to remove the 2,500 soldiers was a self-inflicted blunder, a triumph of wishful thinking over hard-nosed appraisal of the facts on the ground. Biden had been warned of the consequences by responsible military officials yet pressed ahead. The alternative he had disregarded, jettisoning Trump’s “surrender agreement” and staying put with a modest force of 2,500 soldiers, was a relatively low-cost way of preserving a by no means intolerable status quo.
The Afghan catastrophe was a humbling experience for the Biden team. To their credit, they weathered the storm of opprobrium that descended on them and recovered their equilibrium. A grave new challenge lay just ahead.
IN SEPTEMBER 2021, IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING the Afghan collapse, Russia began to conduct a massive military exercise, which included an unprecedented buildup of troops and equipment along the frontier with Ukraine. Intelligence began flowing in suggesting that it was not an exercise at all, but preparation for an invasion of Ukraine. In a highly organized fashion, the Biden administration began to prepare for the possibility of a major land war in the heart of Europe.
Once again, Ward’s narrative walks readers through the ins and outs of the many steps the Biden administration took in the effort to deter Putin: constructing a packet of severe sanctions, sharing intelligence with NATO allies, positioning American forces in Europe, arming Ukraine, and, finally, engaging in intense diplomacy with Putin himself. Of course, none of this proved sufficient. Partly emboldened by the display of American fecklessness in Afghanistan, but overwhelmingly driven by his conviction that Ukraine was a historic component of the Russian empire, Putin’s forces rolled across the border on February 24, 2022.
Ward’s tale ends with the first year of the war, and Biden’s risky journey to Kyiv on February 20, 2023. All told, it is also a story of failure, but failure ringed by partial success. The failure was the inability to stop the war from erupting in the first place, arguably an unattainable goal. The success has been masterful leadership of the NATO alliance in responding to the war itself.
Though the Biden administration can justly be criticized for being overly cautious in arming Ukraine, providing only enough equipment to fight but not enough to win, the real failure increasingly belongs with Trump and congressional Republicans, who have tilted toward Russia and blocked legislation that would provide the necessary arms and funds for Ukraine to survive. Through no fault of the Biden administration, Ukraine’s fate is currently held hostage by the MAGA extremists who control the GOP.
WARD ESCHEWS DRAWING LARGE CONCLUSIONS about the Biden administration’s conduct of foreign affairs. With two wars now raging and ten months remaining in his first term in office, it is perhaps still too early to render a confident verdict.
Though one can disagree with some or even many of the Biden’s administration’s judgments and decisions, as I do especially with respect to Afghanistan, the picture that emerges is of a team that is well within the foreign policy consensus that emerged from the wreckage of the Second World War and has persisted for the past eighty years. Though within that consensus there have been fierce debates about ways and means, at its heart is a commitment to maintaining American power and using it to defend democratic values and institutions, and, together with likeminded allies, attempting to preserve an open international system and keep the peace.
Trump, by contrast, is the inheritor of a tradition which travels under the tainted banner of “America First.” Skeptical of alliances, contemptuous of international institutions and international law, it is inward-looking in other respects as well, favoring trade protectionism and radical immigration restrictions. Widely regarded as discredited after Pearl Harbor, this alternative has appeared periodically in the campaigns of fringe candidates like Patrick Buchanan, but never received widespread support from the American people. Only under Trump did a proponent of such views come to occupy the White House. This November, it could well have its second coming.
Robert Gates may have judged Biden’s foreign policy stances harshly back in 2014, but on the same occasion, Gates had also praised Biden as “a man of genuine integrity and character.” Gates’s appraisal of Trump is worth noting as well. Trump, he wrote in 2020, reiterating a previous statement from 2016, “is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.”
In November, Americans must once again decide between these two figures: a man of genuine integrity and character and a man unqualified and unfit. As Ronald Reagan once said in a famous speech, it is a time for choosing. For at stake is nothing less than the possible shipwreck of the world.
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