Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Joe Biden arrives at Dover Air Force Base on October 21, 2022.
Foreign policy is probably not the first thing most Americans think about in the morning. To be sure, Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine is the first cross-border land war in Europe since 1945, but the Donbas is many thousands of miles away and its effects on American interests are indirect and complex. Anyway, we’ve got inflation, a dysfunctional health care system, and no end of other grinding crises to worry about.
President Biden, by contrast, clearly cares about foreign affairs a great deal. He’s executed the greatest shift in American foreign policy orientation at least since George W. Bush started the “war on terror”—withdrawing from Afghanistan, almost completely halting the drone war, patching up the tattered alliance with the European Union as part of a highly successful support operation for Ukraine’s military resistance, and making a serious attempt to start scaling back American’s economic dependence on China.
He is clearly less focused on domestic policy, for better or worse. On Friday he nonsensically told reporters that he opposed getting rid of the debt ceiling, which would only help Republicans to take it hostage to force cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Problem is, Biden’s low approval ratings and the dearth of popular interest in his reorientation and rehabilitation of America’s role in the world combine to make his foreign and military policies politically fragile. He deserves great credit for turning the ship of state, but it would be disturbingly easy to turn it back to old waters.
Before the Biden administration, the previous 20 years of U.S. foreign policy constituted a spree of violent stupidity that was arguably unmatched in American history. In response to 9/11, America invaded a country that was only tangentially related to the attack (Afghanistan) and still failed to catch the main perpetrator for a decade. Then with the first war still festering, the U.S. invaded another country (Iraq) based on lies, and started a whole new occupation.
President Obama continued Bush’s occupation of Iraq until U.S. forces were basically kicked out, and dramatically escalated both Bush’s drone war and the Afghanistan occupation. The chaos unleashed by the horribly bungled Iraq occupation spawned ISIS and radically destabilized Syria and its neighbors. President Trump continued the Afghanistan occupation and escalated the drone war even further, with even less regard for civilian casualties.
The result was a shattering political and humanitarian crisis across most of the Middle East that continues to this day. It meant the utter pointless waste of something like $8 trillion, over 7,000 lives of American soldiers, and unknowable hundreds of thousands of civilians. Millions were wounded physically or mentally, or had their lives ruined beyond repair.
Meanwhile, Trump’s naked corruption, utter incapacity to govern, and erratic behavior deeply alienated traditional American allies. He continually tried to use American policy to benefit himself, as when he tried to extort Ukraine into making up damaging stories about Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign. Under his appalling misrule, the U.S. looked more and more like the sick man of the 21st century: a shambling hulk of an empire at the mercy of the whims of a demented reality TV host.
Biden has charted something approaching a halfway sensible course for America in the world for the first time in decades.
Given all that came before him, I confess it is quite surprising that Biden has managed such an about-face, particularly given his previous record. He’s long been a part of the national security establishment, and even voted for the Iraq War in 2002. Yet not only has made the change, he stubbornly stuck to it in the face of a howling media tantrum when the withdrawal from Afghanistan wounded mainstream reporters’ imperial pride.
Now, all this is not a complete break with the past. Biden assassinated the leader of Al Qaeda by drone strike in August, and is reportedly pondering a highly dubious military action in Haiti. But as far as the type of foreign policy that is within the realm of political plausibility, Biden’s approach is probably as good as could be expected.
It is therefore alarming that he has gotten virtually no credit for doing so. The Bush-Obama-Trump war on terror was a massive failure that created a Thirty Years’ War-esque humanitarian catastrophe. I naively had thought that if a president drastically scaled it back, he would at least get some credit. Instead, it seems barely anyone has noticed or cared.
Even the effort to prop up Ukraine, while popular on its own terms, has not redounded to Biden’s benefit in approval polls. As Brian Beutler points out, Republicans are already signaling that should they win the midterms, they will obstruct further aid to Ukraine and, if history is any guide, then blame Biden should it then lose ground to Russia.
One might chalk it up to Americans’ habitual lack of interest in the rest of the world, and the Republican Party’s accelerating willingness to undermine the national interest for their own political benefit, or simply out of sheer spite. Regardless, Biden has charted something approaching a halfway sensible course for America in the world for the first time in decades, and it should be getting a lot more attention, and credit, than it has so far.
