
From Afghanistan to Ukraine: Strategy, Tactics, & Biden’s Foreign Policy
(This post is also available as a podcast episode.)
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone but diehard partisans say that President Biden has been a strong president.
His promise to bring America together has failed. His unrealistic prediction that Republicans would snap out of it once the election evicted President Trump from the White House has not manifested. His presidential press conferences, rare as they may be, are the most worrying of my lifetime, save only those of his predecessor. Although the American Rescue Plan protected a fragile recovery, it was fair for critics to worry about the long-term effects on prices and productivity, and even those critics may have underpredicted inflation, now at a 40-year-high of 7.9%. Meanwhile, his Build Back Better budget plan never got through Congress — a Congress his party controls.
For these and several other reasons, I think Republicans are virtually assured of a House takeover this November (perhaps the Senate as well), and Biden’s inability to stop it will make him look even weaker. His greatest singular accomplishment to his party and our country remains that he won an election his opponent was determined to steal, a victory that gave his party control of the executive and legislative branches and our democracy control of itself. Since then, however, victories for this overmatched chief executive have been few and far between, and he should do us all a favor and not run again in 2024.
When his party loses control of Congress in January, his domestic agenda will be even more ineffectual, making his foreign policy all the more critical when either he runs for re-election or the Democrats scramble to replace him. For that reason, and with the Ukrainian conflict now in its second month, I want to consider Biden’s foreign policy through the lens of the two primary crises he’s faced: the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the ongoing Ukrainian conflict.
It’s been a mixed bag. Although I actually agree with Biden’s strategy in Afghanistan, his tactics were abysmal. Then, in Ukraine, it was the strategy that was laughable but the tactics laudable.
Here’s what I mean.
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