Joe Biden’s political opponents have criticised the president’s withdrawal strategy. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
New York Times: With Afghan Retreat, Biden Bucks Foreign Policy Elite
The president, following one of his core beliefs, has put himself at odds with much of the establishment, on the right and left, in Washington and across Europe.
LONDON — When President Biden served as Barack Obama’s vice president, he was often a lonely dissenter in White House debates about military intervention, never more so than on Afghanistan, where he strongly opposed the Pentagon’s 2009 troop surge and was overruled by Mr. Obama and his generals.
Now, Mr. Biden is the commander in chief, and in pressing to conclude the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, even at the price of a frantic, bloodstained evacuation, he has put himself at odds with much of the foreign policy establishment, on the right and left, in Washington and across Europe.
Critics have piled on Mr. Biden, not just for the messiness of the departure but also for his repudiation of the principles that drove the mission in Afghanistan. While the president sees the United States belatedly ending “an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” as he put it on Tuesday in a defiant defense of his decision, critics see a dangerous American retrenchment that could leave the world in deeper disarray.
“This was a political decision, pure and simple,” said Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Mr. Biden, he said, had “ignored the advice of his own top generals and his own intelligence community.”
Even Mr. Biden’s fellow Democrats have delivered harsh assessments, whether about the failure to foresee the swift collapse of the Afghan Army — which led Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, to call for congressional hearings — or about the evacuation, which Representative Seth Moulton, the Massachusetts Democrat, called “a disaster of epic proportions,” leaving some Americans and Afghan allies behind.
Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, wrote that Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw was a cynical political calculation, driven by an “imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars,’ as if our engagement in 2021 was remotely comparable to our commitment 20 or even 10 years ago.”
But it is precisely the longstanding, deep-rooted nature of the beliefs that Mr. Biden is challenging, analysts said, that has made the backlash against him so ferocious.
Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the doctrine of an aggressive, expeditionary foreign policy — in which all options, including military force, are invariably on the table — has become a bipartisan article of faith in Washington. The news media, which covered those wars, played a significant role in amplifying these ideas.
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WNU Editor: He is not only at odds with much of the US foreign policy establishment. I would say that he is at odds with the Pentagon, the US intelligence community, and with every American ally. There is going to be consequences on how he withdrew from Afghanistan, and we are seeing it right now with all the leaks that are coming out from the White House and elsewhere.
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