On Biden’s Foreign Policy Legacy

At 1945 I put together an argument that Joe Biden was, in an important sense, the only person who could have gotten us out of Afghanistan.

Could anyone but Biden have left Afghanistan? The war in Afghanistan engulfed four Presidents over the course of twenty years. The war changed dramatically in response to Presidential decisions, although it can be fairly said that it did not represent the central foreign policy focus of any administration. While each of Bush, Obama, and Trump had opportunities to end the war, none had the necessary combination of political purpose and understanding of the national security bureaucracy. For good or ill, Biden owns the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.

I don’t think that I would go to the floor over the argument that Trump would not, in four full years of a second term, have been able to withdraw from Afghanistan. I also think that Trump’s desire to get the US out of Afghanistan was genuine, and that he deserves a portion of the credit/blame for the withdrawal. That said, Trump’s own Secretary of Defense had already outlined a plan to sandbag Trump on the Afghanistan issue, and I certainly don’t believe that Trump could have handled the withdrawal any less chaotically than Biden; indeed, I strongly suspect that Stephen Miller and his fellow travelers in the administration would have made the process considerably more destructive and inhumane.