Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I

With war raging in Ukraine indefinitely and instability flourishing in the Middle East and trade wars overwhelming our relations around the globe — and more generally with American leadership in the world deafeningly absent — the world appears to have been so completely transformed by Donald Trump’s foreign policy that precedents may seem irrelevant to our understanding of our current situation. If we lead anything now, it is to make it worse. It may seem useless to look back even a few years, to the neolithic age when the Democratic Party was in charge of American foreign policy. But look back we must. For the obligations and the challenges of managing America’s international relations will outlast any American government, and one day a Democrat will sit in the Oval Office again. When that happens, a return to what we used to think of as normalcy will be progress enough, though the magnitude of Trump’s destruction of our position beyond our borders will take a long time to correct. But real success — the restoration of a rational and moral calculus of interests and values — will require that the right lessons, including the cautionary lessons, be learned from the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations.

The Trump administration’s international orientation will be a partial guide in this new thinking: it will show us what not to do, unless we seek an isolated and insulated America. Even though there are isolationist currents in the Democratic Party, it is not a party with a tradition of America First. We are for enlightened world leadership. (A phrase that needs unpacking, of course.) We are against denying Vladimir Putin’s responsibility for the invasion of Ukraine. We are for providing Ukraine the military support it needs to defend itself. We are against economic warfare with our friends and allies in Europe and Asia. We are for a strong NATO alliance and a strengthened security architecture with Asian allies, especially Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. We still believe — I hope — that American power can be used for good in faraway places, and — I hope again — that the United States must act in the face of various kinds of emergencies and atrocities. And of course we emphasize the set of global issues that includes climate change, global health, and food security.

When the happy day comes and Trump is back home golfing and hustling, the immediate challenge will be to restore America’s role as a leader, a friend, and an ally. The second Trump administration has in a matter of months squandered the soft power that took seventy-five years for America to create. With its economic warfare against friend and foe alike, as well as its disdainful attitude towards longstanding allies, trust and confidence in Washington’s leadership has been shattered and it may never return to its previous heights. His capricious demolition of America’s universally admired programs of foreign assistance amounts to a colossal blow to America’s position in the world, not to mention the immensity of the suffering that is causing. It is so much easier to destroy than to build. But there will be no third Trump administration, and if the pendulum of American politics swings back towards the Democratic Party, it will be imperative to understand the foreign policies of the post-Cold War Democratic administrations with lucidity. 

Today America cannot lead because America is alone. Unsplendid isolation, we might call it. Isolationism always fulfills its own dream. When the Trump administration looks behind, it will find few followers. And yet it will at the same time insist upon American supremacy! (I am ignoring, of course, the dizzying inconstancy of Trump’s foreign policy, the daily and even hourly inconsistencies, which makes any generalization about it provisional and may prove to be the administration’s worst failing in foreign affairs. For the next three years, the better part of diplomatic wisdom for the nations of the world will be to try and catch a wave.) The international reputation that the founding fathers of the post-World War II generation created for the United States, Democratic and Republican presidents alike, had a powerful result: the United States was a rare combination of feared, admired, and respected. To be sure, it was also hated, but anti-Americanism did not suffice to overthrow the America-led world order, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The erosion of the America-led world order was in fact begun by the United States. The Iraq war accomplished that, and in many ways it remains the gift that keeps on giving. (“Vietnam Syndrome” was nothing compared to this. Ronald Reagan was elected a mere five years after our retreat from Saigon.) Our reputation was damaged for at least a generation, as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld became the ugly Americans of a new era and the incompetence of the occupation of Iraq undermined America’s reputation for getting the job done. Later, the post-Iraq reluctance to act under the Obama administration further weakened the deterrent effect of America’s military might and taught the nations of the world to call America’s bluff. 

Any honest assessment of America’s role in the world must start with the recognition that America’s power has been grievously diminished in recent decades — notwithstanding the successful air attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and, a decade earlier, the unforgettable Special Forces operation that killed Osama Bin Laden. For it is not just our economic, military, and political system that determines power, but also our alliances and friendships around the world: they are what has differentiated America’s role from that of previous hegemons. (We were a hegemon, but we were never an empire; whatever that abused terms means, it does not denote a system of alliances.) By rejecting the daily diplomacy of alliance building and management, what former Secretary of State George Schultz nicely called “diplomacy as gardening,” the two Trump administrations have done grievous and utterly self-inflicted harm to the force multiplier effect of America’s alliances. 

What is the foreign policy of the Democrats? In recent decades it has been deeply contested. The contest was between two ideas that were perfectly encapsulated in two colloquial slogans by two presidents. “Get caught tryin’,” Bill Clinton instructed. “Don’t do stupid shit,” Barack Obama taught. Joe Biden left no epigram of his own, and his administration continued to be wracked by the debate, though in its responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the war begun by Hamas’ attacks on October 7, 2023, it seemed to be settling the matter with the proper respect for power and principle. 

II 

Bill Clinton often expressed regret that he was not president at a more dramatic moment in American history, such as World War II or the Civil War. History in the years of his presidency was not in overdrive, and it was without a trace of the apocalyptic tone. As it turned out, he presided over a remarkable period of peace and prosperity — not exactly a minor achievement. And when, in the Balkans, history demanded more than American prosperity but also American leadership and American action, he led the West (at first slowly and reluctantly) to a moment that The Economist called “the height of European civilization,” owing to the U.S.– NATO decisions to bring a halt to the Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and to prevent a genocide against Kosovo’s Albanian population. In 1999, we combined force and diplomacy and defeated the aggression of Slobodan Milosevic in the heart of Europe. In an act of moral and humanitarian determination backed up by our hard power, we united to thwart an imminent mass slaughter of the Kosovar Albanians. Unlike Rwanda or Bosnia, this was a genocide prevented. 

Equally important, the way in which Washington led in Kosovo was crucial. Extensive diplomacy led to widespread international support for the war, as the Belgrade government was given every possible chance to accept a peaceful solution. Working with key European allies and Moscow, a UN resolution laid out a postwar plan with the burden for deployment and reconstruction shared by all. In the end, Kosovo became a functioning emerging democracy and is now an independent state — and a tribute to Bill Clinton’s and Madeleine Albright’s commitment to get caught trying. Kosovo was done for the right reasons and it was done the right way. (As an official at the State Department in those years I played a role in this effort.) Like Bosnia, Kosovo demonstrated that it was possible to use force justly, and to use limited force for a limited goal. This does not mean it can be done in all places, only that it can be done in some places — and that is a lot. 

The late 1980s and the 1990s were a dazzling moment in world history. Apartheid fell in South Africa. Soviet communism collapsed in Russia and in Eastern and Central Europe. At Tiananmen Square, countless Chinese demonstrated their dedication to democratic values. Democracy was indeed ascendant. But history was not over. (Has there ever been a dumber notion than “the end of history?”) Perhaps because he was elected to focus on the economy and because the Democrats had been out of power for twelve years, the Clinton administration had an inauspicious beginning in foreign policy. Indeed, the combined chaos in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia managed to overshadow the outbreak of freedom and democratic change across Europe and Asia. But by the end of Clinton’s first term, the ship of state was righted — beginning with the ouster of Haiti’s dictators as a consequence of diplomacy backed by force and an endorsement by the United Nations, and finally, after far too long, the air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs which led to the Dayton Accords in 1995. Ending the war in Bosnia, which President Clinton did with the help of President Chirac, proved an important lesson, showing how U.S.-led diplomacy backed by military power could be America’s method of leadership. For the Clinton administration, unlike its Republican successors, deemed it important to pay “a decent respect to the opinion of mankind.” 

We got caught trying, and it worked. And having seen how force and diplomacy could genuinely resolve crises over Taiwan in 1996 (when two Aircraft Carrier Battle Groups were deployed near the Taiwan Straits, prompting Beijing to halt its intimidation of Taipei) and Iraq in 1998 (when Operation Desert Fox destroyed for a while Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs after Saddam Hussein refused access to UN inspectors), the Clinton administration determined to take the lead in resolving international crises. Applying America’s unique power position, as well as the prestige of the White House lawn, the Clinton administration embraced America’s leadership role. Consider the remarkable diplomatic record of America the Peacemaker in that era. With President Clinton’s help, lasting peace was established between Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. In the Middle East, there was peace between Israel and Jordan, the Oslo Accords, and the Hebron and Wye River Accords, all of which saw the Palestinians given substantial autonomy and land and Israelis living in greater security. The challenge of North Korea’s nuclear proliferation was also dealt with effectively in 1994 in the U.S.–North Korea nuclear accord. Secretary Albright was even dispatched to Pyongyang in the final weeks of the administration to get caught trying to stop North Korea from deploying long-range ballistic missiles. 

And most famously of all, President Clinton himself got caught trying to secure the dream of a permanent Middle East peace at Camp David in 2000, along with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, and later through the Clinton Parameters in his final days as president in 2001. A peace plan was even put forward by Clinton and Albright to the Syrian dictator Hafez Al Assad at Shepherdstown West Virginia, which envisioned the return of the Golan Heights to Damascus in exchange for recognition and security for the State of Israel. But just like his fellow Baath Party thug Saddam Hussein, Assad would not take yes for an answer and rejected any reasonable outcome. Considering what later happened to Syria, it seems unimaginably foolish that Assad spurned Clinton’s diplomatic offer back in 1999 and 2000. 

This was American diplomacy at its most noble, pursuing solutions and working with difficult regimes on behalf of our friends and allies. Along with the prudent use of American power in Iraq, the Taiwan Straits, and the Balkans, it was this relentless pursuit of peace that generated substantial admiration and respect for the United States in those days. It was also during the second Clinton administration that NATO was enlarged to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. With Albright leading the diplomacy, a way was found to bring security to Central and Eastern Europe from future Russian revanchism and still negotiate the NATO–Russia Founding Act, which saw Moscow acquiesce in diplomatic arrangements to ease the pain of losing former client states to the NATO alliance. (I recognize that the expansion of NATO is still controversial in some quarters, but the Russian aggression against Ukraine should have settled that dispute.) 

In retrospect, the most significant mistake of Clinton’s activism abroad was the effort to coax China into becoming a responsible member of the community of nations. At Clinton’s behest, China was made a member of the World Trade Organization, and Beijing’s response was to exploit the West’s openness by growing (and stealing) its way to the point of becoming a rival and a potential threat to the West, as its phenomenal economic boom, its across-the-board adaptation of advanced technology, and its massive military build-up now jeopardizes America’s technological edge and strategic paradigm. To be fair, our China policy was bipartisan. Leaders in both parties were under the illusion that China would become more and more transparent and abide by the rules of the trade game if given the chance. Indeed, it was during the first George W. Bush administration that Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick famously called for helping China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in international arrangements. But after Xi Jinping came to power some years later, nearly all concerned came to rue the day we gave China access to advanced technology and world markets. 

What difference a Clintonian approach would have made in subsequent decades is, of course, unknowable. We do know that the Balkan model of force and diplomacy was consciously spurned during Bush’s two terms. And President Obama, to my knowledge, never once cited Clinton’s successes in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model worth emulating, even though it would have been natural enough for him to tout the previous Democratic president’s successes. Perhaps he opposed them as a young legislator in Chicago. Many years later, by contrast, during the Syrian catastrophe, when Obama was idling in the White House, a friend (the editor of this journal) did ask Clinton what he would have done differently than Obama in Syria, and he replied: “I don’t know, but I would have been caught tryin’.” 

III 

The foreign policy of the Obama years was marked above all by a dire case of Iraq War Syndrome. Obama and his team did all they could to hype his early remark at a rally in Chicago in opposition to Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. It was a stupid war, he said. And that, of course, led to the slogan that defined his foreign policy over two terms. On Air Force One, Obama famously told the White House press corps that his guiding principle was, “Don’t do stupid shit.” The cautionary example of Iraq became a kind of obsession-compulsion for Obama and his policymakers, as if it was all you needed to know about American power and the world. 

On the surface, by restoring American support for European allies after the war and often deferring to them, much of the damage wrought by the Bush administration’s bullying unilateralism was undone. Remember, even before the war in Iraq, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld had alienated nearly every single American ally by rejecting a series of arms control treaties with Russia, including the ABM Treaty, the building block of them all negotiated by President Richard Nixon in 1972, as well as the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention. To round it off, the administration pulled out of the Kyoto climate accords, and the immeasurably haughty Rumsfeld even expressed disdain for the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners of war. Obama’s administration reversed all that, which was a good thing, and worked on climate change and restoring discussions with Russia about strategic nuclear arms. Combined with the fact of twice electing an African American as president, America’s reputation was substantially restored as admiration for Obama the man soared around the world and allied governments found it easy to work with Obama’s diplomatic team, led in the first term by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who proved to be enormously popular on the world stage. When U.S. Special Forces finally located and killed Osama Bin Laden in a dramatic raid inside Pakistan in 2011, many observers judged that respect for American leadership “was back.” 

Yet brilliant as his anti-war stance was politically, since most Americans had turned against the mission after the disasters of the American-led occupation, the ground truth on Obama and Iraq was much more confusing. Although few in the Washington press corps wanted to focus on it, in a moment of candor Obama revealed to one of his most determined admirers, David Remnick of The New Yorker, that if he had been a senator in 2003 and read all of those flawed intelligence reports detailing Saddam Hussein’s extensive possession of chemical and biological weapons, he might well have voted for the second Gulf war, as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and John Kerry did. Despite this acknowledgement, however, his campaign team and his White House aides regularly pilloried those senators. When he ran for president, Obama’s sole credential in foreign policy was his progressive opposition to the war from the start, but it turns out that his claim to greater wisdom than the Democratic establishment was not exactly true. While politically Obama got away with hanging the war in Iraq around Hillary Clinton’s neck in the primaries in 2008, he must not have felt his anti-war position too strongly, since it did not inhibit him from appointing pro-Iraq Democrats to be his Vice-President and both of his Secretaries of State and to direct his foreign policy. 

The confusion in the Democratic Party on this fundamental question surely contributed to the essential confusion at the heart of Obama’s foreign policy. He pulled out of Iraq and then was forced to return American forces with the rise of the Islamic State in the vacuum left by the American withdrawal. He famously surged U.S. forces in Afghanistan after a lengthy policy review and then undercut that surge by establishing a short and public timeline for the withdrawal of the troops that were to be sent in, signaling to the Taliban they should just wait us out. 

But the real damage done by the Obama administration was in its failure to follow through with the threat to use force in Syria — the infamous red line that wasn’t a red line. The American president was caught bluffing. This stupendous blunder was opposed by nearly all his foreign policy team save for his Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who walked him around the White House lawn to cook up his last-minute call for a congressional vote on the intervention that he had promised and upon which the global credibility of the United States depended. This prevarication led to the swift intrusion of Vladimir Putin and Russia into Syria and the region — and the Russian government, perhaps fearing for its personnel who at the time were conducting clandestine chemical experiments at Syrian facilities, obligingly arranged for a disarmament program for Syria’s chemical weapons, which allowed Obama to avoid conducting even the limited air attacks that were under consideration. The man who never wanted to be a war president no doubt slept more easily, but Syria descended further into hell, along with the global reputation of the United States. 

This was stupid shit par excellence. Yes, Syria’s chemical arsenal was dismantled. (The fact that Bashir al Assad immediately agreed to surrender the entirety of his chemical arsenal — or almost the entirety of it, as his later use of chemical weapons revealed — is evidence of how afraid he was of American military intervention.) But the damage to America’s leadership in the world was done. Their oh-so-clever stratagem proved far more consequential than Obama and his chief of staff must have imagined. America’s friends and allies in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia uniformly argued that they could no longer count on an American president to follow through on his commitment to use military power. Talking to a top French national security official at the time, I was met with a visceral attack on American leadership and furious claims of irreparable damage to Western policy in the Middle East. The Kremlin took Obama’s reversal as a golden opportunity to return to Syria, to deploy its modernized air and ground forces, and show what a real ally does. And with the help of Iran’s Al Quds force, Russia applied the brutal lessons learned in Chechnya to flatten rebel cities across Syria. Assad’s savage hold on power was soon re-established, leading to the horror of an estimated half a million Syrians killed and almost an entire population internally and externally displaced, not to mention the additional negative blandishment of Iran gaining suzerainty over the country and a base on the Mediterranean Sea. Syria was the worst case of American bystanderism in our time. 

Ironically, it was President Trump a few years later who exposed the stupidity of Obama’s fear that the use of air power in Syria would lead to another Iraq-like disaster. Trump had also disparaged the Iraq war, but he had no problem following through on his threats to use American air power when chemical weapons were used against Syrian civilians. Indeed, he launched moderate-sized air attacks on the Syrian military twice in response to their violations of his red lines. And in a twist of fate that still boggles the mind, owing to the proven credibility of Trump’s threats to use force, Assad — and Putin — were deterred by a Trump tweet from finishing off the rebel alliance in Idlib, a small province in the north where rebels and dissidents and refugees were holed up. And it was those very rebels nearly a decade later who launched the rebellion that overthrew Assad this year, allowing the Biden administration and then the Trump administration to support Syria’s transformation into a relatively free country, now no longer under American sanctions and working on a diplomatic settlement with Israel. This extraordinary development was one of the delayed consequences of the calibrated but determined use of American (and later Israeli) power. 

In retrospect, however, it was the Obama administration’s approach to Putin’s invasion of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014 that looks to have been even more consequential than the Syrian red line debacle. For the Obama administration essentially abdicated any leadership role in the response to Putin’s invasion, despite the fact that the United States had offered a security assurance to Ukraine in the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 in return for Kyiv giving up its Soviet nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union. Yes, there was a half-hearted sanctions package imposed on Russia, and some Obama officials did condemn Putin’s brazen invasion. But two decisions stand out ten years later. First, Obama declared publicly that he believed that Russia had “escalation dominance” in Europe. Even if true, the signaling of such an assumption to Russia is unforgivably hard to fathom. It gave Putin a green light. (Nor was it necessarily true.) And all the while the Democrats were still deriding Mitt Romney’s comment in the presidential debate two years earlier that “Russia is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe.” Such a view, they said, was “so nineteenth-century.” 

Secondly, Washington absented itself from the diplomacy that ended the initial Russian assault. It was the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who negotiated directly with Putin, leading to the endless arguments and violations of the resulting Minsk Agreement. I am absolutely certain that in her time Madeleine Albright would have resigned if her president had instructed her to absent herself from a diplomatic settlement of a Russian military assault in the heart of Europe. Inaction was the American response to Putin’s invasion of 2014, which is why Putin probably never expected the West to act so decisively eight years later when he launched a full-fledged invasion. 

When it came to humanitarian aid, the Obama administration’s caution and fear of signaling any American involvement became both tragic and farcical. After ruling out military assistance to Ukraine, including purely defensive weapons, a ban was imposed on non-lethal assistance, such as uniforms and vehicles. The one measure of assistance eventually authorized by Obama was humanitarian assistance — and here his inaction became an absurdity. While a hapless Pentagon official began filling a U.S. transport plane with MREs and other emergency supplies to fly to Ukraine, last-minute orders came directly from the White House national security leadership to stand down. They feared how Moscow would interpret the arrival of a military plane loaded with food aid. They did not want to “provoke the Russians.” And so a German shipping company was contracted to deliver the food at far greater cost. 

Then there was Libya. When an uprising against its dictator exploded, and the Obama administration reluctantly participated in air strikes against the Qaddafi regime, a top Obama aide promulgated an imperishable concept. President Obama and his administration were not ceding leadership to Paris and London, he said; not at all. The United States was “leading from behind.” Given the half-hearted American effort — I remember British officials were livid that the United States was refusing to replenish European aircraft with American weapons after the French and the British ran out of bombs and missiles — it was no surprise when the Libyan intervention became a muddle. Qaddafi was killed, but the chaos and instability persists to this day. Our participation in the Libyan operation is now remembered as a case of excessive American intervention, but in truth it was a case of insufficient American intervention. Having procured a perfect Security Council resolution to justify Western action and lead an international response, the Obama administration declined the opportunity and entered the fray with the overwhelming objective of getting out of it. And so we left Libya to its anarchy. 

As a result of the debacle in Libya, the red line reversal in Syria, and the determined inaction after Putin invaded Crimea, not to mention Obama’s lukewarm response to the democratic rebellion in Iran in 2009 and his confused response to the democratic rebellion in Egypt in 2011, respect and fear of Washington precipitously declined. Of course, after four years of the first Trump administration, much of the world welcomed the arrival of a new Democratic administration led by Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden. 

IV 

A British prime minister famously declared that it is “events, dear boy, events” that determine a country’s statecraft. Improvisation is at the heart of foreign-policymaking; otherwise your values and your interests stand no chance of being realized. Events during Biden’s term in office did just that. The record is mixed. While he made important strategic decisions, for good and for ill, regarding Afghanistan and American policy toward China, Biden’s four years in foreign policy will be remembered mainly for Washington’s response to the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and to Hamas’ attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza. Having worked directly for Biden from 1988 to 1993 and collaborated with him extensively afterwards, I can testify that he was uncannily well-suited to understand the threat from Putin’s Russia and to rally European and international support for Ukraine after the Russian invasion. It is hard to think of another plausible Democratic candidate for president in our time who would have done what Biden did to rally the world in defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence — the world and his own wobbly post-Obama party. 

The Biden team quickly realized that the Trump administration was right in seeking to slow down the threat from China rather than advocating China’s rise with WTO-type Obama-and- Clinton-style happy talk. While agreeing with the Trump administration’s threat assessment, however, the Biden administration’s approach was thankfully different. Instead of insulting and bullying crucial allies, Biden and his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, would build a grand alliance to counter China across the board. The Trump administration thought commercially, but the Biden administration thought strategically. From building up the military capabilities of allies through AUKUS (Australia and the United Kingdom), and by means of new arrangements with India, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, from critical minerals to high technology, “de-risking” was the term of the hour; and unique efforts were also made to unite European and Asian allies to prevent economic and military coercion by the Chinese Communist Party. An all-of-government effort was established. Biden was determined to prevent China from dominating the Indo-Pacific or displacing America’s world leadership. 

And by the end of the administration something remarkable was taking place. Europeans had moved from seeking an investment treaty to integrate the European and Chinese economies to working with Washington to penalize Beijing’s decision to go all in on behalf of Russia in what it called a “no limits” partnership. At the same time, Asian allies were increasingly integrated into NATO and supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression. Biden’s and Blinken’s diplomacy, combined with extensive intelligence briefings on the Chinese military build-up and its extensive support for Russia’s war economy, helped link Asian and European allies in unprecedented ways, so that allies from the Atlantic and the Pacific were coordinating with Washington to contain the threat arising from the Russia–China partnership. 

For a Democratic president, this was neither obvious nor easy. Not only would European allies be wary if Washington failed to stabilize its relationship with China, but many in the Democratic Party have come around only slowly to the idea that China is somehow a threat to the West. (Some prominent Democrats have yet to assent to that proposition.) That is why Biden and Blinken started by demonstrating responsible management of the crucial diplomatic dance with Beijing. And for similar reasons — managing but not wanting to overstate or to stimulate the threat posed by China and Russia — Biden began by seeking a summit with Putin to try and stabilize the Russian relationship as he built political and diplomatic support to confront the new Chinese challenge. Of course, that effort came to naught when the bilious Putin continued to spout his grievances regarding everything from NATO expansion to the invasion of Iraq and alleged American interference in Russian political affairs. Soon Putin’s massive conventional build-up around Ukraine rendered any hope for a modus vivendi hopeless. 

Meanwhile there was a second Biden decision of enormous consequence: to move forward with Trump’s Afghanistan policy by withdrawing American troops from that country. A failure to quit Afghanistan would have required the re-opening of negotiations with the Taliban, with all the attendant uncertainty. Since I didn’t join the administration until December 2022, I was not privy to the internal discussions and cannot provide an answer to the obvious question of why President Biden did not pursue the approach that Vice President Biden had advocated back in 2009, namely to reduce the American footprint in Afghanistan to a minimal role of countering terrorism but leaving the larger mission of defending the Afghan government from the Taliban insurgency to the Afghans themselves. Presumably, President Biden did not believe that the residual terrorist threat in Afghanistan justified continuing what Trump and many Democratic leaders insisted on calling a “forever war” rather than a long-term deployment like the ones we continue to maintain in strategically significant areas of the world. (This, notwithstanding the difference between monitoring the armistice line in Korea or maintaining bases in Europe and defending against a determined adversary like the Taliban.) 

The failures of planning and the abysmal coordination in our withdrawal from Afghanistan troubled all Americans, but they were especially hard for a Democrat to watch. As American troops withdrew from Bagram Air Base, the elected government of Ashraf Ghani collapsed and a jubilant Taliban resumed their oppression of many millions of Afghans. And despite heroic efforts to evacuate hundreds of thousands of Afghans, particularly those who had courageously assisted us in our efforts, it is hard to deny that the way we withdrew evoked memories of the disastrous Iraqi occupation ten years earlier and even of Vietnam in 1975, and seriously weakened the reputation of the U.S. military and its political leadership. Until the Kremlin archives are opened, we will never know to what extent, if at all, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan had any impact on Putin’s calculation to invade Ukraine. My guess is very little, because Putin was under the false impression that his attack would succeed in a matter of days and he could present the world with a fait accompli. 

Yet Biden and his team surely proved their mettle from the moment Putin’s intention to invade became incontrovertible. First, an extraordinary effort was made to downgrade highly classified intelligence information and make it available to the public to warn Ukraine and America’s allies of the imminent invasion. This exceedingly unusual intelligence downgrade was immensely important. Following the debacle of Saddam Hussein’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, the standing of the American intelligence community took a hit. Not only did doubt about the accuracy of intelligence make it harder to win support in a crisis, but the power of intelligence diplomacy to persuade friends and allies of future threats was weakened as well. In a tragic way, Putin’s invasion was a kind of vindication for the U.S. intelligence community. After all, key European allies and many others were convinced that Washington was once again wrong. Working at the OECD in Paris at the time, I can attest to the fact that German and French officials up and down the line refused to believe that Moscow would do something so dangerous and so stupid. By warning them, America restored some lost luster and helped Paris and Berlin as they responded with real solidarity to change their strategy and break their budgetary restraints and their traditional caution in response to the aggression. 

More significant than the intelligence diplomacy was Washington’s overall world leadership after the invasion began and it became clear that Ukraine would not be quickly overrun, as many in the West feared. Given the troubled history of American foreign policy in the years prior to the Ukraine war, and especially given the dogmas and the debates inside the Democratic Party, few would have believed that the Biden administration would be able to galvanize such a solid coalition of nearly every country in Europe and many more in Asia to impose economic sanctions, freeze hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian assets, and provide hundreds of billions of dollars more in concrete military assistance, including modern tanks, aircraft, artillery, and multiple variants of missiles and drones. It is true that, from the standpoint of Ukraine’s needs, the pace of delivery of American and NATO weapons was slow and halting, but the far more important point here is that President Biden rejected the view of his predecessor that Moscow had some kind of “escalation dominance” that required Western countries to stand down or risk defeat in a conventional or even some kind of nuclear confrontation. Yes, Biden moved carefully and cautiously when it came to arming and training the Ukrainian military, but there was an undeniable logic to his strategy: given Putin’s repeated attempts to drive a wedge among European countries and between Europe and the United States by repeatedly threatening nuclear escalation, Biden insisted that the NATO allies cross the Rubicon together. NATO unity was Putin’s nightmare, and the Biden administration wanted NATO to provide more and better weapons as a united alliance. 

The internal dynamics in the administration developed a certain pattern. The State Department would advocate and the Pentagon would equivocate. Consider two examples. The M1 tank episode was classic. The debate over this weapon system, over whether and when it should be given to the Ukrainians, involved the Pentagon correctly pointing out how difficult it would be to use the weapon, how complicated its logistical requirements were, and how few were available. Meanwhile, since America was not providing its best tank, Germany was refusing to provide its most modern tank, the Leopard. While early transfers of these weapons might not have changed the military balance, they surely would have helped. With the Pentagon stalling, Blinken eventually persuaded the president that the issue was not the tank itself, but whether the threshold of transferring a state-of-the-art tank would be crossed, in which case Germany and other Europeans could furnish the tanks, which were more readily available and did not contain the logistical tail of the M1. In the end, Biden decided to move forward with a small American deployment right away, which was the signal for the German and European transfers to proceed. Then there was continued debate over providing the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMs, a medium-range surface-to-surface missile. Here again Blinken had to argue it out with Pentagon officials over the details of the weapon’s utility. Since most Russian airfields had moved beyond the range of ATACMS, and since it was the Russian aircraft that were such a threat, Pentagon officials protested that the ATACMS would have minimal effect in blunting the Russian advantage — until new information emerged that the Russian Air Force envisioned the refueling and refitting of those same aircraft on their way to Ukraine at airfields within the range of ATACMS. 

Biden’s policy of active and generous and unintimidated support of Kyiv accomplished nothing less than the overcoming of the taboos on American action that were established by the Iraq War. This time the syndrome took the hit. This was a momentous achievement, at least if the United States is not to shrink into a small-minded and selfish country. You might even say that, temporarily at least, Putin’s war brought many Democrats, led by Biden, back to their senses, or more specifically, back to their sense of history, which of course encompasses more than Baghdad and Falluja. And the great irony is that what made Biden’s forceful leadership possible was precisely his age. Among leaders in the Democratic Party, only he had been around long enough to remember and to understand that when Europe and the United States stand in solidarity, ultimately Moscow cannot sustain its aggressive stance. That was the lesson of the Berlin crisis in 1948 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and the reason why the Cold War ended with the collapse of Soviet communism. Biden was not only post-Iraq, he was also post-World War II. His paradigm for American foreign policy was broader and deeper — and more knowledgeable — than certain doctrines of the Democratic Party in our time. He contested those doctrines and banished them to the margins, at least for now. 

In addition to the Ukraine war, the war against Hamas has had a dramatic effect on perceptions of American power and international leadership, and not in the way most would expect. This is not the place for an extended discussion of what the Biden administration did and did not do in support of Israel from October 7, 2023, until January 20, 2025. I understand that this is the most bitter debate of our day, and the most morally excruciating one. I want only to note that the steadfast American support for Israel against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, demonstrated with the provision of air defense systems such as the THAAD (as well as $16 billion in wartime assistance), was noted by leaders in the Middle East and beyond. Those leaders also saw a glimpse of the future when Washington organized European countries and key Arab countries to work with CENTCOM in a comprehensive defense of Israel’s air space. This was the work of an ally and a leader. (The Biden administration hoped that its fierce support of Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas atrocities would give it leverage to moderate Israel’s conduct of the subsequent war in Gaza, but in this it failed.) Having accompanied Secretary Blinken to a number of intense discussions with European and Arab leaders, I saw respect and admiration for America — not least for its prowess and its strength of will — expressed even by hard-boiled figures like Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. In the latter’s case, he told us emphatically that Biden’s steadfastness regarding Ukraine and Israel had persuaded him that Saudi Arabia’s long-term future lies with Washington and not with Beijing. 

So the larger strategy worked. By doing the hard work of diplomacy, by not disparaging friends and allies who may not agree, by standing by our friends in time of crisis, and by meeting the global responsibilities imposed on us by our own power, the Biden administration, despite some missteps, restored American foreign policy to its proper level, to its moral traditions and its strategic strengths. 

V

If Barack Obama’s diffident withdrawalism made the nations of the world skeptical of American will and anxious about American reliability as an ally, Donald Trump’s erratic commerce-driven America First-ism has driven them to despair. Will a “snapback” in foreign policy be possible after a second Trump term? Certainly not if a Republican succeeds him. For this reason, Democrats must be lucid about what happened during the last three Democratic administrations, so as to prepare themselves intellectually and politically to maintain America’s role as an indispensable leader in Europe and Asia. Sure, with “burden-sharing” and higher defense spending among our allies. But the real issue is not who pays what, but who leads where. 

While many commentators are right to lament the trainwreck of alliance relationships wrought by Trump, the larger problem is that many Americans have lost trust in their government since the debacle of Iraq. Skepticism about American power, about the possibility that it can be used for good and not for ill, is now received wisdom among the letter generations (X, Y and Z), many of whom probably nod their heads sullenly in agreement with Trump’s isolationist tropes. Isolationism, after all, has never been confined to the American right. Why should America defend South Korea? Who cares if China invades Taiwan? Isn’t it a Chinese island? Is Israel still a strategic asset deserving of our support? Is it worth risking World War III to protect those rich Europeans with their cradle-to-grave social services, and why don’t they devote as much national effort to military matters as we do? Isn’t the deployment of American soldiers in foreign lands nothing but imperialism? These questions will increase in force in the coming years, not least owing to the new elan of the progressives within the Democratic Party. It is way too late to count on the perdurability of the foreign-policy worldview that sustained us — and many other nations — before 2003 and the Obama retrenchment. Many Americans probably also agree with Trump’s sensible-sounding “spheres of interest,” whereby Beijing dominates Asia, the Kremlin dominates Eastern Europe and other parts of Eurasia, and the United States brings back the Monroe doctrine to dominate Latin America, with maybe Canada and Greenland thrown in. 

What is most important is for the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia and North America to develop a common threat assessment. Difficult times lie ahead; great power rivalries and worse. The combination of Russia’s modern day war economy and China’s massive build-up of ships, missiles, strategic nuclear weapons, and space and air capabilities poses a threat such as we have never seen before. If we further take into account a ruthless North Korean dictator with nuclear weapons and whatever remains of Iran’s military and terrorist capabilities, we cannot avoid the conclusion — which many Americans would like to avoid — that the so-called Axis of Authoritarians must be countered and — to use the still-valuable Cold War term — contained. 

We might begin with a concept of “dual containment.” Instead of shying away from the word “containment” in the case of China because of its extensive involvement in the world economy, the next administration should follow on the Biden approach with the added candor of using the C-word. Citing “dual containment” in the context of Russia and China will also provide clarity and a sense of purpose to American foreign policy in a chaotic and pitiless world. As long as the next president responsibly manages the relationship with Beijing’s leader, then European and Asian allies will not shy away from strengthening the security arrangements necessary to prevent and deter an aggressive CCP-led China from seeking to dominate Asia and the crucial sea lanes in the South and East China seas, not to mention pursuing its “we are a big power” intimidation of our friends and allies around the world. And by banding together when it comes to crucial minerals, rare earths, semiconductors, and other emergent technologies, China’s use of economic and technological blackmail can be contained as well. 

It is past time for a revival of the mid-twentieth-century approach when the founding fathers of containment designed an enlightened global role for the United States — no, it didn’t always work perfectly! — and then developed a rational and empirically based threat assessment and then constructed a rational and empirically based plan of action. The next president can candidly lay out what China seeks, and the phenomenal military build-up of Russian and Chinese military and high technology weapons, to justify a new and firm policy of dual containment. And instead of demanding that the United States bear most of the burden, a renaissance of alliances can be launched instead. We do not have to do it all, but unless we want an Orwellian world order dominated by the Chinese Communist Party — aided and abetted by Putin’s Russia with a boost from the brutal militarized dictatorship of Kim’s North Korea — we need to lead. MAGAists cannot be expected to understand this, or to grasp that the formation of such essential friendships and partnerships will not be achieved by bullying and trade wars. And so the task of renovating and fortifying our position in the world will fall to the Democrats. But what are the Democrats thinking?