What The Exit From Afghanistan Tells Us About How Biden Sees The World
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
President Biden is meeting virtually this morning with G-7 leaders on Afghanistan. The withdrawal has raised some big questions about how Biden views America's role in the world, as NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid reports.
ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: In January 2002, when the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reopened, Ambassador Ryan Crocker says the first member of Congress to visit him was then-Senator Joe Biden.
RYAN CROCKER: One of his really great qualities, I thought, was his driving need to see things for himself.
KHALID: Crocker says Biden did the same in Iraq.
CROCKER: And I just - I really respected that. So what have they done with the real Joe Biden? And who is this guy up there now?
KHALID: Crocker had thought the president was an old-school internationalist, in the vein of presidents going back to World War II, who believed in American leadership on the global stage. But with the chaos in Afghanistan, he can't seem to make sense of him.
CROCKER: For me, there are kind of two sets of issues here. One of them is what his international philosophy actually is. The other is, quite frankly, an issue of competence. And I find both alarming.
KHALID: Much of Biden's foreign policy is rooted in his years of firsthand experience. And that's why the withdrawal from Afghanistan has raised so many questions. Leon Panetta was director of the CIA under President Obama. He has publicly referred to this as a Bay of Pigs moment for Biden.
LEON PANETTA: The issue that concerns me is that when the president does want to make a decision, that you want to be able to implement that decision in the right way, which means that you have to look at all of the contingencies. You have to look at all the possibilities that could develop.
KHALID: And in this case, it's not clear to him the president did. Panetta has sat in the Situation Room with Biden. He's seen him deal with crises.
PANETTA: He's someone who feels that he's had a great deal of experience in dealing with the world. I think he does have a deep sense of confidence in his views.
KHALID: And one question is how much Biden trusts his own instincts over everyone else's. But the president's worldview isn't just about policy; it's also about style.
RICHARD FONTAINE: He has said that all foreign policy can be boiled down to personal relationships.
KHALID: Richard Fontaine was a foreign policy adviser to GOP Senator John McCain. When the president spoke about Afghanistan, he mentioned that Ashraf Ghani, the now former president, had assured him certain things would happen. They obviously did not.
FONTAINE: U.S. presidents often, I believe, put too much stock in their ability to sway a foreign leader solely through force of personality and things like that because countries have these things called national interests.
KHALID: Fontaine says that's not entirely unique to Biden. The bigger thing he's noticed is that the president, who once supported intervention on humanitarian grounds in the Balkans, in Iraq and even to some degree in Afghanistan, has changed his tune. Nowadays, Biden speaks about the most important global struggle as a battle between autocracies and democracies. And Afghanistan is not part of that equation. He's focused on China. His team often refers to this idea of creating a foreign policy for the middle class, a response to President Trump, but also progressives within his own party. Matt Duss is a foreign policy adviser to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
MATT DUSS: I think there's a recognition that so much of the way that foreign policy was talked about and made in Washington had become completely detached from the kind of lived experiences of Americans.
KHALID: And so Biden, like Trump, made a commitment to end the forever wars. It meant pulling back in some places, even as Biden promised to reengage with the world. And that sends a risky message to some.
JIM JONES: If you withdraw from the world stage because we're going to fix the home problem and ignore the rest, then the world is going to be a very, very dangerous place.
KHALID: General Jim Jones served as Obama's national security adviser.
JONES: For the last half of the 20th century, we figured out how to do it both ways.
KHALID: But Biden seems to be making the calculation that in the 21st century, Americans want to see nation-building at home, not overseas.
Asma Khalid, NPR News.
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