In a matter of weeks, President Joe Biden and his administration committed such egregious miscalculations in their retreat from Afghanistan that even the media questioned the president’s judgment and compared him to Jimmy Carter. Analysts and talking heads, who normally defend the president, wondered how something like this could have happened. Didn’t the administration promise that “America is back?” How could this have gone so wrong?
There is an easy answer to this: The president has reiterated decisions he made a decade ago and refuses to incorporate how the conditions have changed. During the Obama administration, it was no secret that Vice President Biden opposed Obama’s surge in Afghanistan and advised against the views of commanders there. Before that, Sen. Biden had a record of saying the United States should not engage in so-called “endless wars.” I couldn’t agree more with that premise, but refusing to acknowledge the realities in Afghanistan meant that President Biden squandered 20 years of blood and sacrifice, reopened America to the threat of terrorist attacks, and caused enormous damage to our alliances and partnerships.
This administration constantly emphasizes the importance of our allies, yet the way we withdrew from Afghanistan was a slap in the face to our partners. While they agreed with the decision to leave, the careless way we exited outraged them. Our NATO friends invoked Article 5 after the 9/11 attacks. They fought and died alongside our troops. They stood by America’s side for 20 years. They deserve better.
A disaster of this proportion has caught the attention of those who might not otherwise dwell on America’s standing in the world. However, this is not just about Afghanistan. Who is making the foreign policy decisions in the White House? Biden has chosen a team of advisers who have been with him for decades but seem unwilling to challenge his assumptions and instead blindly implement decisions he made years ago. Unfortunately, this has created a distorted decision-making process that limits information, artificially narrows options, and is felt across the foreign policy spectrum.
Every major foreign policy issue this administration touches turns to ash. It started just two weeks after assuming office, when Biden unilaterally extended the New START nuclear treaty with the Russians. Biden overruled experts at the State Department, Department of Defense, and Congress who advocated for a short-term extension that would preserve U.S. leverage in addressing the critical weaknesses in this ill-conceived, Obama-era treaty. On Iran, Biden’s rush to reenter the nuclear deal despite continued Iranian deception and nuclear misbehavior failed to recognize the true nature of the regime and fueled its terrorism in the Middle East. In Israel, instead of capitalizing on the success of the Abraham Accords to bring peace to the region, the administration has returned to years-old Palestinian policies that have led to continued violence and division.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which the Biden administration publicly identified as a Russian malign influence project and verbally committed to stopping at all costs, is now completed. Ignoring U.S. law, Biden traded away Europe’s energy security and put Ukraine on the chopping block in an attempt to curry favor with others — an effort that has now proved pointless after his massive failure to our allies in Afghanistan. Since Biden’s ill-advised summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June, Russia has continued its belligerence and abuses. Cyberattacks have not ceased, and this very week, Russia and Belarus are undertaking a massive military exercise on the borders of NATO. In Venezuela, the administration is openly supporting a flawed negotiation process that is doomed to fail and, when it does, will entrench the influence of transnational criminal organizations and malign external state actors such as Russia in our hemisphere.
Biden’s track record in just eight months has made Americans less safe, weakened our friends, emboldened our adversaries, and undermined America’s credibility on the world stage. Biden’s trusted aides appear to operate in an echo chamber. If a team is unable to consider all the facts or ring the alarm before a self-made crisis such as the one in Afghanistan unfolds, how can America remain a global leader? If this doesn’t change, I’m afraid to see what the remaining years of this administration will yield for us on the world stage.
The debacle in Afghanistan continues to be a whole-of-government failure. By the administration’s own admission, they abandoned hundreds of Americans and thousands of our Afghan allies, suffered the most American casualties in Afghanistan in a decade, and turned Afghanistan into a dangerous breeding ground for attacks against the U.S. The recent U.S. strike that killed an aide worker instead of a terrorist target epitomizes the administration’s wishful thinking on over-the-horizon counterterrorism.
At home, Biden put the Department of Homeland Security in charge of Afghan evacuees, but the State Department and USAID are running the show — staffed by volunteers. To quote one foreign service officer volunteer: “Why didn’t we immediately start tasking the most competent, relevant people we knew to create a plan, instead of asking for volunteers?” The lack of organization is disheartening. We must do better.
Congress has a vital oversight role to play in foreign policy, and the Biden administration must take responsibility for the disaster in Afghanistan. However, it has refused to cooperate with Congress. I asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the dissent cable sent from the Kabul Embassy, and he plainly stated that he will not share it with Congress. My concern is not simply the obfuscation, but that the cable was not shared with the president the month before Kabul fell.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez and I asked Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to testify before our committee, which is only appropriate given the Department of Defense’s failures regarding support for the Afghan security forces and the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program. The secretary refused on jurisdictional grounds.
A siloed and bureaucratic response to this crisis will fail to hold the right people accountable for the many tragedies it has borne, and Congress cannot permit that to happen. Biden and the administration must do better if they want the U.S. to remain the leader of the free world.
Jim Risch is the junior U.S. senator from Idaho. He is a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
