How Biden Is Blowing It With Europe-- CNN Story Is Based In Reality
The quote bracketed below is right out of my Blog article three days ago, "Random Thoughts on the Afghanistan Fiasco"
While most "non-Trump" media were trying to spin the US failure of policy and strategic vision as something other than unmitigated disaster, spreading the blame, and circling the wagons around Biden personally, I homed in on those things which were strategic and fundamental, as for example the implications of these moves for our future relations with Europe.,
For close to four decades of my involvement in international politics, I received briefings from our collaborators in European countries, including daily reports on the "take" of their varied press outlets on developments in the US and elsewhere. I was trained in a certain way to see events through the eyes of Europeans as well as our own on the ground assessments of the US, giving me a slightly different perspective than mainstream US media.
Therefore as the situation broke in Afghanistan, almost by reflex my first thoughts included considerations of how the Europeans would react to this. Hence, the quote below--
["The policy announced by Trump, continued by Biden was conducted almost unilaterally, without input from our NATO and other allies. Remember that Trump as a Putin agent was out to destroy NATO and isolate the US in an "America First" posture. Why would Biden stick with this orientation and freeze out the Europeans, thereby failing to seek their help in extricating ourselves under a negotiated International framework. There was a pathway for allowing an orderly evacuation and transition to the Taliban government which was ignored for reasons still unknown. Economic inducements could have been the "carrot" in bringing about a new agreement and new timetable, with a more gradual phase out. Europe could have helped with this"].
For those older heads who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 when the Soviet high command sought to inflict a strategic humiliation on the young President John F. Kennedy, one of the consequences in its aftermath was the strategic withdrawal of France from the Military arm of NATO, who instead formed their own independent Nuclear deterrent, known as the "Force de Frappe". It very useful to look back on this, as it was a major inflection point for the 20th Century.
The reasoning of DeGaulle for this move was that JFK's actions during the crisis led him to believe that were the USSR to invade Western Europe in response to a US Military strike against Cuba, that the US would not step up to defend Europe, rendering the US Nuclear umbrella for NATO an empty non-starter. DeGaulle, by setting up his own Nuclear deterrent was in effect blackmailing the US to come to Europe's defense, announcing that France would deploy nuclear weapons in response to a Soviet invasion, which in turn would provoke a Soviet attack on the US as well as Europe. So DeGaulle was throwing down the gauntlet to the US as if to say, "does NATO exist in name only, or not"?
Keeping some of this history in mind, as the Europeans do, President Biden so far has attempted to conduct his foreign policy to restore our alliances which were sabotaged by Trump's "America First" isolationist garbage, which he conducted as a misbegotten strategy for globally reducing America's role in the world. Trump did this in favor of proposing a literally mercenary US miltary, which he would hire out to foreign countries in exchange for weapons deals and money. (As he did with MBS and the Saudis) This included his withdrawal from Syria, abandoning our Kurdish allies and the region to ISIS, and Trump's proposals to withdraw from South Korea,, his "dealmaking" with KJU to get a peace accord and score a Nobel Prize to help his reelection. The sole beneficiary of this insanity was of course, Trump's "handler" Vladimir Putin, who stood to pick up the US and NATO's broken geostrategic chess pieces as his "spoils" in the Great Game.
Biden came to office with the promise that he would reverse the global retreat set into motion by Trump, strengthen NATO, confront Russian aggression, and make sure the US would become once again a reliable strategic partner.
The decision to stiff arm the Europeans on the withdrawal policy (Excepting those matters bearing upon the actual withdrawal of European forces deployed there) was read by our allies exactly as I was afraid it would be, taken as renewed doubt about whether the US word was worth anything, and whether in a crisis they would be abandoned in similar fashion as those former Afghan allies left behind, which the administration has been scrambling these last two weeks to evacuate in response to global outrage and immense political blowback at home.
So here we have the CNN story linked below, echoing exactly the issues and concerns I addressed three days ago. It is a reality based article which is likely speaking for a grouping in our National Security establishment which is very freaked out at the administration's pragmatic capitulation to domestic political pressure, undoing the good will and stated commitments they have been making to our allies so far this year.
I've said this before, but in most cases, the timing and context of events and policy statements are more important than the actual events and announcements themselves, because they have a non-linear effect, very much like JFK's miscalculations vis a vis France and DeGaulle in the heat of the Cuban crisis. This highlights again the folly of trying to govern with damage control, poll numbers, "Optics", and election driven ass covering.
It is a gross error in judgment to skew our vision of what this is, in the name of circling the wagons around the President. The best thing we can do to help him is to be truthful and critical, to insure that whatever led to the failures in judgment of the last months is not repeated. Holding the White House accountable does not mean you are indirectly supporting the right wing insurrectionists who are committed to taking the President down. It's means you are committed to making sure the administration succeeds, and that we won't sit back and watch them fuck up in the name of maintaining our "loyalty". That will almost certainly make the problem worse.
In the meantime, it might be a good idea to send your friends over to my Blog, that is if they want to get a picture of things three days ahead of everyone else. 😉
