One picture of Joe Biden at Camp David this week, sitting alone in a polo shirt, chin in hand, looking worriedly at a large screen tells the whole story of the 46th president's failure in his first major mission – withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan.
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Until last week, Biden benefitted by the Afghanistan issue not being a burning one for anyone in the US, and even the hawks in Congress realized that the mission was over and the withdrawal would happen soon. But on the clear, blue-skied day when Kabul fell like a house of cards, Biden managed to put the country back on the agenda and turn it into a litmus test of his crisis management. The grade? Total fiasco. Not because of the decision to pull out, but because of the lack of ability to plan the pullout appropriately and talk honestly about it to the cameras (not to mention, answer questions).
This show of Biden, totally alone, sitting at a big table and talking to his advisors during a crisis while still refusing to cut his vacation at Camp David short, is all we need to know about how Biden – and the rest of the world – has handled Afghanistan in the last seven months. The image made it clear that for Biden, anything unrelated to COVID and the economy will be carried out from afar, with an uninterested look.
This should be of concern to Israel and other US allies, if this is how he'll act when it's time to make a decision about a nuclear deal with Iran, for example. It should also concern anyone who thinks that Biden will be a "human rights" president – all the signs indicate that the Americans will ultimately recognize the Taliban, even if they continue to take away women's rights.
What might be worse, the picture showed the way in which Biden prefers not to make decisions until he is forced to. He thinks that his cabinet is a bunch of bland technocrats, rather than people who have something organic that holds them together. Some will say that former President Trump was also a one-man show, but Trump knew how to give his administration officials access and listen to what they wanted, especially people at the important level, like his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo and the top defense echelon. When they made suggestions, Trump would meet with them in person and listen, and even insist on developing them (such as with the targeted killing of Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Most important – Trump made it clear that he wanted to be presented with plans, and did not wait for them to arrive. With Biden, at least according to reports these past few days, various officials warned repeatedly that the Afghans were not capable of taking the reins, but Biden hoped his cabinet would know what to do without him giving them explicit instructions. Because really, what's so difficult about pulling out of a country, he must have thought to himself.
For Biden, this is a familiar pattern. As described in a weekly column in The Atlantic, as early as 1975 he opposed giving aid to the South Vietnamese government to help it stop the invasion from the north. He opposed the Gulf War in 1991, and in 2007 he refused to help the Bush administration send additional forces to Iraq, a move that in hindsight helped Iraq out of the chaos that reigned at the time, until the Biden-Obama government pulled the forces out and left an opening for the Islamic State to rise to power. In a book that came out a few years ago, Biden is even quoted saying that the US had no obligation to help the Afghans who helped the Americans, and that the Nixon administration had managed to avoid helping the Vietnamese who cooperated with it.
Today, Aug. 20, Biden marks the seven-month anniversary of his swearing-in as president, and it appears that with one failed mission in Afghanistan he has managed to wreck the only brand that helped him be elected: "I'm not Trump."
Biden successfully marketed himself as a man of experience who knew foreign policy in and out and how to negotiate Washington, so he argued that he could be entrusted to manage the US and the world because he already knew the material like the palm of his hand. This advantage, which he used to promote himself, distinguished him from Trump among Independent voters and those who sought stability after the lack of consistency Trump demonstrated during the COVID pandemic. But in one fell swoop, Biden managed to anger the same voters who made the small difference in the November election: the working class who hoped that Biden, like Trump, would be a president who would put America's honor front and center. So they gave him a chance.
'Stamp of approval'
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's arrival at the White House this coming Thursday will be Biden's first chance to rebuild his brand. The stamp of approval Bennett will provide him by sitting with him in the Oval Office will be the first signal that Biden is trying to look like a president who doesn't abandon his allies, and the administration's first step toward the difficult year the Democratic Party is expected to face – interim elections. Historically, the president's conduct has a direct influence on his party's chances of succeeding in the interim elections, and usually voters head for a change. This time, if Biden doesn't make a miraculous recovery, Afghanistan will be the Republicans' return ticket to both houses of Congress. Not because voters are angry about the withdrawal, but because they are angry that Biden demonstrated America's weakness and caused eyebrows to go up about his ability to lead America, even on domestic issues, for another three years. Voters will want something as a counter-balance, in the form of a Republican majority in both houses of Congress.
Biden can now be expected to face an onslaught of criticism about how the US can no longer be counted on as an ally, and his critics will make sure to mention both Israel and Taiwan repeatedly in the near future as test cases. If Bennett lines up with Biden at this particular time, he will be seen as offering him approval and forgiveness, and will thereby get pulled into the American political storm.
An unforgiveable humiliation
Many other Americans, like Biden himself, aren't interested in what is happening in Afghanistan, and won't punish the Democrats at the polls in 2022 or in 2024, or so Washington hopes. But history teaches us that international failures have a notably direct effect on how the US president is perceived at home. Even now, Biden is seeing a drop in the polls and is at his lowest approval rating since he became president because of the failure – and the humiliation – in Afghanistan. Americans will forgive many things, but not incompetence.
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For example, despite all Trump's remarks during the campaign and after his, his polling numbers remained relatively stable during his presidency, even after COVID hit, because he managed to bring the economy to new heights and gave people the feeling that America was once again respected in the world. The same voters hoped that Biden would be a Democratic version of Trump – that he would give America the respect it deserved, and also pull it out of the COVID mess. Instead, in his first seven months in office, Biden managed to do what it took former President Jimmy Carter nearly an entire term to accomplish: cause America to lose the remaining shred of credibility it had in the world as a country not to be toyed with.
No one expected him to fight the Afghans' war for them, but everyone expected him to know how to put the Taliban in its place and deter them without complicating a well-ordered withdrawal. Everyone around Biden is fingering Trump as the party to be blamed for the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, because he was the one who reached understandings with the Taliban about an American withdrawal. But they forget to mention that Trump also made it clear that if the Taliban was responsible for anything "bad," while the deal was being implemented, the US would respond harshly and without hesitation. Biden refused to order a massive attack on Taliban forces that would have stopped their march to Kabul, give the Afghan government some breathing space and allow for an orderly withdrawal, even when one district after another was falling to them. He argued that the Taliban would use any such attack as an excuse to attack America, thereby admitting that he refused to deter the Taliban, and hammering the final nail in the coffin of the Afghan government's chances of survival.
Huge damage to the US image
At the last minute, Biden approved the deployment of thousands of soldiers to the region, including the 82nd Airborne Division, which was the one that launched the invasion of Normandy. Of the 6,000 soldiers sent in, 2,000 were from this division, and the others were from other units of the American forces. In addition, forces from the 10th Mountain Division are still deployed in Afghanistan and are defending its airport, as well as special forces, apparently. The British have also sent in hundreds of soldiers from their 16th Airborne Division. But no soldier can fix the damage done to the US image, and a photo op with the Israeli prime minister will be fully exploited by the White House.
This is why Bennett has to postpone his trip. Bennett argues that his government is 10 degrees to the right of his predecessor. If he believes that he represents that approach, he must not stand alongside a person who has caused America to lose so much of its credibility, and effectively handed the Middle East over to Tehran and the Taliban on a silver platter. Where is American planning? Has America gone back to "leading from behind," as Obama did in Libya, which led to the chaos that Libya and the region as a whole are currently suffering from? If Bennett wants to wipe the smile of Tehran and Hamas' faces, he needs to show Biden that he is not willing to participate with this approach. Bennett will be asked during the visit if he trusts Biden, and he will be forced to say that he does. This would put him in line with an administration that even the Democratic hawks in Congress do not believe is capable of rebuilding America's standing.
If Biden is under attack from the Right and the Left, including by CNN and the other media outlets that general sing his praises, it's a sign he's really in trouble. Does Bennett want to be the one to restore his standing, thereby giving him a chance to put the two-state paradigm back on the table? Does Bennett want to be immortalized as the person who caused the Democrats' peace plan to become an option again, sending Israel and the coalition into another political whirlpool?
Maybe Biden will want to show off his "achievement" with the Palestinian issue. Maybe some sort of reduction to settlement construction, a move Bennett is already moving toward unofficially. This isn't the time for Bennett to be seen as caving in to American pressure. Biden needs to handle his problems alone. For Bennett, it would be better to postpone the visit.
