Biden's Choice.

• Author: Beebe, George
• Position: The Realist

Joe Biden launched his presidency with a bold message: America is back. The rank amateurs who had made such a mess of foreign policy under President Donald Trump would be replaced by responsible and experienced "adults" who understood how the world works and how to get things done. Americans and their allies abroad could rest assured that a competent corps--pedigreed experts that an earlier generation had dubbed the best and the brightest--was once again manning the U.S. ship of state. Our adversaries, we were told, would have to reckon with the return of strong American leadership to the global arena. And so on.

Then came Afghanistan. The collision of this catchy political slogan with the hard realities of Helmand province and the Biden administration's failure to prepare created a humiliating spectacle. Ending the most endless of our unending wars was not as simple as it appeared. The adults who were back in charge of U.S. foreign policy turned out to be not so adept at planning and executing a military withdrawal. As President Biden offered one sophistic explanation after another about why he was leaving, including claiming that he had to adhere to the Trump plan, his advisers' faith that our partners in the Afghan government and military were willing and able to resist the Taliban turned out to be wholly misplaced. The folly of attempting to build a modern central government in a country that had no tradition of central governance was laid bare for all to see. Afghanistan has held a mirror up to the performance of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and the reflection has not been pretty.

No doubt the series of unforced errors committed by this elite did not originate with the Biden crew. Quite the contrary: the seeds of our disaster in Afghanistan were planted as far back as the 1990s, when the rising post-Cold War generation, led by a combination of neocons and liberal hawks, first convinced itself that America should discard its reliance on traditional statecraft to manage and contain foreign threats in favor of an ambitious new effort to transform the outside world in the image of the United States. NATO was re-conceived from a defensive military alliance into something else--a vehicle for spreading liberal governance and creating a new Europe, "whole and free." No matter that George P. Kennan, among others, warned that America risked creating a backlash that would result in a resentful and revanchist Russia. During the Clinton...