What we've got here is a failure to prioritize

Biden’s most forgotten crime, as a metaphor for his foreign policy

In keeping with my recent trend of posting takes a week after the national conversation has moved on, I want to squeeze in a belated reflection on President Biden’s foreign policy.¹ I’ll start with a niche story you’ve likely forgotten.

When the Afghan Republic collapsed in August 2021, its central bank still had $7 billion of cash reserves stored in U.S. banks as a sort of “rainy day fund.” Soon after the U.S. withdrawal, a rainy day arrived. The country’s economy collapsed, throwing tens of millions of Afghans into famine and desperate hardship.

This put Biden in a pickle. Though Afghans sorely needed the money, the country was now run by the Taliban, who were still under U.S. sanctions and had not been recognized as a legitimate government. Further, some families of 9/11 victims filed suit to claim the money for themselves, citing a 2011 judgment that held the Taliban liable for the 9/11 attacks in absentia.

On one hand, the 9/11 families’ claims to this $7 billion were legally spurious and morally outrageous. 9/11 was not committed by Afghan nationals, and even if it were, it’s absurd to punish an entire nation collectively for crimes committed before most of its citizens were even born. The $7 billion included the reserves of commercial Afghan banks, which held the savings of ordinary Afghan people. The Taliban never possessed this money, and it did “not become the Taliban’s solely because they became the government,” explained Arianna Rafiq in the European Journal of International Law. “Nor do State assets ‘belong’ to their respective government, in any case.” And even if they did, the United States had not recognized the Taliban as a real government! How, then, could money belonging to Afghanistan’s central bank be used to pay what the Taliban owed?²

On the other hand, 9/11 victims draw more sympathy from American voters than voiceless, faraway brown people in the country that housed their attackers. The reasons this money belonged to Afghans were too technical for election-year politics, and Republicans had already raced to talk tough on the Taliban. Were Biden to do the right thing, ignore the 9/11 claimants, and return all the money to Afghanistan, bad faith actors may accuse him of softness or charity to countries controlled by terrorists. Helping 9/11 victims was the ultimate political shield.

So what did President Biden do? He took six months to decide, then shrugged and split it down the middle.

In February 2022, Biden divided the $7 billion into two equal parts. The first half would go to a Swiss trust charged with assisting humanitarian and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. The second half would be held in the United States pending the conclusion of litigation by the 9/11 families. Neither half would be used to stabilize the flailing Afghan economy, as was the purpose of a central bank.

Understandably, this decision sparked massive protests in Kabul. The United States came uninvited to their country; foisted a deeply corrupt government upon them; provoked and prolonged a brutal war around them, killing 176,000 of their countrymen; and then promptly left, taking half their savings for the privilege. Even American media accused the administration of stealing Afghans’ money.

Serious legal scholars jumped in to defend the President’s decision. They argued that the law tied his hands until the judicial process ran its course, and that given those restraints, the compromise shielded Afghans as much as legally possible. You can read their arguments and decide for yourself.

But I do not buy it for a second. Presidential discretion in foreign policy is enormous and almost impossible to challenge. When it comes to torture, blowing stuff up, or funding human rights abuses, unsettled legal questions never seem to be much of an obstacle. The Office of Legal Council exists in practice to invent creative rubber stamps for whatever the president wants to do, often using far flimsier legal interpretations than would have been necessary to reject the 9/11 families’ bullshit claims. I have also seen nothing, in any of these justifications, explaining where this $3.5 billion figure came from. It did not match the total compensatory claims in Havlish or any other lawsuit.

So it does not seem too cynical to suspect that President Biden split this money down the middle arbitrarily, as his preferred solution to a political predicament. He had enough legal cover to send all $7 billion to the Swiss trust if he’d wanted to, if not to unfreeze the assets entirely, as dozens of economists urged him to do. But there were sympathetic figures on both sides and choosing one over the other—prioritizing—would expose him to negative press. Giving both sides half the money was his way of hiding from that choice.

And that, I’m afraid, is a decent illustration of Biden’s entire foreign policy.

Time and again, Biden faced challenges that required him to prioritize: to not merely cite U.S. interests, but rank those interests, acknowledge tradeoffs between them, and allocate resources accordingly. On each occasion he made gestures in the direction of a needed pivot from longstanding U.S. policy, only to pull back from outdated instincts or fear of political backlash. Ultimately, Biden failed to choose between competing priorities in ways that left America overextended: strapped for cash, holding the bag for catastrophes, and mired in unwinnable conflicts to protect peripheral interests in the exact regions from which he hoped to divest.

Biden began his term pledging to "course-correct our foreign policy" with a "global posture review," floating a fundamental rethink of where U.S. forces were stationed and why. In the same speech, he promised to end U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen. And soon after, he made the correct decision to withdraw from Afghanistan after 20 futile years. Change was in the air.

The withdrawal itself was chaotic and bungled, but even that is much easier to condemn in hindsight. Experts did not expect Afghanistan to collapse so fast,³ and when it did, the Administration made heroic efforts to save as many Afghans as possible within its withdrawal timeline. Narrow incompetence of execution on a broadly necessary choice that two prior presidents had promised but failed to deliver, I can forgive.

Unfortunately, it seems the political fallout from Afghanistan gave Biden cold feet about any further hard choices. In November, the promised posture review was announced (though not published) with a whimper, prompting withering and widespread criticism. Incredibly, it concluded that no major strategic changes were needed. “Change five words and this could have been written almost a decade ago when the whole ‘Pacific Pivot’ started,” wrote one fed-up Substacker. “Nothing. They’ve got nothing.” That the United States still has forces in Iraq and Syria (and a defense budget driven by pork-barrel spending on obsolete legacy platforms and unneeded bases) is evidence of Biden’s first failure to prioritize.

When Russia invaded Ukraine the next year, I again thought Biden’s initial response was brilliant. Many expected Ukraine to fall quickly, but Biden rallied allies to its support and leveraged U.S. resources to fund, inform, and organize an effective defense. He deftly used salami tactics to increase the extent and sophistication of U.S. support while mitigating the risk of escalation. Contrary to criticism that he was too cautious, there is no reason to believe that any of the weapons initially withheld from Ukraine would have changed the war’s outcome had they only been provided earlier. The risk of nuclear escalation was real and far outweighed any other U.S. interests in the country. Biden deserves credit for avoiding the worst outcomes without selling Ukraine down the river.

But later in 2022, after a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive, Biden faced another choice. Republican support for the war was faltering, and General Milley boldly went public with his opinion that the war was unwinnable by military means. In Milley’s opinion, Ukraine should try to cement its gains at the bargaining table from a position of strength. But State Secretary Blinken, Ukrainian President Zelensky, and a chorus of liberal internationalists dismissed Milley’s expertise as defeatism, insisting on maximalist aims of total Ukrainian victory.

With frank discussion about Americans’ unwillingness to fund this war forever, Biden might have pushed Ukraine to the negotiating table, preserved its democracy and 80% of its territory against all odds, and secured the peace for long enough to rebalance responsibility for European security. But this would have required concessions: at minimum, conceding that Russia would gain some territory from its war of aggression; that Ukraine would not join NATO; and that power gets a vote despite our noble principles. Once again, the inability to prioritize between interests allowed the perfect to be the enemy of the best we could realistically achieve.

So instead, for the last two years, tens of thousands more people have needlessly died, while tens of billions more dollars were sunk into the Ukrainian cause. To continue this aid as long as we have required Democrats to make ugly legislative concessions at home. And what has our renewed commitment purchased? Less than nothing. We’ve watched our leverage evaporate as Russia slowly gained ground in exactly the sort of unwinnable, attritive trench warfare that General Milley predicted. We’ve had no plausible plan for victory, and yet no willingness to admit there would probably be a negotiated settlement at roughly the current battle lines, because President Biden was unwilling to engage with tradeoffs.

The war in Gaza has been the worst of it, though. I’ve written on it before and will spare you another sermon. But once again, Biden could not confront the need to depart from longstanding U.S. policy, resulting in moral and strategic calamity. He pursued “a reflexive policy of support for Israel that failed to account for how much the Israeli government and the world had changed.” He imagined (or at least, told us) that he didn’t need to choose between arming Israel, alleviating the humanitarian crisis, and promoting a two-state solution.⁴ His public statements carried on as if he could meaningfully restrain Netanyahu without the faintest whiff of threatened consequences. And in so doing, he made our country complicit in shocking atrocities that will blight our international standing for generations.⁵

Biden’s domestic legacy will be unifying an angry party at a turbulent moment to beat back a grave threat to American democracy; massaging a divided Congress to score important early victories on climate and innovation; and then throwing it all away by hanging on too long from pride and self-delusion.

His foreign policy legacy will be seen as the last gasp of an outdated and discredited foreign policy establishment. He strategized as if America was still a hegemon, refusing to acknowledge apparent limits to U.S. power and the tradeoffs they required. He clung to a romantic vision of America’s role in the world, cramming every issue into a simplistic “democracy vs. autocracy” framing. He then revealed how hollow that framing was by happily partnering with illiberal India, Israel, and Saudi Arabia whenever it suited his fancy. He based his foreign policy around the preservation of a liberal order that was already dead, and then his own actions put the final nails in its coffin.

His successor is unlikely to be better on this front, in part because he’s incapable of strategic thinking more complex than “Greenland is big.” Nor is he cured of the delusion that America can get everything it wants if it’s only tough and aggressive enough, or makes good enough deals, etc. But he is not a member of the foreign policy establishment, and if nothing else, his return to office should bury the coffin that Biden nailed shut.

As for the Afghan reserves? A court eventually rejected the 9/11 plaintiffs’ claims, but as far as I know, the money they claimed remains in this country. Worse, even the Swiss trust set up to help Afghans with the other $3.5 billion has disbursed $0 so far. Instead, the trust “hired an executive secretary, approved bylaws, and secured an insurance provider.” I’m sure emaciated Afghans, now enduring their fourth winter without a functioning economy, will take peace of mind from learning that their stolen assets are now insured.

Experts quoted in the links above cut through the bullshit: “Our sense is that the [Biden] administration is trying to move as slowly as possible”…“One might say that the fund is working as intended, to keep the problem out of the news.” None of this is new or surprising. Reflexively punishing illiberal governments in naïve hope of regime change, but inevitably hurting the innocent instead? Not thinking through whether regime change would benefit the country anyway, given the likeliest alternatives are now ISIS or renewed civil war? To the very end, Biden clung to the cruel and discredited mindsets of yesteryear.

There’s something obscene about the wealthiest nation in the world unilaterally entitling itself to reparations from one of the poorest. There’s something revolting about an arcane legal catfight between ambulance-chasing lawyers over which arbitrary assemblage of clients should profit from Afghanistan’s misery. They should all blush. They should all be ashamed.

Like so much else Biden did overseas, the Afghan reserves incident set dangerous precedents that undercut our claims of moral leadership. Russia invaded Ukraine because it’s stronger and it can. China killed Hong Kong’s democracy because it’s stronger and it can. And even as we protested this domination of the weak, we seized half the assets of a starving nation that was very recently our ally, because we’re stronger and we can. God forgive us.

1. I’m also conscious that I’ve had a lot of right-leaning posts recently. I guarantee you that is about to change.

2. None of this is to say the 9/11 claimants do not deserve compensation. But they deserved it years ago, and not from the pockets of immiserated Afghans. Indeed, Congress had already disbursed $3.3 billion to these families by 2020: more than a million dollars per 9/11 fatality. $7 billion would more than double this amount. And why, exactly, should the collapse of the Afghan Republic increase what these families deserve?

If President Biden wanted to use this money for reparations, he might have started with the civilian victims of his own military. Relatives of Afghan civilians killed by American forces were given token sympathy payments ranging “from as little as $124.13 in one civilian death to $15,000 in another” – an insulting pittance, if they were even lucky enough for the military to admit its mistake. Perhaps some of these payments were still in the bank when the United States decided to take them back.

3. I took a class taught by General David Petraeus in the spring of 2021. As part of that class I had to brief him on the situation in Afghanistan every week. At one point he warned me that if the United States withdrew from the country, intelligence suggested that the Afghan Republic could lose most of the country “in as little as two years.”

4. At least, that’s the charitable interpretation, rooted in taking his public appearances at face value. The alternative is that he knew he could not restrain Bibi and ultimately did not care, valuing the U.S. alliance with Israel more than the immiseration of two million people. In that case he did choose, but he chose wrong.

5. Ok, I won’t spare you the sermon. Here’s what I wrote in July:

Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration has been on a world tour championing a “rules-based” international order rooted in respect for human rights and international law. He’s tried to rally democracies into a new Cold War against autocratic regimes, in part by highlighting human rights abuses in China and Russia. Though the United States never joined the Rome Statute (and in fact, threatened to invade the Hague if Americans were ever detained there) Biden justified the ICC’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on grounds that he’d committed international crimes.

Now that the ICC arrest warrant is for Netanyahu’s crimes, though, the administration seems much less concerned with those pesky little rules…

President Biden’s policy, tragically supported by most politicians in both parties, has been to arm, fund, hug, cover for, and “stand with” Israel without conditions—no matter how many innocents it kills, how much life-saving aid it blocks, how many settlements it expands, how many homes it demolishes, how many independent NGOs charge it with apartheid or genocide, how much outrage it engenders in the United Nations, or how much its once-proud liberal democracy backslides into a violent ethno-nationalist cult.

Combined with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, drone strikes all over the world, the assassination of foreign officials, CIA torture, and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, this is making our “liberal, rules-based” international order very difficult to take seriously. Most of the world now sees those terms for what they are: a euphemism for naked American power aggrandizement.