The U.S. president’s gift to his enemies

First it was Afghanistan that was abandoned to its fate. Now U.S. President Joe Biden is set to embark upon an equally risky undertaking by announcing the end of American combat operations in Iraq by the year’s end.

In between times, Biden has effectively undermined the security of Eastern Europe — with potentially serious implications for NATO — by agreeing to a deal with Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, to complete the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Completion of the pipeline will end the Kremlin’s reliance on states in Eastern and Central Europe for transit rights to maintain energy supplies to the West, thereby providing Moscow an opportunity to intensify its meddling in their affairs.

Biden has now been in office for six months, and these three policy initiatives, all of which have taken place in the month since the G7 summit in Cornwall, provide the clearest indication yet of his administration’s likely direction of travel. And it is one, at least so far as key allies like Britain and Canada are concerned, that should cause alarm.

Biden has previously spoken of his desire to build a global alliance of liberal democracies to confront the challenge presented by autocratic regimes such as China and Russia. Yet, rather than adopting the mantle of a global leader, the president’s latest moves suggest a more parochial approach, one more suited to appealing to his Democrat base than confronting the major security challenges of the day.

Biden’s capitulation over Nord Stream 2 risks seriously undermining Western efforts to bolster such allies as Poland and Ukraine against further acts of intimidation, while his unilateral decision to withdraw from Afghanistan raises the very real prospect of the country being overrun by the Islamist fanatics of the Taliban.

Similarly, last week’s White House announcement that the U.S. is to cease all combat operations in Iraq risks losing all the hard-won gains of recent years, from defeating the fanatics of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to negating Iran’s pernicious influence in Iraqi affairs.

Biden is no stranger to the Iraq brief. Back in 2002, he, as chairman of the influential Senate committee on foreign relations, was one of a number of Democratic senators who voted in favour of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the dictator Saddam Hussein.

Then, in 2011, serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president, Biden assumed personal responsibility for overseeing the withdrawal of the 150,000 American soldiers based in the country, a move that is widely considered to have led to the devastating seizure of large tracts of Iraq by ISIL militants in the summer of 2014. ISIL’S dramatic emergence resulted in U.S. forces returning to Iraq to drive out the jihadist group.

Having viewed the Iraq issue from both sides, Biden knows only too well the pitfalls of Washington’s policy in recent decades. Nevertheless, by ending U.S. combat operations, the American leader is rolling the dice at a moment when the country is still attempting the difficult transition from tyrannical rule to functioning democracy.

Making the announcement after meeting Iraq’s prime minister, Mustafa al-kadhimi, at the White House on July 26, Biden said Washington remained committed to “strengthening Iraq’s democracy,” as well as the fight against ISIL. But, from next year, the U.S. will only provide training and support for the Iraqi military, which henceforward will have to tackle ISIL and other threats to the country’s security on its own.

In addition, Iraq remains a key target for neighbouring Iran’s Islamic Republican Guard Corps, which continues to support a complex network of Shia militias that seek closer ties between Baghdad and Tehran.

Biden will justify the cessation of American hostilities in Iraq with the same argument used over Afghanistan, that the U.S. public is no longer interested in so-called “forever wars” and that, after two decades of relentless and costly combat, it is time for others to assume the burden.

Such arguments conveniently overlook the strategic imperatives that obliged the U.S. and its allies to maintain a strong military presence there in the first place, arguments, moreover, that are as pertinent today as they were 20 years ago. The primary purpose of Western involvement in Afghanistan has been to prevent the country being used as a safe haven by Islamist terror groups such as al-qaida and ISIL, a prospect that cannot be ruled out if the Taliban succeed in its bid to seize control of the country by force of arms.

In Iraq, meanwhile, the priority has been to prevent the country succumbing to the malign influences of either Iran or ISIL.

Biden’s decision, therefore, to withdraw U.S. combat forces from both countries, as well as his capitulation over Nord Stream 2, sends a clear signal that his administration has no real interest in global leadership. It is a message that will be gleefully received in Moscow and Beijing.

HIS ADMINISTRATION HAS NO REAL INTEREST IN GLOBAL LEADERSHIP.