History and Politics by Robert Brent Toplin ["The Past is Never Dead. It's not even past" - William Faulkner]

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President Biden’s Speech on Afghanistan Could Signal a Major Shift in America’s International Relations

US President Joe Biden speaks about the situation in Afghanistan from the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, July 8, 2021. - US President Joe Biden expressed confidence on July 8, 2021 in the Afghan military and said that a Taliban takeover of the country is not inevitable.
"I do not trust the Taliban," Biden told reporters at the White House, "but I trust the capacity of the Afghan military." (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

Robert Brent Toplin

Pundits are missing the broad implications of Joe Biden’s speech in early July 2021 about pulling U.S, troops out of Afghanistan. The President’s comments have relevance beyond the specifics of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. They reflect Joe Biden’s long-held judgment that there must be limits to America’s military interventions abroad. Biden’s speech pointed to new challenges that are not getting the attention they need. President Biden referred to terrorist threats in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Problems related to the pandemic, climate change, and cyber security require action, and the United States must remain at the cutting edge of technological development to compete globally. Commitments in Afghanistan were undermining efforts to deal with other challenges.

President Joe Biden responded in that speech to people that disagreed with his decision to pull American troops out of Afghanistan. “I ask them to consider the lessons of history,” he counseled. The U.S. military had been in Afghanistan for 20 years. America committed a trillion dollars to actions in Afghanistan. 2448 Americans were killed there and 20,722 wounded. Remaining in Afghanistan several more years would expand losses in blood and treasure. The United States did not go into Afghanistan to nation-build, Biden emphasized. “No nation has ever unified Afghanistan . . . Empires have gone there and not done it.” He identified projects at home that had received inadequate funding because of America’s costly military engagements abroad.

President Biden’s message resembled an argument historian Paul Kennedy made in his 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Kennedy observed that powerful nations of the past, including Spain, France, and England, got bogged down in overly ambitious military pursuits. When the cost of those vast operations mounted, national debts spiraled. Rather than making these countries more powerful, military overstretch eventually weakened the societies. Kennedy’s history lesson offered a warning to the American people in 1987. President Biden’s speech regarding the Afghanistan pullout offered an update of Kennedy’s thesis. In 2021 the U.S. was vastly overcommitted abroad.

Recently, several historians and journalists have drawn attention to problems that result from overly ambitious military interventions. They noted that operations in foreign countries – fighting, occupying, and keeping the peace – have been undertaken by the United States far more than by other countries. Freakonomics, using a broad definition of military operations, reported that “America has been at war 93% of the time – 222 out of 239 years – since 1776.”  Washington maintains troops in about 800 military bases in more than 70 countries. The U.S. has engaged in a dozen major wars since its creation: the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Operation Desert Storm, the Iraq War, and the war in Afghanistan.

President Biden’s speech hinted at broader questions suggested by this history. Is it time to end what Biden calls the “forever wars”? Since the United States now spends more on defense than the next eleven nations combined, is this single country assuming too much responsibility for international security? After the United States failed at nation building in several troubled societies, should U.S. leaders approach related missions more cautiously in the future? Why does the United States spend trillions of dollars for military activities in foreign countries when millions of Americans lack adequate schools, housing, and health care?

In a 1953 speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, President Dwight D. Eisenhower identified problems associated with the last question:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed. The cost of one heavy bomber could build modern schools in 30 communities, or two fine, fully equipped hospitals. We pay for a single destroyer with the money for new homes that could have housed 8000 people.

President Biden, like Dwight D. Eisenhower and historian Paul Kennedy, is concerned about the impact of military overreach on the domestic economy and society. But there is another consideration that drives Biden’s interest in reducing America’s military footprint around the globe. Current policies are placing thousands of uniformed Americans in harm’s way.

President Biden mentioned this concern in a speech on May 28, 2021 at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Virginia. He reminded service men and women in the audience that he had visited Afghanistan and Iraq about 25 times and met soldiers that were on their fourth, fifth or sixth mission in the war zone. Biden described his late son’s military service and conjectured that Beau’s death related to service in Iraq. Beau “went as an incredibly healthy young man and came back with a severe tumor because his hooch was just downwind from those burn pits.”

President Biden told the audience of military personnel that he kept information on-hand every day that listed the total number of troops lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Every one of these lives is a tragedy, an empty seat at the dinner table, a missing voice at the holidays,” said the President. He linked those tragedies to his decision to change the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan. Biden said the first thing he did after announcing plans for withdrawal was to visit Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery. That region of the cemetery is dominated by the Afghanistan and Iraq war dead.

From personnel experience, Joe Biden understands the sorrow parents feel from the loss of a son or daughter in a theater of war. Biden does not want to see many more gravestones at Arlington. His emotional commitment to military families evidently gave him courage when dealing with generals, politicians, and pundits that objected vigorously to the policy shift. Now that the controversial decision to bring a close to America’s 20-year war has been made, the President may find more opportunities to transform America’s role in global affairs.