Biden’s priority isn’t the fall of Afghanistan, but the rise of China

The former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has lambasted the US decision to pull out of Afghanistan as driven by “ obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending the ‘ forever wars’”. That mantra formed part of Joe Biden ’ s pitch for the presidency, so it is at him that Blair ’ s ire is directed.

It was, after all, Blair who stood shoulder to shoulder with the US following the 9/11 al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers, and subsequently committed British troops to combat operations alongside the Americans in Afghanistan in 2001, to root out the terrorist group that was based in the country. However, it is surprising that he would express such a trenchant position given the egregious misadventure he championed in Iraq. The invasion was justified on a prospectus of the presence of weapons of mass destruction that many at the time, including myself, felt was spurious and was later found to be baseless.

Having been the architect of the most significant foreign policy debacle since Suez, many would have opted to keep their heads down. Indeed, a number of proponents of the neoconservative interventionist doctrine that sought to topple regimes across the Middle East and impose Western liberal values by force, have done just that. Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, both key cheerleaders and George Bush Jr its receptacle, have all remained relatively quiet. Given that both their philosophy and the playbook used to implement it have been utterly discredited once again in recent days by the collapse of the Afghan government, staying shtum is prudent.

One cannot help but contrast the 20-year sojourn of US and associated Nato forces in Afghanistan with the first Gulf war in 1991. In response to Saddam Hussein ’ s invasion of Kuwait, the then US President, George Bush Sr, built a coalition of 35 countries (including a number of Arab states) with a tightly defined aim of pushing Saddam back to the Iraqi border. The mission was accomplished in five weeks. Given its success, the temptation to march on Baghdad and to topple the Saddam regime was palpable, but resisted. It was a textbook case study in statecraft.

But despite the debacle of the 2003 Iraq invasion, which remain s his epitaph, Blair has never been the shy retiring type. He argues that the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and the rapid ascendancy of the Taliban which is now seeking to form a government, will leave every anti-Western jihadist group “ cheering ”. That may be the case but there is no evidence — and never has been — that the Taliban for its part has any interest in exporting its creed of literalist Islamic theocracy to other parts of the world.

However, Blair ’ s question of whether the events of recent days indicate that the West is in “ epoch-changing retreat” merits consideration. It was in 1992 that the political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of History and the Last Man argued that following end of the Cold War in 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, mankind’s ideological evolution was complete and that “ the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” had been achieved. That now looks foolish, premature and short-sighted.

Fukuyama now openly accepts that US hegemony, which he argues reached its peak following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and endured until the financial crisis in 2007-8, is on the wane. The hitherto unipolar dominance of the US is now being challenged globally, most clearly by China and to a lesser extent by Russia, at least within its own sphere of influence, as evidenced by its annexation of Crimea in 2014. President Biden is well aware of this.

The Harvard professor, Robert Putnam, coined the metaphor of the two-level game. His point was that when making foreign policy decisions leaders have to consider both their domestic audience and their international one when determining strategy. Biden knows that on the home front only 37 per cent of Americans oppose withdrawal from Afghanistan, a fact that those castigating him fail to mention. He therefore has political cover for the decision he has taken. Biden has one eye on the mid-term elections next year, which are important to him to bolster the Democrat position in Congress and ease the passage of legislation.

On the international front Afghanistan is simply not a priority for Biden. Those lamenting the President ’ s decision have clearly paid scant attention to his position over the past decade. Biden was never supportive of Obama ’ s troop surge in 2010 to halt Taliban advances which saw military forces swell to 100,000. So it should have come as no surprise that he would follow through on the commitment made by Donald Trump in direct talks with the Taliban in February 2020 to withdraw troops.

What is surprising, however, has been Biden ’ s thinly veiled contempt for his country ’ s allies that have paid a heavy price in blood and treasure by standing by the US over the past two decades. On Wednesday he gave a speech at the White House on Covid booster shots, just hours after a packed House of Commons held a marathon session on Afghanistan, where the reaction of a majority of British MPs to the bungled withdrawal of forces, and the concomitant shambles in evacuating personnel, was a combination of disdain and disbelief.

Biden is steeped in foreign policy issues, having spent over four decades in the field, including 12 years as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee and eight as Vice President in the Obama Administration. He should have done much better. There was none of the arm-around-the-shoulder diplomacy we expect from him. No calls were made to allies as provincial capitals fell like dominoes to the Taliban and the US ’  puppet President Ashraf Ghani scarpered, allegedly with more than $100 million in cash (a claim which he denies).

Biden ’ s key concern is the ascent of China, which will rival the US in the coming years for the role of global hegemon. That battle may last for decades, and the speed of the decline of the US vis à vis its rival is uncertain. But unlike the US, which has shaped its foreign policy this century on the export of its values and the democratisation of troublesome states through political intervention, China ’ s policy is instead driven by the rapacious pursuit of economic might. The US failure in Afghanistan has opened up the possibility of China asserting its mining and associated interests in the country, perhaps as part of its Belt and Road initiative. Afghanistan’s geographical proximity to the China-Pakistan economic corridor is also invaluable, with Beijing’s huge investment in the strategic port of Gawadar, providing a gateway for its goods to the Arabian Sea.

The real test for the US could come if China decides to invade Taiwan or if Russia chooses to engage in renewed mischief-making in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is clearly rubbing his hands with glee. As Taliban soldiers rolled into Kabul in the American Humvees they had commandeered from fleeing Afghan government forces, the Russian state broadcaster RT did not miss the chance to run the headline: “ They came, they saw, they lost.”

Whether the US would have the appetite for great power confrontation and whether it would be able to secure the support of allies within and outside these regions, given its perceived lack of reliability, remains to be seen. That is what will be keeping President Biden awake at night — not the future of Afghanistan and its people.

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