I was so impressed with how the Biden team conducted itself -- from the time Biden became the presumptive nominee until very recently — that I’ve been inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt when they seemed to have screwed up.
When America’s NATO allies felt badly treated not to have been more fully included in the decisions concerning the ending of the war in Afghanistan, I thought, “There must have been some reason that they kept these decisions close to their vest.”
And more lately, when the deal was struck with Australia concerning the U.S. providing them with nuclear submarines, leading to the French being profoundly offended at how the whole thing was conducted behind their backs and then sprung on them, I was again thinking, “There must be some reason that the French had to be kept in the dark.”
(I think both of those decisions — to end the 20-year war in Afghanistan, and to tie the U.S. and Australia together militarily in a way that helps check China’s aggressive advances in the Asia-Pacific region — were good ones. But still….)
But I’ve found no such reasons. And this morning I heard the matter of the French discussed (on MSNBC’s Morning Joe), and it seems that the people in the White House involved with these matters — starting with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan — all misjudged the matter: It’s not that there was some big reason it all had to be done in secret apparently, but rather they simply didn’t imagine that it would have such a big impact on the French (and the wider European Union).
Preventing our traditional European allies from feeling betrayed, and looking at the United States as a nation that could not be trusted, would be no small matter, I would think for an administration that has expressed great eagerness to restore the vital ties of alliance and respect and friendship that Donald Trump did so much to destroy.
It is disappointing, first of all, that Biden — with his deep experience in foreign affairs — did not know on his own that the proper conduct of these big moves that affect our close and long-standing allies require scrupulous attention to those relationships. If adequate consultation was consistent with the basic goals, how would Biden not have made sure that our allies felt well-treated?
But Biden seems a President who follows quite consistently the advice he gets from the people he’s put around himself, and so if his National Security team says “Let’s do it this way,” he is not very likely to tell them, “No, we’ve got to do it this way instead.”
That works fine if the people around him are giving him good counsel, and as I’ve hitherto been quite impressed with the caliber of people with whom he has surrounded himself.
But it seems that there’s a problem here, with the counsel he gets from his national security team— and in both cases it has seemed that there’s something going on there that significantly undermines Biden’s stated major foreign policy goal, which is to restore our alliances, and to restore the United States as the leader of the free world.
Biden needs to ask: “What’s going on — and with whom — that leads to these misjudgments?” And then, “Is what’s wrong there something that can be corrected with those people remaining in place? Or do those mistakes mean that I need to find other people on whose judgment I can better rely?”
These are unforced errors, it seems, and it is already challenging enough to try to re-establish American leadership in the world after the terribly ugly conduct of the previous President, and the still-looming specter that America may cease to be a member — much less the leader — of the world’s democracies.