It was back in 2015 that Foreign Policy bluntly described Barack Obama’s foreign policy as a, and I quote, “giant cluster-fuck”. Welcome back to the future, courtesy of Obama’s Veep, Joe Biden.
As Foreign Policy noted, Obama might have inherited a diabolical foreign policy situation — but he went on to make it infinitely worse. Biden has, amazingly, upped the ante of Obama’s duplicitous incoherence.
First, Joe Biden has defined his presidency with the most disastrous American foreign policy decision since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The only thing worse than a “forever war”, as Biden has called the Afghan conflict, is a “forever defeat”. Biden has delivered that.
Yet, we were told, it wasn’t going to be this way. Obama was supposedly the smartest Ivy League graduate in the room. Joe Biden is supposedly a 50-year-graduate of the Washington school of realpolitik. Yet both white-anted America’s military and left the world a vastly more dangerous place than they found it.
Joe Biden is Barack Obama in Depends.
It would be almost comical if it weren’t so serious for the rest of us.
The US military, particularly the army and marines, emerged from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars a substantially broken force. The US retains immense air and sea power but in many cases the technology is old and ill suited to the speed and range of China’s missiles.
The US needs to redesign its military to deal with its “near peer” adversary, Beijing. Moreover, this must be done at breakneck speed. Xi Jinping could well see a period of policy disarray in Washington and a US military system focused on evacuating people from Kabul as the right time for China to press its confected claims over Taiwan.
The Chinese Communist Party must surely be unable to believe their luck. The Wuhan virus, whether it was manufactured and released as a bioweapon or not, has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams of bio-warfare. With the fall of Afghanistan, Xi’s BRI stands to stretch, unbroken, from Beijing to Tripoli.
Beijing wins. Their foreign minister has already met with Taliban leaders. The PRC will be in Kabul before the end of the month with soft loans and hard power, with “smart cities” technology and “advisers” to help the Taliban consolidate control.
This has ramifications for Australia and New Zealand.
A key lesson from Afghanistan for America’s allies is we all need to strengthen our own defence capabilities. We cannot assume the US will just be over the horizon ready to defend our strategic interests. The US can raise very high barriers to its own involvement in regional security problems.
This is a tough message for Australia, which has become habituated to think that defence spending at a little over 2 per cent of gross domestic product and a defence force about two-thirds the size of a Melbourne Cricket Ground crowd is enough to defend the country.
Or, in New Zealand’s case, 1.5% of GDP and barely enough personnel to fill the Gold section at Eden Park.
If the defeat in Afghanistan wasn’t demoralising enough, for the army and marines in particular, the Biden administration is demoralising its entire military with a neo-Marxist re-education campaign. The US embassy in Kabul might have flown a Pride flag, but it did nothing to stem the Taliban tide. Services like the navy are woke and “inclusive”, but in no shape to fight a war.
It’s possible Biden would be prepared to commit the US to help defend Taiwan, but a country that’s capable of cutting a peace deal with the Taliban might conclude Taiwan isn’t worth the fight.
Short of that scenario, Biden will look to Japan and Australia to be the security providers of first resort in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Canberra will have to do more heavy lifting than it typically likes doing and doesn’t want to pay for.
The Australian
That goes double for Wellington: if the Ardern government is even bothered. It seems much more likely that former International Union of Socialist Youth leader Jacinda Ardern and the lunatic band of wokesters, the Greens, are secretly welcoming our new Chinese overlords.
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