What Biden got right Obama ignored his warnings on the Middle East

It is fitting that the departure of Joseph Biden Jr. was defined by his trademark stubbornness. For weeks, he held out against those within his party who were calling for his immediate withdrawal. But then came the Republican convention in Milwaukee — an occasion dominated by Trump the Survivor, and witnessed by millions who had never before paid attention to such gatherings — and the decision was made for him.

Until then, Biden’s legendary resilience seemed unbreakable. This was, after all, a quality he acquired at the price of intense suffering. By the time Biden appeared as a newly elected senator on the Washington scene in 1973, he had already suffered two life-altering tragedies. First, the rapid downfall of his businessman father from affluence to poverty when Biden was seven years old; and second, the more terrible blow of the accidental death of his wife and one-year-old daughter some 40 days after he was first elected.

Yet still Biden marched on, winning re-election to the Senate every six years until 2008, when he was concurrently elected Vice President with Barack Obama. It was, more than anything, proof of his mastery of “retail politics”, which allowed him to keep different clusters of voters happy. In Biden’s mini-state of Delaware — whose population in 1974 was just over 600,000 when New York State already had close to 20 million — it was not hard for him to win voters one by one, especially since he chose to live in Wilmington, commuting by train to Washington each day. When I first met Biden during his first senatorial term, the legendary political guru and speaker of the house Tip O’Neill was already saying that he would be a Washington personality for decades.

Many things about Biden’s life are well-known, but only future biographers will reveal what he himself rigorously kept secret from the world: that during his eight years as VP, Obama systematically ignored his excellent advice on foreign affairs. Captive to the latest policy clichés of the NGO world, he ignored Biden’s decades of experience as a very active member and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had heard from and interrogated hundreds of expert witnesses, many of them with valuable, first-hand experience in the world beyond Washington.

On Iraq and Afghanistan, by far the most important foreign-policy issues during his eight vice-presidential years, Biden radically disagreed with the strategy that Obama inherited and continued to pursue. Biden insisted that Iran would control Iraq unless its influence was drastically limited by US support for a Sunni regional government in addition to the Kurdish regional government, thereby confining Iran’s influence to a third, Shi’a, regional government.

But Obama preferred the advice of Dr Susan Rice, his national security advisor, Dr Samantha Powers, his ambassador to the UN, and Dr General Petraeus, whose stock of fashionable academic phrases about the world’s conflicts could never compete with the real-world knowledge that Biden had accumulated. As a result, Iran did what it wanted in Iraq. And it still does, largely because a central proponent of Obama’s deluded appeasement policy outlived his presidency: his personal friend Roger Malley, who was foisted on Biden and kept in the White House, until he was finally brought down by a security breach.

It was much the same in Afghanistan. Had Obama followed Biden’s advice, instead of listening to the telegenic PhD-general Petraeus, the US could have saved trillions of dollars and many American lives by abandoning the quixotic attempt to train and equip the Afghan army. From the start, Biden insisted that the military body was a total fraud — not just because Afghanistan’s so-called officers bought their promotions with bribes, but because the entire concept was rooted in a fantasy. Biden knew that Tajiks would only fight for other Tajiks, Uzbeks for Uzbeks, Hazaras for Hazaras, and so on — and that none of them would fight for the abstraction called Afghanistan.

Indeed, he needed tremendous self-discipline not to react when he saw his superficial boss being endlessly applauded at elite policy gatherings in Washington and Aspen, while he himself was ridiculed at Georgetown dinner parties. And it was a most bitter irony that it was Biden, as the newly installed president, who was universally blamed for America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a few months after his inauguration, following the mass surrender of the Afghan army without a fight.

Now, as he exits the stage, Biden has decided to offer another hostage to fortune, by nominating Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate ahead of the Chicago convention next month. That Harris is a remarkably strategic politician shouldn’t be overlooked: she started her pursuit of high office before she was 18 by choosing the modest education of Howard University over Stanford — where her father would teach — because of Howard’s politically powerful Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. But this cannot do more than mitigate her tremendous shortcomings as a candidate.

As VP, she was given one task: to stop the politically disastrous flood of millions of illegal immigrants walking across the border from Mexico. In June 2021, she made a very brief and futile visit to the border instead of staying in Washington to identify and activate effective border-control measures, which did exist and were only activated by Biden himself as the election approached. When given her only opportunity to display a capacity to govern, Harris failed.

For this and many other reasons, it seems improbable that Harris would fare well in a campaign against Trump, unless her running mate can do even more for her than the sharply intelligent Vance can do for Trump. But looking at the array of figures now trying to win her favour, one must be sceptical. As someone who was befriended by Biden decades ago, I do not derive any pleasure in anticipating that his anointed successor will be removed by the Democratic Convention — or else lead her party into a November debacle.

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Professor Edward Luttwak is a strategist and historian known for his works on grand strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations.

ELuttwak