Republicans eyeing a campaign to succeed President Joe Biden as commander in chief agree the Afghanistan withdrawal is an incompetently managed foreign policy debacle, yet they are notably split over the underlying policy of American retreat from the region.
There is a laundry list of Republicans either mulling a 2024 presidential campaign or mentioned as possible contenders — and all who have commented on the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as the United States scrambles to extract Americans and Washington’s Afghan allies have been uniformly scathingly critical. But GOP unanimity stops there.
Some Republicans back U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years in the country but are aghast at Biden’s handling of the pullout — chief among them former President Donald Trump, who initiated the retreat, and his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Others, such as Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse and Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, opposed withdrawal when Trump first announced plans to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan — and when Biden declared he would stick with his predecessor’s policy.
Still, other Republicans, such as Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, typically foreign policy hawks, have staked a middle ground, neither firmly supporting an exit from Afghanistan nor the continued open-ended deployment of U.S. troops to the South Asian nation. This GOP schism on projecting American power abroad, with a faction of Republicans embracing non-interventionism, marks a major break from the Reagan era.
Previously, only minor voices in the party, and certainly not top White House contenders, would have countenanced withdrawal from Afghanistan. That has been especially true of the war to fight terrorism over the last two decades. The asymmetrical conflict was sparked by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in northern Virginia committed by jihadists whose leaders were given sanctuary by a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to plot against the U.S.
“There’s a growing split in the GOP about how forward-leaning the U.S. should be in the world,” said Doug Heye, a veteran Republican operative in Washington who has sharply criticized Biden’s handling of Afghanistan. “It existed before Trump, and it’s wider because of him. It’s not clear that there will be a single GOP position here.”
BIDEN OWNS THIS AFGHANISTAN DEBACLE
The populist wing of the Republican Party, elevated in recent years by Trump, is pleased with the GOP’s turn away from a muscular, internationalist foreign policy. The development has left traditional Republicans, rooted in the previous era of former President Ronald Reagan, disturbed and perplexed.
“It’s a rot within the Right that so many are willing to shrug off the projection of American power abroad as essential to keep us safe and promote freedom everywhere,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and co-author of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Shaping American Politics. “The [Pat] Buchanan wing has always been weak and wrong.”
Trump was negotiating a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban, set to occur this year, when he was ousted by Biden. Biden chose continuity with his predecessor but took matters further. Soon after assuming power in January, the new president announced that all American forces would exit Afghanistan before next month’s 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Biden assured the public that the drawdown would be orderly and cause no problems for American national security.
The president’s assurances were fool’s gold.
As Taliban forces steamrolled the Afghan army and captured the country, Biden was forced to deploy thousands of more troops to evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and defend the airport as Americans, Afghans who risked their lives to support the U.S., and others in danger of execution by the Taliban boarded planes to safety. The images, compared to the 1975 fall of Saigon when the U.S. was chased out of Vietnam, are devastating and have alarmed U.S. allies.
Republicans across the spectrum are uniformly holding Biden responsible for what is unfolding and the damage it is doing to American credibility around the world. The president’s Afghanistan miscalculation has caused allies to question if the U.S. can be counted on to keep its treaty obligations and led delighted U.S. adversaries to assume they have a green light for malign activities.
“The tragic events rapidly unfolding in Afghanistan lie at the feet of President Biden,” tweeted South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, a potential 2024 contender for the GOP presidential nomination. “A hasty withdrawal without proper planning or protections for Americans & our allies in the region demonstrates a clear failure of leadership.”
“These actions have sent a toxic signal to our allies around the globe as the whole world watches,” Scott added.
That Scott complained about Biden’s mismanagement of the withdrawal from Afghanistan but is not opposed, in principle, to withdrawal is an example of the changing politics of foreign policy in the GOP and an example of intraparty division sparked by Trump.
The former president is a longtime skeptic of the benefits of overseas military deployments, describing operations such as the one in Afghanistan with the derisive term “forever war.” Trump’s approach to foreign policy, and that phrase, was previously more common among Democrats. In the case of Afghanistan, Scott and Trump, and others in their camp, are not on the wrong side of conservative voters, or voters generally.
But that is cold comfort to Republicans who believe that an even better-managed retreat from Afghanistan would have given jihadist terrorists enhanced abilities to launch deadly attacks against the U.S. homeland and American interests abroad, requiring military action. For these Republicans, Biden is not the only culprit behind the Afghanistan fiasco. To them, Trump’s negotiation with the Taliban and insistence on retreat is a key component in the broader U.S. failure in South Asia.
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“The unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan — the shameful, Saigon-like abandonment of Kabul, the brutalization of Afghan women, and the slaughter of our allies — is the predictable outcome of the Trump-Biden doctrine of weakness,” Sasse said in a statement. “History must be clear about this: American troops didn’t lose this war — Donald Trump and Joe Biden deliberately decided to lose.”
