A terrifying realization hit me last week. Joe Biden cares more about what the Taliban think than about what the British think.
He decided the timing of the evacuation of Afghanistan without bothering to tell his chief ally. But he did not dare take such a unilateralist approach to the terrorists who had been killing U.S. soldiers for decades.
“We’ve been in constant contact with the Taliban leadership on the ground in Kabul, as well as the Taliban leadership at Doha, and we’ve been coordinating what we are doing,” he announced at a press conference. It soon became clear that it was the turbaned militiamen who were dictating the pace of the withdrawal. Boris Johnson, with other G-7 leaders, begged the president to delay the departure, even for a few days, so that the West’s Afghan auxiliaries could be brought to safety. Biden instead did the Taliban’s bidding.
In a sense, he had little choice. Kabul’s airport lies on an almost indefensible plain. If the Islamists wanted to make trouble, they could easily kidnap some U.S. soldiers. The Afghan mullahs hold Biden’s presidency in the palm of their hands, just as surely as the Iranian ayatollahs held Carter’s in theirs.
What else can he do but hope that they are easier to deal with this time around than they were 20 years ago? He may even be right. Taliban leaders do indeed sound more moderate now — not because they are trying to ingratiate themselves with the decadent West, but because Afghan society has changed. The median Afghan is 18 years old and has known only secular rule. Afghans are no longer the semiliterate population that the Taliban could rule through drug money and Shariah courts.
But if the mullahs do turn out to be less hard-line this time, and it’s a big if, it will be for domestic reasons rather than to placate America. Likewise, if they choose to let people leave, it is not as a favor to the West. It is because they want their opponents out of the way.
In the early 20th century, James Michael Curley, the Irish machine politician who served four times as mayor of Boston, aimed to bolster his electoral majority by driving white Anglo-Saxon Protestants out of Massachusetts. When, before America’s entry into World War I, a British officer asked his permission to appeal for volunteers, the crooked Democrat replied, “Go ahead, colonel — take every damn one of ’em!”
The Taliban can’t say that publicly, but it is easy to imagine them saying something similar in private. It is also, of course, easy to imagine them engaging in reprisal killings. Indeed, it is likely that, amid the chaos, they are doing both. But they are doing so for their own reasons, not at Biden’s behest.
The president’s willingness to dance to the Taliban’s tune is understandable, if shaming. His reluctance to work with his closest friends, by contrast, is completely incomprehensible. I have heard U.S. commentators saying things like, “If you British are so keen on being in Afghanistan, you stay there.” But we were there for only one reason: America had been attacked. We treated the twin towers abomination as an assault on our interests, our values, our side.
We did so because we regard our interests as intertwined with those of the United States. Most of us have lived the whole of our lives in a world that takes U.S. leadership for granted. Only now, perhaps, are we uneasily reminded of how nearly the U.S. might have retreated into its hemisphere after 1945.
The Truman administration made a decision to remain internationally engaged through the Marshall Plan, the nuclear umbrella, and the garrisons in Europe and Asia. None of these things were popular at home. As Averell Harriman put it, “Americans wanted to settle all our difficulties with Russia and then go to the movies and drink Coke.”
No one, after the Trump presidency, can pretend that the lurch into isolationism is some quirk of Biden’s. In both parties, there is an understandable weariness with overseas commitments. With a trillion-dollar deficit, the U.S. should indeed be retrenching, picking its fights, and withdrawing carefully from ungrateful outposts. But that does not mean withdrawing from the entire international system, abandoning the alliance of free English-speaking democracies.
In 1939, as in 1914, most Americans believed that, if they minded their own business, they would be left in peace. But that is not how things work. A world from which the U.S. withdraws will not be a patchwork of squabbling independent states. It will be a world dominated by altogether darker and more malevolent forces. And if you think those forces will leave you alone, you haven’t been paying attention.
