Last week’s U.S.-African Leaders Summit was the culmination of months of hard work by diplomats at the State Department and National Security Council. It all went out the window with a single photograph: President Joe Biden watching the World Cup with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Liberian President George Weah, and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.
Tigrayans and many outside observers accuse Abiy of genocide. He both precipitated a blockade of Tigray that starved a half million Tigrayans and subcontracted the looting, rape, and murder of siege survivors to Eritrean forces. Among the victims of this slaughter was the uncle of World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who himself hails from Tigray.
Buhari, meanwhile, cut his teeth on the Biafra genocide. He rose to prominence decades ago due to his single-minded efforts to kill Nigeria’s largely Christian Igbo people. Despite hopes he had consigned his religious and ethnic hatreds to the past, as president he has unleashed militias to attack the region and separately failed to address the corruption and administration dysfunction that facilitates Boko Haram attacks in the country’s northeast.
Weah, meanwhile, is Africa’s poster child for corruption and judicial abuse. In the midst of an unprecedented food shortage, he took a 45-day junket to Qatar, Monaco, France, and finally, Washington. Biden meanwhile invited Weah and a number of other leaders with questionable commitment to elections to the Oval Office to discuss with them the importance of democracy. It surprised no one outside the White House that Weah used the resulting photos of the event to suggest false U.S. endorsement. Biden might talk diplomacy, but his rehabilitation of Africa’s worst leaders suggests that, for the president, black lives matter, just not in Africa.
Alas, Biden’s self-defeating strategy and his blind ear for optics neither begins nor ends with Africa. The U.S. continues to pay the price for the Afghanistan withdrawal. Biden’s logic never made sense. “Forever war” is simply deterrence by another name. His sacrifice of allies and a generation of women was a forfeit of human rights that set back American strategy and the rules-based order tremendously. The Afghanistan withdrawal encouraged Russian President Vladimir Putin to conclude he would face no consequence for his Ukraine invasion and led Chinese President Xi Jinping to tighten his noose around Taiwan.
Then there’s Turkey: Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the murder rate of women has increased 1,400%. Over the past year, the number of journalists Erdogan jailed doubled, putting the ostensible NATO ally on par with China, Iran, and Myanmar. Yet, despite Turkey’s descent into the abyss, Biden recommended selling the country F-16s, planes he uses to bomb Yezidis, kill Kurds, and threaten Greece.
Biden’s approach to Iran is even more callous. As protests shake the regime to its core and Iranians defy their oppressors to march for women, life, and freedom, Biden continues to allow Special Envoy Rob Malley to negotiate an agreement with the regime that would immediately inject tens of billions of dollars into the coffers of its security forces.
Joe Biden, or perhaps his national security adviser Jake Sullivan, increasingly channel former Nixon and Ford strategist Henry Kissinger. That is no compliment. Kissinger famously rationalized any betrayal of human rights in the name of realpolitik. The reality of his legacy, however, was gratuitous betrayal for little in return. Whatever short-term gain Kissinger expected evaporated quickly. What he believed sophisticated analysis, America’s enemies recognized as naivete they might exploit. Simply put, Kissinger left America strategically weakened and laid the groundwork for Russian, Chinese, and Iranian revival.
So it is today with Biden. His Africa photo fumble bolsters China and Russia while throwing democratic countries and regimes under the bus. Efforts to bail out Iran pay dividends directly into Russia’s war machine. Trying to play it both ways on Taiwan emboldens Beijing. The rules-based liberal order is under the most sustained threat since World War II. The world cannot afford naivete in the face of cynicism or Biden’s belief that betraying those seeking to unshackle themselves from dictatorship can ever be an American interest.
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Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
