Brett McGurk was outraged. Without consulting his team, let alone U.S. allies, President Donald Trump announced on Oct. 6, 2019, that the United States would not only abandon Syrian Kurdish fighters with whom it had allied in order to defeat the Islamic State but also greenlight a Turkish invasion of northern Syria.
Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned, and McGurk quickly followed. Within days, Turkish forces had moved south into Syria’s most stable and democratic region, where they prioritized repression of Kurds, Christians, and Yazidis over defeat of the Islamic State.
While Trump cared little for the Kurds, many of his top aides understood that their abandonment would not only breathe new life into the Islamic State but would also signal indigenous forces in any future conflict that they should not trust the United States. In order to prevent a complete rout of the Kurds, retired U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane and Sen. Lindsey Graham convinced Trump to walk back a complete withdrawal in order to protect oil wells near Deir ez-Zour. The U.S. presence braked the Turkish advance, and the oil wells had the additional advantage of helping the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria fund itself, continue its fight against the Islamic State, and be a refuge for hundreds of thousands of Syrians of various ethnicities and religions who have no place else to go.
President Joe Biden’s national security team, however, announced last week that it would end a Treasury Department waiver that allowed a U.S. company to help produce the oil the Syrian Kurdish region needs to survive. A Biden administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, hinted the decision rested less in strategic vision and more to reverse Trump precedent. That is a Washington game, much like Trump’s populist pledge to stop “endless wars,” but ultimately, it completes an abandonment of the Kurds that Trump began. The irony, of course, is that McGurk used his outrage over Trump’s betrayal to springboard himself into the Biden administration, only to preside over the completion of the betrayal.
The same willingness to betray America’s indigenous partners is true with regard to Afghanistan. The Biden administration announced that it would complete a full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S. Put aside the silliness of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s insistence that the Taliban should respect the rights of Afghan women or face pariah status, given how little Taliban leaders care about neither. Through the fight against al Qaeda, there have been no closer ally to American forces than their interpreters; they have not only provided linguistic services but served as cultural guides at huge personal risk. The Taliban targeted not only them but also their extended family members. Yet, while Biden and his top aides castigated Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban,” the White House has no plans to evacuate the 18,000 Afghan interpreters whom the Taliban are certain to hunt down, torture, and kill after the U.S. withdrawal.
Once again, the cynicism of top Biden personnel is on display. Jon Finer, Biden’s deputy national security adviser, who, after the Obama administration co-founded International Refugee Assistance Project, joined with McGurk to pen an October 2019 New York Times op-ed calling for “special access to visas…for [those] who worked most closely with our forces, such as interpreters and advisers…” While written in the context of the Syria abandonment, the same logic applies to Afghanistan.
Their silence in the face of the double-betrayal, however, underscores what is wrong in Washington. In hindsight, their advocacy appears rooted more in partisanship and cynicism than idealism and morality. Both are now in a position to craft Biden’s policy but show little inclination to help those whose plight they once embraced. Power and perks have trumped principle. Biden and Blinken promised to return diplomacy to the heart of foreign policy. The looming double betrayal suggests both are replicating Trump’s worst impulses.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
