U.S. in Desperate Need of a Foreign Policy Renewal

The following essay originally appeared at The Hill. It is republished here by permission of the author.

The Biden administration promised to return American foreign policy to reliability and international leadership after the disruptions of the Trump years. Yet its egregious mismanagement of the exit from Afghanistan has damaged America’s global standing and undercut the credibility of three of the administration’s foreign policy planks.

President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were supposed to repair transatlantic relations by reassuring our European allies, give priority to human rights in all decisions, and counter Chinese ambitions. The deeply flawed execution of the Afghanistan withdrawal undermines all those aspirations and leaves the Biden foreign policy vision in shambles. The diplomatic team that was supposed to bring professionalism has left America rudderless.

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The Consequences of Afghanistan: Comments on Girard

Renaud Girard is an American-born French journalist, the author of several books on world affairs, especially the Middle East. In this trenchant commentary on the Afghan debacle, he recognizes the defeat for what it is, bluntly invoking the collapse of the imperial German army at the end of the First World War. Is that an overstatement or an unflinching naming of the collapse of an order? Girard brings a realist eye to the factors that have contributed to the current situation, asking us to understand them and their consequences, as the Taliban proceed from city to city, heading toward Kabul.

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U.S. Iran Policy within Transatlantic Relations

Matthias Küntzel is a German political scientist with a focus on the Middle East. He provides astute analyses of the German and more broadly the European role in responding to the challenges posed by the Iranian regime; two of his books are available in English from Telos Press. His current piece, published here, sheds important light on the challenge of the moment: the Biden administration’s vocal commitment to returning to the JCPOA—a long-standing position during the presidential campaign—but facing continued intransigence from Tehran, willing to accelerate its nuclear program, indeed all the more so in the wake of the Biden election. Once it became clear that Trump and Pompeo were on their way out and that the incoming administration, which had been advertising its support for the Obama-era deal, would take over, Tehran became more, not less, aggressive on the nuclear front. It is presumably calculating that increased pressure will lead Washington to buckle by lifting sanctions first, in a way that would certainly not have succeeded with the previous administration. That makes the moment all the more fragile and fraught. Küntzel leads us through this maze.

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Biden, Berlin, and the Iranian Bomb

Matthias Küntzel is a German political scientist with a focus on the Middle East. His books with Telos Press include Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 and Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, both of which are available in our store for 20% off the list price. His English-language website is matthiaskuentzel.net.

The days are over when Europeans only had to point to Donald Trump to legitimate their appeasement politics toward Tehran. But what will the new American administration and its European allies do to prevent Iran from getting the bomb?

Of course there is the nuclear deal with Iran. For months its proponents have been hoping for Joe Biden’s electoral victory. He would revoke Trump’s leaving the deal and loosen the sanctions on Iran; in return Iran would revise its violations of the agreements, and everything would be good again.

And now? Biden is still holding onto his controversial promise to return to the deal. He has filled the most important positions in the State Department with people who played leading roles in the negotiation of the deal under Barack Obama, including some who—like the new Iran envoy Robert Malley—proved to be particularly accommodating toward Iranian demands. And Biden has not at all insisted that the regime change its missiles program or aggression policies in response to a lifting of the American sanctions. He has only asked for one concession: that Iran return to the terms of the deal before lifting the sanctions that Trump imposed.

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Why Trump Will Win

Donald Trump will win in November because the same forces that propelled him to victory in 2016 are even stronger today in 2020. This year is shaping up to be the most turbulent in American history since at least 1968, if not 1941: we are living in the era of black swans. But if you keep spotting them, are black swans still so rare? Common sense dictates that Trump will lose resoundingly in November given the chaos of the past eight months, public fatigue from the last four years, and near-daily October surprises. Then again, common sense also dictated that Trump and his campaign would have gone the way of the 9-9-9 Plan and Original Mavericks within three weeks of descending the escalator at Trump Tower. At the risk of eating my own words in a bit less than one month, here is the quant- and wonk-free case for why Trump will win, poll numbers be damned.

The reason for Trump’s 2016 victory is simple: support of Donald Trump was and is a reactionary backlash against eight years of progressive overreach during the Obama administration and twenty-five years of weak Republican leadership. Donald Trump is crude, ill-tempered, unprofessional, and unfit to be president—much less a cultural figure—but was elected almost exclusively for these reasons. Contrary to the media catechism, Russia did not throw the election to Donald Trump, fake news articles from Macedonian click farms did not convince hordes of Baby Boomers on Facebook that Hillary Clinton leads a ring of satanic pedophiles, and 46.1% of voters in 2016 were not white nationalists. Trump won because a plurality of voters hated the elite class so much that they were willing to vote for such a man just to humiliate the GOP in the primary and the overall political establishment in the general. Trump’s victory was because of voters’ frustrations, and any retrospective analysis of 2016 applied to the current election year must start and end with them.

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