This is a tale of two intelligence failures. The first: in hostile, unforgiving Afghanistan, a failure to foresee what would unfold when US-led forces began to leave. It’s been much commented on.
The second failure, just as huge, gets less coverage because it involves spies who mark their own homework. America’s mighty civilian army of political pundits, suave in the studio, ruthless in the restaurant, utterly lost the plot when it came to a relatively simple piece of need-to-know Humint, to use a term they might in their breathless reportage. They failed to notice that Joe Biden is, for better or worse, his own man.
More than that: a man with a history, a character, an entire political demeanour that leads to August 31 and all that surrounds it. A man who rejects Donald Trump, but embraces at least some of what Trump stood for in foreign affairs.
The political journalists failed and so did the national security establishment who thought they were going back to the Obama years, or even the Bush years, where problems could be grappled with and then shelved. Kicked down the road. A surge or a withdrawal? How about both? Compromise options always taken. Decisive options almost never. What these folk in particular should have realised is that the character of this president is different.
Biden is off-the-scale in self-belief. He makes Barack Obama look diffident. According to Lucky, a book about the Biden ascendency by reporters Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes, the Biden-Obama relationship was, in Joe’s eyes, much more equal than we all understood. “The two men looked at each other like mentor and mentee . . . but it was never clear that they agreed on which of them was in which role.” His self-belief was “a great strength and a weakness that could leave him sounding a little self-delusional”.
Well, the joke’s on us. There is no delusion. Biden is fulfilling what he has always regarded as his manifest destiny, even when others sniggered.
Biden also knows stuff happens. It’s happened to him. Tragic things: the death of his first wife and his daughter in a car accident, the more recent death of his son Beau from brain cancer, the descent of his other son Hunter into drug-addled disaster. And the recovery, Joe’s recovery, from all of this. Stuff can be overcome; always there are opportunities he spots that others do not see.
Who thought he could win the Democratic Party nomination in 2020? Not Obama, who forgot to mention him in an early appraisal of runners and riders. Not the press after his fourth place in Iowa. Or his fifth in New Hampshire. Or when he was savaged in a debate by an otherwise uninspiring candidate called Kamala Harris. But Joe kept faith with Joe, and the other candidates duly imploded and a plague was sent to settle on the land and lo: he became president.
How does this affect his view of Afghanistan? It makes him confident of his rightness and also of his ability to survive whatever setbacks there are.
Richard Holbrooke, the late US diplomat, noted in his diary a Biden response in 2010 to a suggestion that America had an obligation to maintain its presence in Afghanistan. “F*** that,” the author George Packer records Biden as saying, “we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
Nor should we be surprised to see it reported this week that some of Biden’s most senior aides do not feel they are able to engage him properly in discussion about alternatives. It’s even been suggested that some are frightened of him. Biden is no Obama.
He is not cool, in any sense. As Lucky recounts, he has a long history of insulting people, including voters. Even in last year’s truncated campaign Biden found time to call a young woman “a lying dog-faced pony soldier”.
But the biggest intelligence failure of all was a failure to spot, in a speech by Antony Blinken, the new secretary of state, in March, the clear exposition of a policy of leaving Afghanistan and continuing with Trump’s anchoring of foreign policy in its impact on America. Blinken said: “We’ve set the foreign policy priorities . . . by asking a few simple questions: What will our foreign policy mean for American workers and their families? What do we need to do around the world to make us stronger here at home? And what do we need to do at home to make us stronger in the world?” As the think tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said at the time, these pledges, with their stress on American workers and their families, were “not entirely typical fare for a secretary of state”. Well noticed. Pity everyone else got fixated on “America is back” and asked no further questions.
There are seasons in American politics. Franklin Roosevelt’s social programmes lasted, you could argue, through all the presidencies up to Reagan. The sense of world leadership of the Reagan years took us through Clinton, Bush and Obama to Trump. And now we are in the Trump era, led by a man who is not Trump but lives in the world Trump helped create.
Only there’s a Biden twist. Careful students of the man might add that he was signed up to this era long before it arrived. Packer has pointed out that Biden, in a speech as a young senator in 1975, said of the case for bringing Vietnamese civilians out of Saigon: “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals.” As Packer says, “if you stay long enough in politics you might find yourself standing in the same river twice.” And, it seems, facing in the same direction.
Gerard Baker is away
