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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden to use Nato summit to atone for damage of Trump years

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      Three years ago it was Donald Trump who stunned Nato members at a summit in Brussels, warning that he may be prepared to pull the US out of the western military alliance if its other members did not increase their defence spending.At a summit in the same city on Monday, it falls to Joe Biden to repair the damage from four years of his predecessor’s freewheeling theatrics, although experts caution that the Trump era will have lasting consequences.Rhetorically, at least, the omens are favourable. The US president declared Nato’s article 5, under which an armed attack against one member is deemed an attack against them all, a “sacred commitment” last week.Similar language and a respectful tone, long a Biden trademark, are expected in the Belgian capital, not least because the US wants Nato, along with the G7, to take a more robust line against Russia, particularly on cyberwarfare, and even China, not traditionally seen as an opponent.US officials were confidently briefing before the summit that “this will be the first time that the Nato countries will be addressing the security challenge from China”.The alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has promised a new cybersecurity policy and has said relations with Russia, from where most hacking emanates, were at their lowest point since the end of the cold war.Karin von Hippel, the director general of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said: “Biden is arguably the United States’ most experienced foreign policy president. He really does value alliances and knows they are needed to tackle problems like China.“But Nato allies also know that four years can go by pretty quickly in world affairs. They know that Trump, or a politician like him, could return to the presidency soon. They have to imagine a world where the US is not there all the time.”Until Biden’s election, Nato had been paralysed or in retreat. Three years ago, Trump arrived late to a morning session and bulldozed into a discussion about Ukraine’s application for membership and the situation in Afghanistan with a theme of his own.The president accused the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, of refusing to spend more on defence and went on to declare that Nato allies would have to raise their spending by January 2019 or Washington would go it alone.No firm commitments were extracted in the emergency discussion that ensued and most leaders left hastily, but Trump held a press conference and declared, in a parallel universe, that the summit had been a great success. “I’m very consistent. I’m a very stable genius,” he said, repeating an already familiar phrase.Nato officials pared back the 2019 summit in London but Trump ensured it was even shorter anyway, storming out after a group of leaders were caught on video ridiculing his lengthy press conferences. The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was two-faced, Trump said, accusing Ottawa of not spending enough on defence.It was almost something of a relief that the coronavirus pandemic intervened in 2020, although Trump ordered the withdrawal of 12,000 US troops from Germany, a decision Biden has reversed. The idea that other Nato members should increase their defence spending and share more of the burden has, however, united a string of US presidents.At the Nato summit in Cardiff in 2014, when Barack Obama was president and Biden his deputy, members agreed to reverse cuts in defence spending and lift it above 2% of GDP. Helped somewhat by falls in GDP related to the pandemic, the UK will hit 2.29% in 2021 and France 2.01%, but Germany’s spending stands at 1.53%.Nor is Biden’s commitment to US militarism absolute. He followed through with Trump’s announcement of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, even though other Nato allies such as the UK would have preferred to continue the long-running peacekeeping mission.Stoltenberg was asked at a press conference on Friday whether Trump’s absence would allow other alliance members to go easy on defence spending. During his reply, he argued that the “transatlantic bond in Nato goes beyond individual political leaders”.Von Hippel, however, cautioned against over-confident talk at what is likely to be an upbeat gathering. “The threat of another Trump should make the Europeans less complacent,” she said. More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on the Afghanistan withdrawal: an unwinnable war | Editorial

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      Britain’s former prime minister Harold Macmillan is said to have told colleagues that the first law of politics should be “never invade Afghanistan”. It was a lesson that imperial Britain had learned the hard way, following three separate casualty-strewn incursions in the 19th and 20th centuries. After 11 September 2001, when al-Qaida radicals, based in Afghanistan and protected by the Taliban government, successfully attacked New York and Washington, the lesson was quickly forgotten.Instead, the United States, backed by Britain and Nato, launched a retaliatory campaign to destroy al-Qaida and overthrow the Taliban. After spectacular initial success, marked by the unexpected collapse of Kabul and massive bombing of the al-Qaida presence in the eastern mountains, the military campaign became overcommitted and, in the end, even faced defeat. Western ambitions were long on idealised visions of the postwar order, but short on a grasp of regional realities and military capabilities. The Taliban regrouped and rearmed. Long attritional years of civil conflict followed. This week, almost 20 years in, Joe Biden has decided America has at last had enough of an unwon and unwinnable war. He is bringing the troops home. America’s allies, including Britain, will now follow the US through the exit door.In his televised address this week, Mr Biden announced that nearly 10,000 US and Nato troops – including 750 from the UK – will start pulling out within weeks. All of them will be gone in time for the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks later this year. The president’s words were a valediction over what, in the end and in spite of its achievements, has been a failed campaign. “We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal and expecting a different result,” the president said. He is surely right. Donald Trump had reached a similar conclusion from a different, more isolationist standpoint, although, unlike Mr Biden, without consulting his allies first. None of that will stop congressional Republicans denouncing Mr Biden’s decision as reckless.The US president’s announcement exposes some of the limits of 21st-century American power. It is true that, while the US has been engaged in Afghanistan, education has blossomed across much of the country, including for girls, who were largely excluded by the Taliban. Life expectancy, now at 65, has risen each year. But these gains remain fragile and their future is highly uncertain. When the Russian-backed Afghan regime collapsed in the early 1990s, the Taliban were able to take back control quickly. The same thing may happen after America’s departure 30 years later. Peace talks are continuing, but the Taliban will now have less reason to treat them seriously.Mr Biden’s decision marks the death of a particular kind of American hubris. New forms of warfare, increasingly technologically ambitious and involving fewer ground troops than in earlier wars such as Vietnam, were championed two decades ago by the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They have not achieved the goals that he claimed. Winning this kind of war without major troop commitments has not worked. Afghan opinion has been more divided and is marked by greater hostility to the US than the simplistic western assumptions of 2001 ever allowed. Regional hostilities have not been overcome. American public opinion has also become increasingly hostile towards committing to the conflicts. The nation-building claims that were made about Afghanistan and, later, Iraq have been exposed as unachievable. A lot of this was predicted and predictable when the conflict was launched. But there is very little satisfaction to be drawn from seeing it come to pass amid continuing uncertainty and insecurity for so many Afghan men and women. More

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      Afghans dread the ‘danger hours’ as fragile gains of 20 years slip away

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      Ghazaal Habibyar’s trembling hand hovered over her mobile phone, unable to type the numbers. “I was afraid to hear bad news,” she recalls of that morning in Kabul when she heard there’d been an explosion close to her young son’s school.
      “Why should we have to choose between educating or protecting our children?” asks the 38-year-old mother of two – a former Afghan deputy minister of mines and petroleum. That day, her six-year-old son was sitting safely in class.
      This is how the day begins now in Kabul – the time of day in a time of war that is most worrying of all. Afghans call them “the danger hours”.
      “There’ve been blasts before me, and blasts behind me,” says 22-year-olduniversity student Sadeq Alakozai. “Every day we wonder whose turn it will be.”
      One morning, a magnetic “sticky” bomb slapped on a minibus took the life of a popular TV presenter at the same time Alakozai and his friends were driving to work on the same street. Another morning, a district security chief was assassinated in a blast so strong it flipped the police car upside down at a busy roundabout just before they reached the same corner.
      Afghanistan – map
      From 7.30am to 9.30am, when the diesel fume-soaked streets of the capital are choked with traffic as government employees go to work, is the time to avoid, if you can. Every day someone somewhere in Afghanistan is picked off: journalists and judges; civil servants and scholars; activists and academics.
      Many of the victims came of age in the two decades since the Taliban were toppled from power in the US-led invasion after the 9/11 attacks; their lives are being cut short as the last of the US-led Nato forces deliberate over a departure date and the Taliban boast of victory.
      The Taliban’s path back to power could either run through accelerating moves by President Joe Biden’s team to negotiate a political way out of war, or what many fear could be the most blistering of battles this summer in a country which has already lived through more than 40 years of pain.
      No one takes responsibility for this wave of assassinations. The Afghan government blames the Taliban. The Taliban accuse the Afghan government, which is also under fire for not being able to protect its people. And, in a time of rising insecurity and impunity, anyone with a gun and a grudge can exploit the moment.
      Many see a concerted campaign by Taliban supporters to kill off or frighten away what is described, in shorthand, as the “gains of the last 20 years”: educated, ambitious women; a vibrant media; an active civil society.
      “They claim these realities were created under the US military occupation and are like foam on top of water, which goes away as soon as you touch the waters underneath,” says Tamim Asey, a former deputy defence minister who now chairs the Institute of War and Peace Studies in Kabul. More

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      in Elections

      European leaders hail 'new dawn' for ties with US under Biden

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      European leaders have voiced relief at Joe Biden’s inauguration, hailing a “new dawn” for Europe and the US, but warned that the world has changed after four years of Donald Trump’s presidency and transatlantic ties will be different in future.“This new dawn in America is the moment we’ve been awaiting for so long,” Ursula von der Leyen, the European commission president, told MEPs. “Once again, after four long years, Europe has a friend in the White House.”The head of the EU’s executive arm said Biden’s swearing-in was “a demonstration of the resilience of American democracy”, and the bloc stood “ready to reconnect with an old and trusted partner to breathe new life into our cherished alliance”.But Von der Leyen said relief should not lead to illusion, since while “Trump may soon be consigned to history, his followers remain”.Charles Michel, the president of the European council, also said the US had changed. Transatlantic relations had “greatly suffered” and the world had grown “more complex, less stable and less predictable”, said Michel, who chairs summits between the EU’s 27 heads of state and government.“We have our differences and they will not magically disappear. America seems to have changed, and how it’s perceived in Europe and the rest of the world has also changed,” he said. Europeans “must take our fate firmly into our own hands”.A study this week showed that while many Europeans welcomed Biden’s election victory, more people than not felt that after four years of Trump the US could not be trusted, and a majority believed Biden would not be able to mend a “broken” country or reverse its decline on the world stage.The EU has invited Biden to a summit and top-level Nato meeting when he is ready, with Michel called for “a new founding pact” to boost multilateral cooperation, combat Covid, tackle climate change and aid economic recovery.The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said he was “greatly relieved” at Biden’s inauguration, hailing “a good day for democracy”. He said democracy under the Trump administration had faced “tremendous challenges and endured … and proved strong”.Steinmeier said the transfer of power to Biden brought with it “the hope that the international community can work together more closely”, and he said Germany was looking forward “to knowing we once more have the US at our side as an indispensable partner”.However, he said that “despite the joy of this day”, the last four years had shown that “we must resolutely stand up to polarisation, protect and strengthen our democracies, and make policy on the basis of reason and facts.”Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, said his country was “looking forward to the Biden presidency, with which we will start working immediately.” He said the two countries had a strong common agenda, including “effective multilateralism, climate change, green and digital transition and social inclusion.”The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said Biden’s victory represented “the victory of democracy over the ultra-right and its three methods – massive deception, national division, and abuse, sometimes violent, of democratic institutions.”Five years ago, Sánchez said, the world had believed Trump to be “a bad joke. But five years later we realised he jeopardised nothing less than the world’s most powerful democracy.”Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, who has faced criticism for his close relationship with Trump, said he was looking forward to working closely with Biden, citing a host of policy areas in which he hoped to collaborate.“In our fight against Covid and across climate change, defence, security, and in promoting and defending democracy, our goals are the same and our nations will work hand in hand to achieve them,” Johnson said in a statement.The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called for Russia and the US to repair their strained ties. “The current condition of relations between Russia and the US is of great concern,” he said in an interview with the state-run news agency Tass. “But this also means that something has to be done about it in order to normalise relations. We cannot fence ourselves off from each other.”Among the US’s more outspoken foes, Iran, which has repeatedly called on Washington to lift sanctions imposed over its nuclear drive, did not miss the chance to celebrate Trump’s departure.“A tyrant’s era came to an end and today is the final day of his ominous reign,” said the president, Hassan Rouhani. “We expect the Biden administration to return to law and to commitments, and try in the next four years, if they can, to remove the stains of the past four years.”Biden’s administration has said it wants the US back in the landmark Iran nuclear accord from which Trump withdrew, providing Tehran returns to strict compliance.The Nato chief, Jens Stoltenberg, said the military alliance hoped to strengthen transatlantic ties under the new president, adding that the world faced “global challenges that none of us can tackle alone”. More

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      in US Politics

      Why a Biden presidency might not mean a return to pre-Trump foreign relations

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      European leaders, desperate for an end to the Trump presidency, are being warned that four years of Joe Biden may present them with new challenges and not a simple restoration of the benign status quo in transatlantic relations prior to 2016.An evolving Biden doctrine about ending “forever wars” and protecting American workers from Chinese competition would require collective military and economic commitments from the EU that it is still ill-equipped to meet, foreign policy specialists have suggested.The overall tenor of the platform, emphasising post-Covid multilateralism and cooperation with fellow liberal democracies, is already welcome in Europe. Biden’s promised end to the institutionalised mayhem, animus towards allies and pandering to authoritarians will be a relief. Competence, reliability and dialogue may not be a high bar to set a presidency, but simple normality would amount to a revival of the idea of the west, such has been the chaos of the past four years.Forsaken multilateral institutions, such as the World Health Organization, would be rejoined, ending the US practice, in the words of Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser Tony Blinken, of simply going awol. “Ninety per cent of life is about showing up,” Blinken told Chatham House, adapting Woody Allen.Biden may seem to personify an old-school nostalgic Atlanticism of the foreign policy establishment. But the Democrat’s draft policy platform released last month reflects the influence of the progressive left, and an effort to absorb the lessons from the shock 2016 defeat.Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy adviser, speaking to the European Council on Foreign Relations podcast, agreed that Biden had moved to the left, saying he had faced mobilisation on foreign policy from progressives in a way that Barack Obama never experienced. As a result, foreign policy is no longer a backwater in democratic politics, and new links between foreign and economic policy are being drawn.Many of the Obama-era foreign policy advisers now clustered around Biden, dismissed as a horror show by some on the left, also deny that they crave simple restoration, saying everything has changed since 2016.Stung by Hillary Clinton’s defeat, they recognise the populists’ claim to have better constructed a foreign policy to help Americans’ daily lives at home. William Burns, a former state department official under Obama and one of Biden’s many advisers, recently wrote: “The wellbeing of the American middle class ought to be the engine that drives our foreign policy. We’re long overdue for a historic course correction at home.”Jeremy Shapiro, a senior researcher with the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR), also says there has been a pressure on Democrats to make their foreign policy more relevant to daily American lives. “There was this sense that in the Obama administration foreign policy was a plaything of the elites divorced from Americans’ daily existence. The change from Obama to Biden is there will be more focus on America.”Without threatening tariff wars, the Biden platform hints at a new scepticism about globalism and free trade. In broader policy terms, Europe will welcome Biden’s commitment to the Paris climate change treaty, and to Nato, “the single most significant military alliance in the history of the world,” as Biden described the organisation to the Munich security conference in 2019. To the relief of Berlin, the withdrawal of US troops from Germany would stop. A more consistent approach to Turkey would be sought. More

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      in US Politics

      Jared Kushner appeared ignorant of what Nato actually does, book claims

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      Sinking in the Swamp says Trump’s ‘lead point of contact’ for US allies seemed unaware of alliance members’ commitment to defend each other from attack Though Jared Kushner was a “lead point of contact” for US allies worried about Donald Trump’s threats to Nato, the president’s son-in-law did not “seem to know what Nato actually […] More