The Boldness Of Biden And Boris – by Andrew Sullivan – The Weekly Dish
Biden braved the Blob and got out of Afghanistan. We will debate how he did so, and with what consequences, for quite some time. But he still did it. Obama tried and failed. Trump made a big song and dance and signed a surrender deal. But Biden actually got us out.
This wasn t inevitable. The defense and foreign policy establishments had plenty of their usual arguments threats of terror attacks, pabulum about recent progress, the avoidance of humiliation to slow-walk presidents into inaction, but they didn t succeed this time. Biden had sufficient experience to see through their bluff, and the fortitude to fight back when they raged against the withdrawal. Yes, it was horribly messy; tragic in the ways wars always are. But it had that mystical quality of an actual decision: doneness.
Equally this week, the sudden and surprise announcement that the UK, the US and Australia would form a new military and intelligence alliance in the Pacific, including new nuclear-powered submarines for Australia, was a bold signal to China that the US is not about to abandon that region, or its allies there. It came seemingly out of the blue, but had been in the works, apparently initiated by Australia, for some months.
I m leery of too aggressive a posture, as I explained here, but you can t deny that this was a real shift. The British national security adviser, Stephen Lovegrove, called it perhaps the most significant capability collaboration in the world anywhere in the past six decades which seems like a bit of truthful hyperbole. But the deal will bolster our Pacific allies, alarmed by the peremptory Afghanistan withdrawal, and rattled by China s newly raw nationalism and economic clout. Militarily, it targets one of China s weaknesses its submarine program and, if coordinated with India, for example, is a serious act of enhanced deterrence.
As with the Afghanistan withdrawal, this decision also severely bruised an ally, France, whose previous diesel submarine deal with Australia was suddenly scuppered. But the reassertion of an Anglophone alliance on China s doorstep is not a sign of a superpower in retreat. It was Biden taking the initiative.
via andrewsullivan.substack.com
Andrew it seems to me is exactly right about this. The tone is wrong, but what do you expect? It seems likely Boris is calling the shots about the New AUKUS deal, but hey, that’s ok with me. Getting out of the sandbox was the right thing to do, just not so utterly incompetently. Is this London playing Athens to our late antiquity Romans? Oh, who knows. But doing the right thing for the wrong reason is better than the converse. Is there a French word for schadenfreude?