Our Dangerous World Needs More Than 'Not Biden' for an American President

Donald Trump cleared that low, low bar, but he's no foreign policy savant.

This weekend’s horrific Hamas attack on Israel, and the Biden administration’s stunning negligence in the face of it, have naturally given the Republican presidential contenders an opening to whale on the current Democrat incumbent and make the case that they should be commander-in-chief instead.

Here’s a portion of Ron DeSantis’s remarks:

Israel, with the full support of the United States, should kill Hamas members and extinguish their entire infrastructure.

And right now, America must immediately do three things: (i) freeze any money Joe Biden has made available to Iran; (ii) cut off any and all types of foreign aid flowing to Hamas; and (iii) immediately shut down America’s wide-open southern border to ensure we are in a position to better protect Americans here at home from these real threats.

And here are a few words from Donald Trump:

These Hamas attacks are a disgrace and Israel has every right to defend itself with overwhelming force. Sadly, American taxpayer dollars helped fund these attacks, which many reports are saying came from the Biden Administration. We brought so much peace to the Middle East through the Abraham Accords, only to see Biden whittle it away at a far more rapid pace than anyone thought possible. Here we go again.

His statement alludes to one of MAGA’s most popular narratives: that Trump brought peace to the Middle East without starting any new wars, and none of the major crises to erupt on Biden’s watch would have happened if Trump were still president.

It’s a superficially-appealing sentiment, given how many of Biden’s sins come down to things that would be obvious that any halfway-competent president (like “don’t give $6 billion to terror states,” or “don’t leave piles of military weaponry in a country we’re abandoning to the enemy”). But like so many of MAGA’s narratives, it relies on knowing little and understanding less about subjects that are usually far more complicated than can be conveyed in the 45^th president’s trademark tweets.

First, we’ll give credit where credit’s due. We can safely assume Trump wouldn’t have given Iran a pile of cash that in turn financed Hamas. While Trump too wanted to leave Afghanistan (more on that in a bit), we can also grant that the bloody, slapdash, and humiliating manner in which Biden did so was uniquely his. The previous administration was also strongly supportive of Israel.

On balance, it’s a record that compares far favorably to that of the average Democrat. It is not, however, the record of a unique geopolitical savant on whose watch lasting solutions were found and conflict became a thing of the past.

Take the most-often cited example, the Abraham Accords, which brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Muslim nations: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. They are a good thing, to be sure, and could have been a foundation for more in a second term. But peace among a handful of nations whose previous relations were hardly the most hostile or violent is a far cry from declarative statements from those like Mike Lee that “Trump brought peace to the Middle East.”

The Accords were positive steps toward peace for parts of the Middle East; they were not themselves “Middle East peace,” for Israel, for the United States, or for Muslims themselves. Reports of al-Qaeda’s and ISIS’s deaths have been greatly exaggerated. We just got a grim reminder of how dangerous Hamas still is, and that they’ve got a state sponsor (a state sponsor which, by the way, still wants nuclear weapons). The Taliban still lives, and now controls the government we fought to depose it from twenty years ago.

On its own, the fact that the Middle East is still fundamentally the same as it was before Trump took office doesn’t make him a failure. America isn’t responsible for everything that happens an ocean away, and no one president can be expected to remake an entire region or resolve conflicts that have persisted for centuries.

Yet Trump and his boosters routinely speak as if that’s exactly what he did, and more than a few of his followers seem to have fallen for his trademark narcissistic exaggeration. And so we get the article of faith that of course bad things simply wouldn’t have happened if Donald the Wise were still watching over us.

More importantly, let’s not forget Trump’s own capacity to cause bad things himself, or the way his rhetoric oscillates between the perennial tough guy who’ll crush America’s enemies in a heartbeat and a mouthpiece for Code Pink-style cliches about “warmongers.” Case in point: Biden’s Afghanistan debacle could have easily been Trump’s, had he won reelection, which just as easily could have sent the exact same message of weakness to America’s enemies.

As nightmarishly despicable as the current president’s execution of withdrawal was—getting thirteen American soldiers killed in a year that had previously seen zero casualties, leaving $7 billion worth of military weapons and equipment for our enemies to use—we’ll never really know how different Trump’s own planned pullout would have turned out. We can reasonably give him the benefit of the doubt that personnel and hardware would have been safely evacuated before turning out the lights, but at the end of the day it would have still meant the Taliban returning to power. Just consider the following overview of the agreement Trump’s state department struck with the Taliban in early 2020:

The U.S. agreed to a full withdrawal from Afghanistan within 14 months, the delisting of Taliban leaders from international sanctions lists, and an uneven prisoner exchange that would free 5,000 jihadists for just 1,000 prisoners held by the Taliban. (The Afghan government quickly balked at this concession.) The Taliban has agreed to take part in intra-Afghan negotiations, but hasn’t recognized the Afghan government’s legitimacy. Nor has the Taliban agreed to a ceasefire with Afghan forces, or offered any real indication that it seeks peace. Akhundzada’s victory declaration was littered with references to the Taliban’s “Islamic Emirate,” the same authoritarian regime the jihadists have been fighting to resurrect since 2001.

In his defense of the deal, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo trumpeted the Taliban’s supposed counterterrorism assurances. But the text of the agreement doesn’t support his claims. Pompeo told a national television audience that the Taliban “for the first time, have announced that they’re prepared to break with their historic ally, al-Qa’ida, who they’ve worked with much [to] the detriment of the United States of America.” Except, that is not what the Taliban’s political team agreed to in Doha.

Al-Qaeda is mentioned by name twice, in back-to-back passages that repeat the same assurance. The Taliban claims it will “prevent any group or individual, including al-Qa’ida, from using the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” Without ironclad enforcement provisions, this is not a significant concession. The Taliban has been saying this all along.

Trump’s foreign policy was not the consistent application of a deep, coherent vision. Like every other aspect of his presidency, it was combination of instincts and advice, with good and bad to be found in both categories—made all the trickier to untangle by his tumultuous relationships with his own generals and national security adviser.

As we’ve seen these past seven years, that combination easily bests what we can consistently expect from Democrats, but it’s a far cry from the steady, confident leadership we truly need in such dangerous times.