Debates in the United States of America among the various wings of the Democrat Party regarding Biden’s vision for foreign policy are going strong. Be it in the Democrat Party base, or be it in its Congress group, there is a strong trend that America needs to withdraw from the “endless wars.” The Party’s “centrist” wing for its part wants the old order that cultivated “American interventionism” to continue as is. Hence, the Biden administration is being pressured by these two diverging trends.
The Biden administration has not yet made a clear-cut decision on whether to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Bob Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee; Jack Reed, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; and Adam Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, all object to the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. The highest ranking members of the Democratic Party in both wings of the American Congress are of this opinion.
There’s a bipartisan agreement that America should prolong the endless wars. This consensus is advocated by the established centrist wings of both parties. Remember, both parties’ wings in the U.S. Congress had thwarted all of Trump’s so-called efforts to pullout American troops from Afghanistan and Syria. Furthermore, the 2021 Defense Budget Draft, which includes articles preventing U.S. troops abroad from returning home, was passed with this bipartisan alliance for the second time, despite Trump's veto.
According to U.S.’s bipartisan foreign policy elites, the world revolves around America. Everything going on in the world has to do with the U.S.’s national security interests. These elites believe that the endless wars could be stably sustained. Some analysts have branded this illusion as “strategic arrogance.” Following Biden’s win in the presidential elections, the Defense for Democracies Foundation (FDD), a pro-Israeli Neocon think-tank, published a report comprising opinions that the U.S. should preserve its "world police" role.
According to this so-called think tank, the U.S. preservation of a military presence in many countries across the world will serve to make America itself more secure. Leon Panetta, who served as the head of the CIA and Secretary of Defense during the Obama era, and former General Herbert Raymond McMaster, who served as the National Security Advisor during the Trump era, made significant contributions to the report. Both names are high-ranking officials of the FDD’s Military and Political Power Center. In the report, McMaster criticizes calls to “bring U.S. troops back home.” According to him, these calls are romantic notions that contradict American realism.
In his book published in 2020, titled “Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World,” McMaster conducts a theoretical defense of American Interventionism. McMaster, who was given the boot by Trump, is also one of the strong critics of Trump’s attempts to pull troops out of Afghanistan. Then again, McMaster finds the past 20 years of America’s foreign policy highly flawed, calling it “strategic narcissism.” He feels it’s wrong to think that everything that transpires in the world has to do with the U.S. As it is, even the title of his book carries traces of this very strategic narcissism.
McMaster suggests that the U.S. engages in strategic empathy with other states. Unfortunately, it is not a concept that America's hardline foreign policy elites sympathize with. Furthermore, even the U.S.’s Syria policy which clashes with Turkey’s national security interests is enough to cast the shadow of doubt over McMaster’s strategic empathy suggestion to begin with.
Mcmaster’s claim of “fighting to defend the free world” is nothing but rhetoric. The facts unfolding on the battleground prove that “American Arrogance” is as strong as ever. In conclusion, McMaster’s book goes no further than being a confirmation of the deadly confusion of America’s foreign policy elites.
