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Even though there were a dozen candidates competing for air time at last night’s Democratic presidential debate, it wasn’t too chaotic to begin to imagine what kind of commander-in-chief — lest we forget, that’s the principal Constitutional duty a president has — the eventual nominee might make.
To begin with, this debate was the first to have anything like a coherent focus on “foreign policy,” which in this context meant discussing President Trump’s decision to withdraw US forces from Syria and open the door for a Turkish invasion. And it was a bit of luck that CNN “moderator” Anderson Cooper framed the question around Trump’s “abandonment” of the Syrian Kurds, provoking a torrent of geopolitical virtue–signaling that provided a revealing combination of vapidity and unintended clarity.
Joe Biden got the first bite of the apple. True to himself, his answer channeled the plainspoken toughness of Harry Truman — or was it the faux–toughness of “Red-Line” Barack Obama? — a swirl of confusing detail and a pirouette of oral preening that deflated the whole grand soufflé. (Mixed metaphors are the only way to characterize Biden.) Here’s the Truman rhetoric: “I would be having a real lockdown conversation with [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and letting him know that he’s going to pay a heavy price for what he has done now.” For emphasis, he added: “Pay that price.” How the price was to be exacted, Biden did not say. He did, however, claim that, based on his “many thousands of hours” spent in the White House Situation Room and “many hours on the ground in those very places” visiting American troops and commanders, he would not have withdrawn either the final element of US forces from northern Syria or “the additional thousand in Iraq.” His outrage peaked when he concluded that the Syria withdrawal was “the most shameful thing that any president has done in modern history — excuse me, in terms of foreign policy.”
This was rich coming from the architect of the Obama Administration’s 2009 Iraq withdrawal, both a much more shameful and consequential abandonment of allies and snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory than Trump’s Syria fiasco. And, in trying to distance himself from Obama’s notorious “red-line” statement on Syria, Biden in 2016 told the Council on Foreign Relations that he was glad Obama didn’t follow through on that threat. “I am not a proponent of laying down markers unless you’ve thought through the second and third and fourth step that you’re going to have to take, and almost assuredly will have to take in order to accomplish your initial goal.” Not surprisingly, in the debate Biden did not share any thoughts on future steps he would take in Syria.
Neither did Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who in many polls has nudged past Biden as the Democratic front-runner. This is one area of policy where she has yet to develop a comprehensive plan. “I sit on the Armed Services Committee. I talk with our military leaders about this,” but what she talked about is anyone’s guess. “I was in Iraq and went through the neighborhoods that ISIS destroyed.” And so….?
After the ritual bashing of Trump not only for his impulsive decision-making but his penchant for “sucking up to dictators,” Warren did recite what might be considered the conventional-but-not-crazy progressive wisdom. “I think that we ought to get out of the Middle East. I don’t think we should have troops in the Middle East,” she said. “But,” — wait for it — “we have to do it the right way, the smart way. … We need to get out, but we need to do this through a negotiated solution. There is no military solution in this region.” These are not the droids you’re looking for, move along. The Middle East is at war, and nowhere more intensely than in Syria and Iraq; we — and anyone still unfortunate enough to ally themselves with us — are losing. The Syrians, Russians and Iranians would be delighted to negotiate an instrument of surrender. Jimmy Carter declared the Middle East to be a vital U.S. national security interest. No more.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a veteran of service in Afghanistan, had both the luckiest draw and cleverest answers. He was lucky in following Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, also a vet, who indulged in her standard rant about opposing “regime-change wars” in Iraq and, in her view, Syria. “The slaughter going on in Syria is not a consequence of American presence,” replied Buttigieg, who also pivoted to a swipe at Trump: “It’s a consequence of a withdrawal and a betrayal by this president of American allies and American values.” But lest we think that Buttigieg has doubts about the strategy of further withdrawal, he continued: “Look, I didn’t think we should have gone to Iraq in the first place. I think we need to get out of Afghanistan.”
Buttigieg and Gabbard went a few more rounds parsing the definitions of “endless war” and “regime-change war” before Sen. Bernie Sanders was invited to speak. Sanders provided the final wrinkle when he declared that Turkey’s attack on the Kurds had disqualified it as an ally, despite its long-standing membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Somehow, this sparked an applause-generating declaration of the need to support allies. It also sparked Buttigieg to chirp that not only was Turkey an ally until Trump lost “leverage” with Erdogan, but that Saudi Arabia had been kicked off the island for murdering journalist and activist Jamal Khashoggi. Mayor Pete was really Mayor Polonius.
Taken as a whole, the candidates’ performances reveal an astonishing level of either naiveté or dissembling about the role of the United States in the world and what they would do to repair and renew America’s leadership of the “free world” — not that there’s a Truman or Kennedy Democrat who would think or talk like that. For all the energetic Trump–bashing in evidence last night, there was equal reason to conclude that, in substance, there is not going to be much difference when it comes to the use of American power should a Democrat return to the White House. The retreat continues.
Taken as a whole, the candidates’ performances reveal an astonishing level of either naiveté or dissembling about the role of the United States in the world.
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