The prevailing notion that Biden’s scuttle from Afghanistan is a sign of American weakness is wide of the mark. On the contrary, with each passing week the pre-1941 FDR template of the Biden presidency becomes clearer.
I set out the FDR parallel in a profile of the new president in January. This wasn’t fantasy but based on Biden’s record and programme as a New Deal Democrat, in the context of today’s dual crises of Covid-19 and the long-run social degeneration that has flowed from Reaganomics. We were evidently witnessing a moment akin to the depths of the Great Depression in 1932, when FDR was elected: the question was whether Biden could rise to it.
So far, so good. It has been six months of unrelenting presidential energy and focus devoted to state-led jobs growth, infrastructure and social welfare. Biden’s initial $1.9 trillion Covid-19 stimulus bill, enacted just seven weeks after his inauguration, is being followed by his imminently successful enactment of a further $1 trillion infrastructure bill plus a $3.5 trillion federal budget boost for health, children and social outlays.
Recent weeks have seen an audacious bipartisan deal with Republicans, including minority leader Mitch McConnell in the Senate, to enact the infrastructure bill and enable the $3.5 trillion package to pass on a narrow party vote as, effectively, part of the deal.
Biden has split the Republicans, which is crucial to his run of legislative successes. Trump helped with his bizarre determination to continue disputing the 2020 election, but equally vital is the new president’s skill in attracting Republican support for a growth plan while playing to the centre, or into touch, on divisive cultural and non-economic issues, including foreign policy.
With echoes of pre-war FDR, and in stark contrast to LBJ, foreign policy is being handled with a premium on avoiding entanglement in far-off wars. Like the great man—but unlike Trump and FDR’s most isolationist opponents—Biden is keen to nurture allies where practical, but his priority is fighting for the condition of America rather than anything else. This week’s withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, implementing a deal with the militant Taliban agreed last year by Trump, is Biden saying, like Roosevelt, that he is putting jobs and the economy first and “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” He used almost exactly this FDR formulation in his Afghanistan broadcast on Monday: “I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another country’s civil war.”
Time will tell whether the terrorist threat which led to US intervention 20 years ago is abated, and whether the twin perils of Russia and China will be contained or exacerbated by a president determined to fight at home rather than abroad. Biden presents his Afghanistan scuttle in terms of prioritising America’s strategic competition with Russia and China, but in truth, like FDR in the 1930s, he aims to avoid military conflict with the other great powers entirely.
If it’s any comfort, FDR wasn’t forced to fight the great dictator until his third term, when America was fundamentally stronger and more self-confident than eight years previously.
As for Boris Johnson’s Britain, we obviously couldn’t sustain an Afghan regime which the US abandoned, and the notion that we might have done so was a sad consequence of ludicrous Brexit rhetoric about “global Britain.”
Our duty is clear: to take as many refugees as we can; to honour our debts to those who helped us as an occupying power; and to think very seriously about whether we too should be prioritising our economy rather than engaging in imperial distractions and delusions.
“Amtrak Joe,” the man who commuted from Delaware to Washington via train each day he was in the Senate, pledged to rebuild America’s middle and working classes and may prove to be America’s most powerful social reformer since FDR and LBJ. Boris, the Prime Etonian, isn’t set for any such relationship with Britain’s struggling classes.
