Biden needs to be a better gardener

Biden needs to be a better gardener

So much for tending to allies

By 

Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

August 18, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

There is a case to be made that after the chaos of the past week, the situation in Afghanistan is stabilizing. The Taliban has been making a pleasant number of non-revolutionary statements: promising the country will not be a haven for terrorists, offering amnesty for government workers, urging women to continue to work in government, and pledging no reprisals against Americans still in Kabul.

This sounds very different from the Taliban rulers of a generation ago. Obviously, it’s still the early days, but this seeming moderation, combined with the U.S. military’s restoration of order at Kabul’s international airport, suggests that the Biden administration can start getting its head above water on the immediate crisis and focus on the next steps.

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts outlined some possible next steps in Tuesday’s column. There is a more pressing need, however, one so basic I did not think it needed to be said out loud: The Biden administration, and President Biden in particular, needs to do a better job at gardening.

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By gardening, I am talking about George P. Shultz’s meaning of the term. In his memoir, “Turmoil and Triumph,” Shultz emphasized the importance of tending to allies to avoid the emergence of friction: “From all my former experience, I appreciated how important it was to see people on their own turf, where they feel at home and where you meet the people with whom they work. I call this kind of work ‘gardening,’ and it is one of the most underrated aspects of diplomacy. The way to keep weeds from overwhelming you is to deal with them constantly and in their early stages.” To extend the idea even further, looping in allies before decisions are implemented is a way of signaling the importance of the relationship.

Surely this was the most obvious foreign policy difference between Biden and Donald Trump during the 2020 campaign. Trump conducted foreign affairs by tweet; Biden pledged that “America is back” and has tried to follow through on that pledge both virtually in the Pacific Rim and in his first overseas trip to Europe.

When we get to the events of the past week, however, it sure seems as though the Biden White House is unconcerned what U.S. treaty allies think.

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Reporters are having no difficulty finding allied officials complaining about the Biden administration’s handling of the past week’s events. My Washington Post colleague Liz Sly notes, “some German officials and lawmakers are seething at Washington’s failure to consult coalition partners such as Berlin.” Sly quotes Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, lamenting, “We’re back to the transatlantic relationship of old, where the Americans dictate everything. … ‘Yes we want to partner with you, but in reality, we want to be able to tell you what to do and when.’ ”

Politico’s Alex Wickham tells a similar story in his newsletter after Biden’s White House address on Monday: “The phrase members of the British government, EU officials and foreign policy experts keep using is that this is Biden’s ‘America First’ moment — a Donald Trump-style rejection of his allies that will lead to horrific human rights abuses and a huge refugee crisis.”

The Biden White House keeps telling reporters that “the president’s national security team has been engaged in months of extensive scenario planning, and was ready for this challenge.” Which makes it very puzzling that the most important U.S. policy principal has not been tending to U.S. allies in this real-world scenario:

This is not just on Biden, but his foreign policy team as well. According to CNN, U.S. officials were caught flat-footed despite all that extensive scenario planning. The network also noted that “the diplomats who spoke to CNN said that while the Biden NSC has a lot of meetings, they don’t make many rapid decisions.” This comes after weeks in which NATO allies in Afghanistan were caught short by the U.S. military evacuating troops with minimal consultation.

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Here is some free advice for the president and his national security team: Rightly or wrongly, U.S. allies are worried about your resolve and your competence. I have no doubt that you will receive an earful from angry allies if you listen to their concerns. Better to tend to the garden, however, than to follow Trump’s path of speaking first, speaking later, and ignoring treaty allies. So get on a plane, get on a phone, get on a Zoom chat, and start gardening already.