Killing of ISIS leader shows how unsettled our foreign policy debate really is

Killing of ISIS leader shows how unsettled our foreign policy debate really is

Paul Waldman — Read time: 4 minutes

Columnist

Yesterday at 1:37 p.m. EST

On Wednesday night, the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, was killed in a raid by American Special Operations forces. Most Americans have probably forgotten that ISIS still exists, didn’t know the name of its now-dead leader, and would prefer to believe that the War on Terror is something in America’s past.

Which, when you combine it with the other challenges the country is confronting, shows that this is an unusually unsettled moment in U.S. foreign policy — both its conduct by the administration and its political implications at home.

We’ve long told ourselves a broad, encompassing story about our place and goals in the world. It gives order and purpose to our actions and allows us to convince ourselves that we are the protagonists of a noble and heroic story.

It’s usually the tale of a globe-spanning struggle between freedom and oppression, civilization and barbarism. For decades, it was the Cold War. The 9/11 attacks gave us new focus; now we were fighting a Global War on Terror anywhere and everywhere, to vanquish those who “hate our freedoms,” as George W. Bush said.

And today? Not only don’t we have a single story to tell about the purpose of U.S. foreign policy, but both parties are divided about what that purpose should be.

When President Biden spoke from the Oval Office on Thursday, his words could have come from Bush or Barack Obama; we’ve lost count of how many times a president has announced proudly that, as Biden said, “Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more.”

That terrorist will of course be replaced by someone else, whom sooner or later we will also probably kill. Whoever is president at that time will tell us how much safer we’ve become.

And as usual, the event was accompanied by the death of civilians, 13 of them, including six children. The military says that al-Qurayshi blew up himself and his family, but we’ve learned over and over again that early reports that absolve U.S. forces of civilian deaths should always be treated with skepticism.

Yet I would wager that almost no Americans are aware that Biden has dramatically scaled back the drone war, in which successive presidents, including both Obama and Donald Trump, enthusiastically rained death from above all over the world, killing many civilians in the process. Even so, some Democrats have urged the administration to limit it even further.

Meanwhile, the administration is working hard to persuade Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine, and this has divided the Republican Party. Traditional GOP hawks have largely stood behind the administration as it has put itself between Russia and Ukraine, while the party is gripped by a pro-Russia movement led by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Carlson has been whipping up the base and directly attacking many Republican senators, who are none too pleased about it.

But others know which parade they want to run to the front of. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), whose ambition to become president burns so bright that it could power half the St. Louis metropolitan area, is taking the side of the base: He is urging the administration to renounce the idea of Ukraine ever joining NATO (which happens to be Putin’s goal as well), so we can “shift resources to the Indo-Pacific to deny China’s bid for regional domination.”

In other words: These European conflicts just don’t offer the clarity and purpose we need. But China? There’s a clash of civilizations we can get behind.

That’s what China promises (and to be clear, plenty of Democrats also believe competition with China should be our foreign policy focus). So don’t be surprised if in the coming months and years we see Republicans in particular get more and more focused on China.

That clash-of-civilizations narrative always has both a foreign and domestic component: The enemy is out there, but its traitorous allies are also among us and must be rooted out. The foreign adversary is a readily available weapon to use against political opponents, who can always be charged with being a fifth column insufficiently devoted to America’s cause.

We’re not there yet; you don’t see Republicans routinely calling Democrats “pro-China” the way they used to accuse liberals of being Reds or terrorist sympathizers. This is still a time of transition for the party, which is recovering from the lack of focus Trump imposed on its foreign policy ideas.

He seeded affection for Russia into his party’s base but was contemptuous of the adventurism of the Bush years, leaving the War on Terror almost an afterthought. He cared most about immigration and its threat to American Whiteness — but that doesn’t tell anyone what they should think about events in Europe or Asia.

So while you couldn’t find one in a hundred voters who could identify a Biden Doctrine, Republicans don’t have much of an alternative vision of foreign policy to offer. And perhaps they no longer need one. They’ve found their clash of civilizations here at home, where their hatred of liberalism has become so maniacal that nothing else seems to matter. Against the threat of a Toni Morrison novel or a 12-year-old trans girl who wants to join the softball team, who has time for foreign policy?