The Biden Doctrine: Never Actually Win

Ukraine. Iran. Hamas. Hezbollah. The Houthis… The enemy varies, but the Administration policy is mostly the same.

And the same under Obama: Syria. ISIS. And Ukraine back then, too.

We should call it the Biden Doctrine. And the Obama-Biden Doctrine. And probably the Obama-Biden-Blinken-Sullivan-Harris Doctrine.

Abstracting from the peculiarities of each case, the overall doctrinal posture has been:

• Hold the line at where the enemy has already advanced to.
• Keep our side in the fight. Help it just enough for that purpose.
• But don’t let it roll the enemy back. Cut back on arms for it, if it’s advancing too far and might soon defeat the enemy (as when our Syrian Democratic Force was on the edge of defeating Assad).
• Make sure to never actually win.
• And when pressed by the media on, “Why are you dragging out the war? Why don’t you seem to want to win?” In the case of Ukraine, protest that “I really do want Ukraine to win” against Russia. And have to keep saying that, because everyone senses that it’s a lie. In the case of ISIS, say that it’s bad for us to win by our own force.

Why this seeming determination not to win?

The Obama-Biden Administrations have had their reasons – bad ones, but real motivations nevertheless. Their reasons have caused the terrible effects that we have seen time after time, in Syria, in Ukraine, in Gaza…

Obama argued that our winning against Assad or against ISIS was too costly, dangerous to world peace, unworkable, and unsustainable – as, he argued, we had seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. That, to be sure, is self-contradictory. In reality, it was in every case more costly, more bloody, and more unsustainable to drag the wars on and refuse to win them.

What lies behind these self-contradictory, muddled liberal lines? There is a more logically consistent refrain that could justify the anti-victory doctrine: the radical refrain. Obama and his foreign policy teams imbibed that refrain repeatedly in their college days. It is the one refrain that gives clear moral commands and places strong moral demands on students in their formative years. It is strong in the back of their minds, as a back-up motivation for the compromising, self-contradictory liberal versions they give in their own conscious version of it. It is also strong in the ideological spaces within the political bases of the two Administrations. It is this refrain:

“For us to win would be unjust. It would be a victory for American-Western imperialism. It would give encouragement to our own deplorable people to become more deplorable, more confident, more aggressive, imperialist, more dangerous to the world.”

This radical argument against winning is a consistent one. A monstrous one, an immoral one — but a consistent one in its own logic. Its consequences would not be obviously self-defeating to its own stated purposes, the way the liberal arguments against winning are.

Are the liberals simply serving the radical purpose of being against the West, then? Are they simply lying with their illogical rationalizations?

These’s a kind of in-between moral posture. It maintains the liberal unclarity of purpose and absurdity doctrine, while mostly serving the radical clarity of purpose and doctrine. It is this:

“We have to fight the enemy at the moment, because the enemy of the moment is even worse than us. But we must not win, at least not of our own force; that would be terribly wrong for the long term. Maybe, in the successive cases of Syria and ISIS, we can arm locals – who turned out too often to be Al Qaeda affiliates — to eventually win in our place, after dragging out the wars bloodily and letting ISIS metastasize all around the world. Or maybe we can invite in great powers independent of us, like Russia and Turkey, to step in and stop Assad in place of us, and establish a better multipolar world order against our bad unipolarity. “Come right in”, so to speak.”

And indeed they did come in – too often on Assad’s side, against us.

Some corollary doctrines to the renunciation of our winning

• Don’t let our side escalate.
• When our military power gives us a clear objective dominance of the escalation ladder, don’t use it that way and force the enemy to stand down. Concede to the enemy the initiative on escalating and being assertive.
• Don’t build on momentum when you’re winning. Don’t use a temporary advantage to push further military. Wait while the enemy regroups, recovers, and takes countermeasures
• Don’t follow up on an advance. Don’t pursue the enemy. Don’t turn its retreat into a rout. The enemy might fold in that case — and that’s apparently unthinkable, it means winning

But what to do, if your ally pulls a surprise on you and is routing the enemy despite your objections?

In that case, step in fast and demand a ceasefire. Mobilize the international community to pressure Israel to stop. Count on the media to pile on too.

We watched the last point play out for a year in Gaza. Now we’re watching it play out again in Lebanon. Its real, practical meaning is: give hope to the enemy that you’ll rescue it from the rout. Prop up its morale. Keep it in the fight – in the name of being peaceful. Drag the war out. Make it a bloodier ordeal, and a more pointless one.

It is the terrible cost of a terrible doctrine.