Michael Rubin
Iranian hard-liners have been circulating a list of “concessions” worth tens of billions of dollars to which the Biden administration has allegedly agreed, all to get Tehran to come into compliance with a nuclear agreement that is near expiring.
For the Biden administration, a collapse of fortitude in the face of rogue regimes has become the rule rather than the exception. After fanning conspiracies that former President Donald Trump was a Russian agent, President Joe Biden’s team gave Russian dictator Vladimir Putin the gift of a generation when it waived sanctions on the Russo-German Nord Stream-2 project, an action that the Kremlin interpreted, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had warned, as a green light to invade Ukraine.
As Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border, Biden again counseled defeat. National security adviser Jake Sullivan encouraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to flee his country and surrender it to Russian aggression. That Zelensky refused did more to defend the post-World War II liberal order than any U.S. politician has since former President Ronald Reagan.
Perhaps Biden’s biggest surrender was Afghanistan. It is one thing for Biden to want to end a war, but how wars end matters. Biden gratuitously kneecapped America’s Afghan allies and all but handed the Taliban a regime. (Biden’s initial inclination to set the final withdrawal date for Sept. 11 would have been a gift to al Qaeda had advisers not quietly walked the president’s worst inclinations back). Even now, the State Department has chosen to condemn Afghans’ successful resistance against the Taliban, which suggests a bizarre desire to preserve the Taliban rule.
Now, Biden is at it again. When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, it remained in physical possession of more than $9 billion in Afghan government reserves that the elected Afghan government had deposited in U.S. banks. That is Afghans’ money, but not the Taliban’s. Yet, just weeks after the Taliban was caught red-handed sheltering al Qaeda’s leader in the house of its interior minister, the Biden administration appears ready to transfer those billions of dollars surreptitiously to the Taliban. The scheme to which Biden’s team has agreed is to transfer that money into a Swiss-based trust fund from which an international board would disburse money to alleviate suffering under the Taliban regime.
This setup will not work. The Taliban would no longer allow independent aid distribution than North Korea would. The White House should know that since the Clinton administration tried this once and failed. At the very least, Biden’s setup would reward the Taliban and their Pakistani masters after both conspired to kill hundreds of Americans. The scheme also creates a dynamic in which the Taliban could point a figurative gun at Afghans’ heads to demand money.
The president’s knee-jerk reaction is to appease and incentivize the world’s most reactionary forces rather than defend the liberal order. The issue is not partisan: Mainstream Democrats may be quieter but are just as uneasy as Republicans at Biden’s judgment.
It is time for Congress to act truly bipartisanly to put the brakes on Biden’s worst excesses. Congress already demands a say in any agreement Biden strikes with Iran. Perhaps it can also demand that Afghanistan’s money be used to resettle and aid Afghans who put their lives on the line for the U.S. or Americans. A portion of the money can likewise be earmarked to support Afghan girls and women who seek to continue their schooling outside of Afghanistan. More still can support the armed Afghan resistance. None, however, should ease Taliban governance.
If Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken ignore such prerogatives, it is time for Congress to respond with its power of the purse to reduce and curtail support for other programs in order to concentrate on what Biden appears so reluctant to do — defend the liberal order.
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