Biden's Pointless 'Global Posture Review'

It is remarkable how the Biden administration goes through the motions of lengthy reviews only to conclude at the end that the status quo is basically fine.

Emma Ashford is appropriately withering in her comments on the Biden administration’s Global Posture Review:

The main problem with the posture review is that it was completely irrelevant. I’m honestly not sure how the Pentagon managed to take a year to come to such insipid conclusions.

Kelley Vlahos and I talked about this for our show last week, and we had the same reaction that Ashford had. It is remarkable how the Biden administration goes through the motions of lengthy reviews only to conclude at the end that the status quo is basically fine. We knew that Biden was going to be a status quo president overall, but it is strange that they are content to keep almost everything they inherited from Trump in place. This was true of their miserable review of sanctions policy, and it is true of this review process as well. When the sanctions policy review came out, I said this:

The absurdly long wait for the completion of this review might have been warranted if it had produced anything of value, but it proved to be nothing more than a waste of time and effort. They could have skipped going through the motions of a policy review and just admitted up front that nothing important would change.

Beyond wasting time and effort, these useless reviews suggest that the Biden administration isn’t willing to ask any hard questions about failed policies. It may also suggest that they can’t recognize failure even when it is staring them in the face. That would explain why the Biden administration is going back to business as usual with all of the worst clients in the Middle East. It would help to account for their reflexive statements of “ironclad” and “unwavering” support for Ukraine when it is clear that emphasizing U.S. backing of Ukraine is making the situation worse.

It would be one thing if the Biden administration could make a serious case that all existing policies and deployments made sense, but they can’t. Every “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign has been a colossal failure, but Biden is keeping all of the sanctions Trump imposed. There is no good reason for the U.S. to have tens of thousands of troops in the Middle East, especially when there is supposed to be a shift of resources and attention to East Asia, but it seems that Biden intends to withdraw very few or none of them. As I said in one of my Antiwar columns recently, Biden is choosing to keep the U.S. mired in the Middle East, and it seems to be largely because of inertia and an unwillingness to court more hawkish backlash.

Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is looking more and more like a one-off. It was the exception where the president showed real political courage to do the right thing for the country. Everywhere else I see nothing but drift and recommitting to policies that we all know don’t work. Given Biden’s overall record, that isn’t really surprising, but it is discouraging all the same.