Politics

Joe Biden’s Presidency Is Already ‘Transformational’

Biden is leaving Afghanistan and rebuilding America, as challenges persist.

It was always difficult to imagine Joe Biden, perennial creature of the senate and longtime representative of America’s utterly dysfunctional national government, being a radical agent of change as president. It was widely presumed during his candidacy that he would simply steady the ship after the chaotic instability of Donald Trump’s broken presidency, that he would seek to return America’s governance to its middling status quo.

Yet in the last week, the Biden administration has proved that it intends to use this window of extreme crisis and stark political division to enact a far-reaching and yes, transformational, agenda.

America is finally leaving the quagmire in Afghanistan behind, after twenty long years of sinking our nation’s blood and treasure into a black hole from which it seemed we would never extract ourselves. It took the Soviets ten years to figure out that Afghanistan would bend to no foreign adversary, and it took the British only thirteen years to reach that same conclusion.

Tragically, it took the United States twenty years of dead and crippled young American soldiers and horrific war waged in the wadis, opium fields, and mountains of the Hindu Kush to realize we could not impose a stable Western-style democracy in our image on Afghanistan.

It was never going to happen.

This is an act of immense political courage. There’s a reason four American presidents have been unable to pull us out of this mess. There will be blowback, to put it mildly.

Thus, the pentagon pressed Joe Biden to remain in Afghanistan until the Taliban had met certain conditions on the ground. Biden’s response is that a conditions-based withdrawal is a recipe for America to stay there forever. Indeed, there are loud and bipartisan voices across the U.S. government that are urging the Biden administration to stay and continue to prop up Ashraf Ghani’s deeply unpopular and corrupt government, perhaps forever.

There will surely be a period of intense violence, instability, and continued war upon the American military’s departure. Kabul’s fledgling democracy may well collapse, and the Taliban may eventually seize the seat of government there, reimposing their fanatical vision of Sharia law on the country.

Still, Biden understands there is simply no military solution to Afghanistan’s woes. Ultimately, it’s not our country to run.

After walking through section 60 of Arlington national cemetery, Biden was asked by a reporter if it was a difficult decision. He replied that his decision to withdraw was “absolutely clear.”

Instead, Joe Biden is reinvesting in America itself.

He passed a nearly two trillion dollar stimulus, a package progressive icon Bernie Sanders has called “the single most significant piece of legislation for working-class people that has been passed since the 1960s.”

Now, the Biden administration is gearing up for a massive, far-reaching push to rebuild America’s crumbling physical and human infrastructure. Rather than pouring more money and American lives into a distant foreign land for obscure and unattainable goals, America is turning inward to renew itself.

The unconditional withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan coupled with Biden’s push to rebuild America at home is a sign that the pandemic, coupled with the political disaster of Donald Trump’s failed presidency, has opened the door for the Biden administration to pursue a uniquely ambitious agenda both at home and abroad.

The milquetoast policies Democrats expected of a Biden administration seem to have fallen away in this new political moment, and Joe Biden is taking full advantage of the multiple converging crises at home to enact policies that will fundamentally shift America’s future.

While these are bold initial steps, there are numerous and urgent problems that also demand action.

Even as Joe Biden announced the withdrawal from Afghanistan, police killed another young Black man, sparking massive protests, only ten miles away from where Derek Chauvin is on trial for murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis. American policing and criminal justice are in dire need of reappraisal and reform, as evidenced by the seemingly endless parade of cops murdering unarmed Black men.

In another related and uniquely American debacle, a New York Times article today detailed the massive price in lives Americans are paying in opioid overdoses, after new data showed overdoses to be worse than ever before during the pandemic. 87,000 American lives were lost to opioid overdoses this year alone. This is another domestic crisis that demands a robust and totally reimagined response from America’s government.

Of course, there is also the seemingly endless nightmare of mass shootings amid America’s epidemic of gun violence. Clearly, the status quo is not working here either.

Donald Trump left this country in ruins, and by doing so, paved the way for a newly ambitious agenda from elected Democrats. Joe Biden is acting swiftly to reorient America’s foreign policy away from endless failed wars and nation-building, and turning the focus back toward rebuilding America itself. These early moves should be applauded by progressives, even as we must continue to aggressively press the Biden administration to address America’s other simmering issues.

At the very least, this is an auspicious beginning.