To justify his endorsement of Donald Trump and abandonment of the Democratic Party, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said last week Trump told him “that he wanted to end the grip of the neocons on U.S. foreign policy. He said he didn’t want any more $200 billion wars.”
The following day, Trump told the National Guard Association, “I don’t think we’ve ever been closer to World War III than we are right now” because the “radical political class … sends our guardsmen and women to defend the borders of distant foreign nations while they surrender our own borders to an invasion right here at home.” He promised to “expel the warmongers” from the government and accused Kamala Harris of wanting “endless war.” Before bringing out another former Democrat to the stage, Tulsi Gabbard, Trump said, “Millions of traditional Democrats, including FDR Democrats, JFK Democrats, independents, and old-fashioned liberals are joining our movement,” in part because, “We’re uniting forces to end the endless foreign wars.”
Evidence that “millions of traditional Democrats” are backing Trump is scant. Recent polls from Quinnipiac University, The Economist, and Yahoo! News show that only between 1 and 2 percent of Democrats support Trump. (Harris’s range among Republicans in those same polls is between 2 and 5 points.)
But clearly, Trump is betting that he can make inroads on the anti-war left, with the help of Kennedy and Gabbard, by portraying himself a peacemaker battling warmongers Biden and Harris.
Evidence for that charge is also scant. If Biden and Harris have so deeply embroiled America in endless war, how is it that fewer American soldiers have died in combat during their administration than in Trump’s? How is it that fewer soldiers have died in combat than in any administration since Jimmy Carter?
According to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks annual casualty data, 65 soldiers died in “hostile action” during the four years of the Trump administration, versus 13 under Biden through 2022, the last year tabulated. The Washington Monthly’s Zach Marcus reviewed combat-related deaths announced in Pentagon press releases over the previous two years and identified three additional hostile action deaths, for a total of 16. That’s a 75 percent decline.
You are likely familiar with the incidents that caused the 16 deaths, as there are only two: the August 2021 suicide bombing at an Afghanistan airport and the January 2024 drone attack on an American military base in Jordan, for which the loose-knit Iranian-backed militia Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility.
The reason why the Biden-Harris administration has suffered so few hostile action deaths is because it ended the so-called “forever war” in Afghanistan. Most of the deaths were a tragic consequence of leaving that combat zone, not from deepening any foreign conflict.
In leaving Afghanistan just short of the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Biden and Harris closed the book on the failed neoconservative project of exploiting that traumatic event to expand American hegemony across the Greater Middle East with American ground troops.
How exactly are we on the verge of World War III? In Trump’s narrative, it’s because of the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars.
Trump places heavy emphasis on the Afghan bombing deaths to argue Biden and Harris are so incompetent that they facilitated fresh conflicts. He told the National Guard conference, “It gave us Russia going into Ukraine. It gave us the October 7 attack on Israel. Because it gave us lack of respect.”
This tenuous, self-serving argument collapses upon minimal scrutiny.
Withdrawals are always dicey business. As the Washington Post explained in a 2007 article when an Iraq War withdrawal was the focus of debate:
History is replete with bad withdrawal outcomes. Among the most horrific was the British departure from Afghanistan in 1842, when 16,500 active troops and civilians left Kabul thinking they had safe passage to India. Two weeks later, only one European arrived alive in Jalalabad, near the Afghan-Indian border.
The Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which began in May 1988 after a decade of occupation, reveals other mistakes to avoid. Like the U.S. troops who arrived in Iraq in 2003, the Soviet force in Afghanistan was overwhelmingly conventional, heavy with tanks and other armored vehicles. Once Moscow made public its plans to leave, the political and security situations unraveled much faster than anticipated. ‘The Soviet Army actually had to fight out of certain areas,’ said Army Maj. Daniel Morgan, a two-tour veteran of the Iraq war who has been studying the Soviet pullout at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., with an eye toward gleaning lessons for Iraq. ‘As a matter of fact, they had to airlift out of Kandahar, the fighting was so bad.’
An accompanying graphic reported that the Soviet withdrawal, carried out over a 9-month timeframe, resulted in 523 troops killed. And that’s generally considered to be an orderly withdrawal.
The American withdrawal from Saigon in April 1975 was not without incident. Two Marines, Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge, neither of whom had been in Vietnam for an entire month, were assigned guard duty at a Saigon air base for the final day of the withdrawal. While the assignment was thought to be relatively safe, the two were killed by a North Vietnamese rocket—the last two Americans to die in the Vietnam War.
The Abbey Gate bombing resulted in 11 more deaths than the Saigon rocket attack, but both were a lone tragic incident in an otherwise well-managed withdrawal under inherently chaotic circumstances.
In the case of the Afghanistan withdrawal, the plan to withdraw by a set date was not established by the Biden-Harris administration. That was done by Trump in the Doha agreement directly forged with the Taliban, without participation from our allies in the Afghan government. A member of Trump’s National Security Council later called it a “very weak agreement” heavily skewed towards the Taliban, who “wanted U.S. forces out, and they wanted to take over the country militarily.”
Doha set the withdrawal date for May. Biden, who also wanted to get out of Afghanistan, didn’t ditch the agreement, but he did unilaterally push back the date to September, in part to give the Afghan government and the Taliban more time for peace talks. But the government fell to the Taliban in August, necessitating a hastier withdrawal than anticipated. If Biden shares responsibility for that outcome, he shares it with Trump, who set the stage for the Taliban takeover and criticized Biden in April 2021 for refusing to withdraw sooner.
It’s also plainly ridiculous to attribute the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine were longstanding, and according to one report, he decided to invade in March 2021, five months before the Abbey Gate bombing. (At a minimum, that’s when the troop buildup at the Ukrainian border began). Israelis and Palestinians have been in violent opposition for 75 years. Hamas had been planning the October 7 attack for ten years, and Hamas leaders greenlit the final execution of the plan three months before the Abbey Gate bombing.
Most importantly, the Biden-Harris response to outbreaks of violence in both regions has no similarity to post-9/11 neoconservatism, which envisioned American ground troops welcomed as liberators into the heart of the Arab world and installing political leaders favorable to our interests.
Biden, who was once a supporter of the 2003 Iraq invasion, learned the lesson from its many failures. He has rejected the notion that every problem can be solved by American military might and refused to commit American ground troops when no clear endgame can be articulated. Despite much panic over the possibility of provoking Putin into wider escalation or even nuclear war, the current administration has managed to support the Ukranian resistance and expand the NATO alliance without attracting direct attacks on American interests, let alone any pressing of The Button.
In the Middle East, the Biden-Harris policy has been containment, not escalation. As horrible as the devastation has been within Gaza, we haven’t seen the conflict metastasize into a full-blown regional war. As I wrote in April, one of Biden’s most impressive feats was convincing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to drop a planned barrage on Iran, which could have uncontrollably fanned the flames.
The biggest proponents of an uber-hawkish neoconservative foreign policy—the Trump-supporting Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham—were chastising Biden’s approach on Sunday, in the aftermath of the murder of six Israelis held by Hamas.
“I would urge the Biden administration and Israel to hold Iran accountable for the fate of remaining hostages and put on the target list oil refineries in Iran if the hostages are not released,” argued Graham on ABC’s This Week–a plan almost sure to spark a sprawling war.
“I think we should note that these hostages were discovered in the tunnels under Rafah. That’s where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris put pressure on Israel not to enter for months,” said Cotton on NBC’s Meet The Press, “What the Biden-Harris administration should’ve done from the beginning is not pressure Israel to restrain its response but let Israel win from the very outset.” (The logic escaping Cotton: if Israel had not gone into Rafah and instead forged a ceasefire deal, the six hostages would probably be alive and home with their families today.)
To be fair to Trump, the number of military casualties on his watch was well below that of Barack Obama. And Obama’s number was well below that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Bush is the president who actually pursued the post-9/11 neoconservative policy. Obama is the president elected to end it, which he began to do by withdrawing from Iraq in his first term, eschewing any military invasion and occupation of Syria despite the horrors perpetrated by its dictator, and focusing attention on counterterrorism (which, before 9/11 the Bush-era neocons scoffed at as a minor matter compared to the threat of missiles from rogue state dictators.).
When Obama sent troops back into Iraq in this second term, it was to deal with the rise of ISIS—a genuine terrorist threat—not to pursue neocon hegemonic fantasies. Trump would later take full credit for the demise of ISIS, but he was only finishing what Obama started and on which Obama had already made significant progress.
Similarly, Biden finished what Trump started by withdrawing from Afghanistan. And while the Taliban is now back in charge—which is hardly good news for Afghanistan’s people, especially its subjugated women—the country has not become a staging ground for international terrorism.
These decisions can be legitimately debated. But they shouldn’t be artificially grafted onto an incongruous ideology for self-serving political purposes.
Granted, Trump did not pursue a neocon foreign policy, though that’s not enough to give Trump any gold stars. For example, neocons and liberals alike were aghast at Trump’s cozy dealings with Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
And yet, there are far more neocons in Trump’s orbit and the Republican Party—such as Cotton and Graham—than can be found amongst the Democrats.
Biden and Harris are not neocons. They ended the last endless war. Their current foreign policy rejects using ground troops to impose America’s political will on unwilling peoples. It instead provides military aid to nations whose people are fighting their own battles to protect the existence of their own nations. In doing so, we check the aggression of adversaries such as Russia and Iran without condemning the American military to sink in quagmires. In the case of the Israel-Gaza war, military aid to Israel is paired with diplomatic pressure on Israel for military restraint, as well as with humanitarian aid to Palestinians and efforts to pursue a peaceful two-state solution.
Both the Israel-Gaza and Russia-Ukraine conflicts are deeply challenging crisis. But the Biden-Harris team has rejected the neocon calls for reckless actions that could turn them into a World War III. The clearest evidence of that is the extremely small number of American soldiers who have died in hostile actions, one more way the current administration outdid its predecessor.
