On Thursday, the United States and its allies secured a deal with Russia in order to return some 16 people, including multiple Americans, from the Russians. The Russians have basically taken several Americans hostage over the course of the last several years, and the United States traded a bunch of murderers as terrorists and spies for these hostages.
This is being treated as a massive win for the Biden administration by the media and the Biden administration itself. In return for Evan Gershkovich and former Marine Paul Whelan, Russia retrieved eight people, including a convicted murderer who shot dead a former Chechen rebel leader in Berlin, a Russian agent accused of helping give sensitive American electronics and ammunition to Russia, a man involved in what American authorities called “an elaborate hack-to-trade scheme that netted approximately $93 million through securities trades based on confidential corporate information stolen from US computer networks,” and four other convicted spies.
Republican Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement, “I remain concerned that continuing to trade innocent Americans for actual Russian criminals held in the U.S. and elsewhere sends a dangerous message to Putin that only encourages further hostage-taking by his regime.”
It’s great that we’re getting back our people; that is a wonderful and good thing.
But the treatment of this as a massive triumph by the Biden administration betrays an enormous amount about the way that Americans think about foreign policy, particularly on the Left and in the hallowed precincts of the State Department. The West has become accustomed to looking at foreign policy as though the best foreign policy ends in trading murderers and spies for innocent people. That is the best-case outcome.
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That is an extension of a generalized world view that the best foreign policy for America is to lose slowly and with the least possible cost, not to actually push to victory. It’s part and parcel of a broader worldview that says, for example, that Afghanistan was a triumph, which is something Joe Biden and Kamala Harris said, despite the fact that pulling out of Afghanistan left 13 American service people to be killed, hundreds of Americans behind, tens of thousands of American allies to be slaughtered by the Taliban, and millions of women to be dragged back into basements so they can’t go to school.
According to Biden, his State Department team, and Harris, that was a triumph. To them, the best form of foreign policy involves losing very, very slowly and with the least amount of cost; the worst foreign policy is where you win.
This is not unique to Biden or Harris. This has been an essential element of American foreign policy strategy on the Left for decades. It’s why America has not won a full-scale victorious war since World War II. It’s been a long time in America since we won a full-scale victorious war because we’re always fighting to stasis; we’re always looking for a way out.
What this did was incentivize Vladimir Putin to take more Americans hostage.
The West has been sucked into the morass of never winning victories and treating what are, by any standard of the imagination, losses as victories.
Two things can be true here: It is incredibly good that Americans are coming home, and it is a diplomatic loss to trade murderers for innocents.
Diplomacy is a tactic. It is not a strategy. The foreign policy establishment is constantly suggesting that diplomacy is in and of itself a strategy, that talking is a strategy.
Talking is a means to an end. Sometimes it’s useful; sometimes it’s not.
When you treat diplomacy as the strategy, what you end up with are bad deals and lost wars.
Which is the name of the game when it comes to Joe Biden.
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