The Biden administration's execution of the Afghanistan withdrawal was a political disaster that damaged the perception of US reliability and created a negative precedent.

• Foreign Policy & Security Failures

• "I think the only thing that gives me a little bit of pause is that Trump has now had the opportunity to see how that played out and see how politically disastrous it was for Biden. And because we are one month into Trump's term, a deal cut along those lines puts the fall of Ukraine on Trump's watch rather than on the watch of the person who comes after where where he got sort of politically lucky in that respect that it happened under Biden."

  1:03:37 Watch ↗

• "So the the point was that um the US basically stopped supporting the government of Afghanistan as a result of the peace deal that Trump signed in 2020 and then Biden executed in 2021. And that led to the fall of the Afghan government at the hands of the Taliban. And the danger is that if the United States were simply to terminate support to Ukraine or force Ukraine into a really bad disadvantageous peace deal,"

  1:09:36 Watch ↗

The Biden administration's ultimate policy goals for Ukraine were not substantively different from the Trump administration's; only their negotiating tactics differed, suggesting a convergence on a less-than-ideal outcome for Ukraine.

• Foreign Policy & Security Failures

• "Candidly, I don't think the Biden administration would disagree substantively with any of those things or a Harris administration would disagree with that. But presumably those are things you would try to sort of bargain away over the course of the negotiation rather than sort of giving them away up front."

  37:58 Watch ↗

The Biden administration's foreign policy was perceived by allies as a temporary 'aberration' rather than a durable return to a traditional, alliance-based norm, highlighting a failure to solidify this approach in the face of a changing American political landscape.

• Foreign Policy & Security Failures

• "And and so you you can no longer convince yourself if you're a European leader that this is all an aberration and that what we saw from President Biden is sort of the true norm in American state craft uh in the 21st century. The reality though is that and as merits and every other responsible European leader knows, I mean Europe has a tremendous distance to go to actually have any sort of strategic autonomy."

  50:10 Watch ↗

The Biden administration's handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021 is presented as a model for catastrophic foreign policy failure, suggesting a similar collapse could happen in Ukraine if US support is withdrawn.

• Foreign Policy & Security Failures

• "if the United States were simply to terminate support to Ukraine or force Ukraine into a really bad disadvantageous peace deal, you could see a similar collapse of Ukrainian resistance and the way that you saw in Afghanistan in 2021."

  1:10:00 Watch ↗