Pollak: In Foreign Policy Chess, Biden Chooses the Black Pieces

President Joe Biden’s failing foreign policy can be likened to a chess player who always chooses the black pieces: he is never seeking to win, but rather tries to play for a draw, at best, every time.

Conventional chess wisdom holds that since the player with the white pieces moves first, the best that the player with the black pieces can do is mount a solid defense and hope for a draw. The only chance to win is if the white player makes a blunder — and blunders can be hard to recognize, under pressure.

Conversely, the player with the white pieces dictates the pace of the game and takes the initiative toward the goal of victory.

President Donald Trump always played with the white pieces. He was unpredictable; he was blunt; he took decisive actions.

His foreign policy had clear objectives: to boost American military strength while bringing U.S. troops home; to build U.S. energy independence; and to leave global agreements that hurt American interests, while seeking more advantageous deals.

When Trump left office, albeit before he had hoped to do so, he left his successor: a plan to withdraw from Afghanistan, before the summer “fighting season”; sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and negotiations to include China in renewals of the New START nonproliferation treaty; sanctions that were destabilizing the Iranian regime, and limiting its global reach; an expanding set of Middle East peace deals in the Abraham Accords; and quiet on the Korean Peninsula.

Biden — to use a word he often threw at Trump — squandered that bequest. He delayed the withdrawal from Afghanistan, initially postponing it to Sep. 11, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; he removed sanctions on Russia and gave it a renewed New START treaty; he sought talks with Iran toward a new nuclear deal, which the regime dragged out for months; he damaged relations with the Saudis, slowing the advance of peace in the region; and he dropped the ball on North Korea.

In effect, Biden decided to play with the black pieces. Thus, instead of a controlled withdrawal in Afghanistan, the pullout became a deadly evacuation; instead of forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to worry about what NATO would do, the U.S. practically invited him to invade Ukraine; instead of pressuring Iran, the U.S. gave it months to enrich more uranium; instead of peace in the Middle East, there is Houthi and Palestinian terror; and North Korea is back to launching missiles.

Biden tried to claim that he was reviving America’s global leadership, through diplomacy. “America is back!” he proclaimed, repeatedly. But America is not “back” — quite the opposite: the U.S. has left Central Asia; the Saudis and Emiratis no longer take Biden’s calls; and the administration abandoned agreements with Central America to control the flow of migrants. China and Russia have taken advantage of Biden’s perceived weakness, which is as enticing to enemies as it is troubling to allies.

In Ukraine, Biden has neither a plan for victory nor a role in diplomacy. His stated goal was to limit U.S. involvement, which Russia took as an invitation to invade. Today, NATO is unified because of Putin’s audacity, not Biden’s supposed leadership.

President Barack Obama also took a passive approach to a foreign policy — a doctrine that his advisers called “leading from behind.” But in Obama’s case, it was a deliberate strategy, based on the conviction that the U.S. was a malevolent power.

Biden’s foreign policy does little more than enact talking points that Democrats used to attack the last administration, without regard for their consequences.

For example: Trump overlooked Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi; therefore Biden must dump the Saudis as allies, and de-list the Houthis as terrorists. Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords, which achieved nothing; therefore we must rejoin them, and cut domestic oil and gas production, boosting dependence on Russia.

Trump pulled out of the Iran deal, therefore it must be restored. There is barely any pretense from the Biden administration that the Iran deal will actually achieve anything, least of all deter the regime from pursuing its ambition to become a nuclear power. Nor is there any thought given to how the talks — which depend on Russia as an intermediary — might affect other issues, such as the war in Ukraine. The main selling point of the deal is that it will delay the inevitable by a few months.

Trump’s “America First” was a strategy, and delivered real achievements. Obama’s “Leading from Behind” was a strategy, albeit one that failed.

Biden’s “America Is Back” is not a strategy; it’s a posture, largely crafted for domestic consumption.

So we are stuck, with Biden, playing the black pieces, hoping, at best, that Putin will blunder. And as grandmaster Garry Kasparov might explain, only the Russians, among chess-playing nations, have a tradition of winning with the black pieces.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.