Bad Judgment and Biden’s Pentagon Colin Kahl is the wrong choice to be chief Defense strategist.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bad-judgment-and-bidens-pentagon-11615246787?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
Another Biden nominee with a record of intemperate tweets is at risk of sinking in the Senate, and the press is comparing him to Neera Tanden, the President’s withdrawn first pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Yet whoever replaces Ms. Tanden is unlikely to change the trajectory of the Biden Administration’s progressive policies.
The Pentagon nomination of Colin Kahl, a dogmatic proponent of the Iran nuclear deal, is another story. A no vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee could push the Administration toward a Mideast approach that better serves America’s national interest.
President Biden has tapped Mr. Kahl for undersecretary of defense for policy, one of the most important non-cabinet jobs in the federal government. While the Secretary of Defense handles high-level defense politics, and the deputy secretary manages the department day-to-day, the undersecretary plays the leading role setting strategy—including representing the department at National Security Council deputies meetings.
Mr. Kahl’s strategic Mideast misjudgments have been pronounced. In 2015 as Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Mr. Kahl argued for sanctions relief on Iran, declaring they “are not going to spend the vast majority of the money on guns, most of it will go to butter.” In the event, Tehran took advantage of the windfall to increase its financing for proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
Out of government Mr. Kahl relentlessly assailed the Trump Administration’s reorientation of Iran policy, tweeting in 2019 that “hawks” in Congress “won’t be satisfied until they get the war they’ve pushed for decades.” Democrat Joe Manchin, the swing vote on Armed Services who opposed the Iran deal and applauded President Trump’s 2018 withdrawal, might be interested in whether Mr. Kahl thinks he is a warmonger as well.
Mr. Kahl seems unable to see the strategic benefits to U.S. interests in containing Iran. He sees only apocalyptic risks. After the U.S. strike that killed Iranian terror commander Qasem Soleimani, who had the blood of thousands of Americans on his hands, Mr. Kahl’s reaction on Twitter was that “Trump has started a war with Iran in Iraq.” War never came.
When the U.S. decided to move its Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Mr. Kahl declared “Trump’s Jerusalem decision further isolates the US” and warned of a “third Intifada,” or Palestinian uprising. Yet the Embassy move strengthened America’s ties with its closest Middle Eastern ally. The Trump Administration’s wider Mideast rebalancing toward Israel and the Gulf states helped broker closer Arab-Israeli ties, culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords.
Mr. Kahl described the accords in his hearing as the “culmination of a set of trends, frankly, that have been in the region for about a decade.” Yet he doesn’t recognize how U.S. courtship of Iran can destabilize the region. He doesn’t seem to have revised his thinking on the 2015 nuclear agreement at all, though even some proponents of the deal acknowledge that the Trump Administration’s sanctions on Iran packed more punch than they thought possible.
Senators last week also pressed Mr. Kahl on the idea of a “no-first use” nuclear policy, which would damage the credibility of American deterrence and which Joe Biden endorsed when Mr. Kahl was his adviser. Mr. Kahl didn’t give a clear position in a written answer to the committee, though at the hearing he said he opposed it. One 2017 tweet also seems to suggest skepticism of America’s planned Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missile system.
Democratic administrations lean more on diplomacy and soft power than Republican administrations, and that’s clearly team Biden’s preference. But with the State Department stacked with liberal internationalists, and John Kerry as a cabinet-level climate envoy, it’s important for the Pentagon to provide a counter-perspective.
Mr. Kahl’s nomination is in jeopardy for bombastic tweets like his claim that “every Republican Senator” who supported arms sales to Saudi Arabia “shares ownership of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” But there are sound policy reasons for the Senate to exercise its advice and consent power to demand a more hard-headed strategic thinker for this crucial national-security post.
Comments are closed.
