Sometimes, it’s helpful for American presidents to have a doctrine, as they help guide policy and sharpen both strategy and messaging. Former President George W. Bush sharply defined his presidency on the doctrine of “either you’re with us, or you’re against us,” opening a space for unilateral military action.
When U.S. President Barack Obama was first sworn in, expectations that a departure from the Bush Administration’s obsession with the Middle East were imminent. The argument was that the United States had paid too much attention to its military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and too little was spent on Asia, where an emerging China was now developing islands by hand and attempting to influence weaker Southeast Asian states to do its bidding.
The ancient Chinese strategy game of weiqi, or Go, involves a competition in which the player who occupies the most board space wins. Logic would dictate that in Afghanistan, a Go strategy by the Taliban would have resulted in a decisive victory, but that would be absolutely wrong. Had the Taliban pursued a Go strategy, holding the countryside, where some three-quarters of the Afghan population lives, it would not have succeeded as spectacularly as it did in seizing power following the U.S. withdrawal earlier this month.
For most of its existence, the Quad has been conceptualized as an informal entity with objectives primarily aimed at containing China and maintaining the long-standing rules-based international order. For India, Japan, Australia, and the United States these interests are firmly rooted in the implementation of a cohesive, salient Indo-Pacific policy.
After more than two months of negotiations, the Afghan peace process has resumed in Doha, Qatar, with the Afghan government and the Taliban having finalized a set of procedures and principles that will govern the process going forward. With the business of finite details out of the way, the second stage of the peace process will focus on the creation of a political path to a nationwide ceasefire, and ultimately a lasting political settlement.
In the U.S. Senate Chamber on January 6, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas led a futile Republican effort to challenge the 2020 election results that gave Joe Biden the White House and caused President Donald Trump to be the first incumbent president since George H.W. Bush in 1992 to lose reelection. Cruz argued that the counting of the Electoral College votes should be paused so that a bipartisan commission could be formed to investigate voting irregularities, similar to that which occurred back in 1877.