Yesterday an interesting exchange happened when Biden’s State Dept. spox claimed that they hadn’t canceled any international agreements that were made under Trump, telling reporter Matt Lee that he’d be hard pressed to name one.
Just for context, the initial question from Matt Lee being addressed here is this one (not in video):
The argument that you guys inherited an agreement with the Taliban that the previous administration concluded and that you had no choice, I don’t understand that either. This administration inherited plenty from the previous administration that it absolutely reversed. Are you saying that you’re not – you have a – you’re not confident in your negotiating skills that you could have renegotiated with – that you couldn’t have renegotiated a deal with the Taliban and that the – and are you saying that the President, in fact, didn’t want to take troops out, didn’t want to withdraw?
That’s an interesting question. Here’s how Ned Price responds:
The State Dept. spox claims that the importance of the durability of international agreements and American foreign policy across different administrations is something Biden believes in or something, which is apparently their excuse for why Biden is pulling troops out even though they claim Biden doesn’t want to do so.
That’s when Matt Lee accepts the challenge to name international agreements Biden has already broken, and starts naming them:
“How about the Geneva protocol on the anti-abortion stuff? … How about the agreements with the Northern Triangle, with Mexico and the Northern Triangle? Those are international agreements that you guys jettisoned. I mean, you just challenged me to come up with an international agreement that the previous administration signed that you guys have walked away from, and I just gave you, I think, three.”
Spox Ned Price’s reaction is amazing. While Lee is naming these international agreements, Price is completely at a loss for words.
Price finally responds (not in the video), claiming that they had no choice but to leave the Afghanistan agreement in tact:
But this administration also understands the importance of when the United States signs its name and gives its word in the context of a formal international agreement, especially one where the stakes are profound for American – the American people, including our service members, deployed service members, that’s something that we take very seriously. So the idea that we could have done away with the U.S.-Taliban agreement and that American service members could have remained in Afghanistan on May 1st, as they were on April 30th as they were on December 31st of 2020, is just not something that would have been feasible given where we were.
The fact that the Taliban are already taking over cities there says something about how they view the agreements they’ve made with the US.
At the end of the day, I’ve often wondered why we are even still in Afghanistan and I’m all for wanting to bring our troops back home. If all of our training of the Afghan forces to keep the Taliban under control doesn’t work now, it’s probably never going to work.
