Background: President-Elect Biden and the Kurds
Today, we’ll be discussing President-elect Joe Biden. Joe Biden will enter office with the most notable pro-Kurdish record of any previous American president. He was the first American politician to visit the Kurdish region, Iraqi Kurdistan in 2002, where he spoke to the parliament and gave his pledge for American support to the Kurdish cause. His efforts in Iraq were integral to the formation of the modern KRG, what was advocacy for Syrian Kurds was essential in shaping American policy toward Syria. Biden also made defense of the Kurds, a key part of his foreign policy platform in the recent presidential election. Under President Trump though, the United States notably scaled back itsPro-Kurdish policies. It sat by idling during the 2017 independence referendum when Baghdad and Iran invaded Kirkuk and other Kurdish majority provinces. In October of 2019, Trump gave Erdogan a green light to invade Kurdish held Northern Syria, resulting in an ongoing humanitarian crisis while provoking significant bipartisan backlash within the United States, catching the wide attention of an American public that usually ignores foreign policy decisions.
While we have good reason to expect Biden will continue his pro-Kurdish outlook. We must also look at real politics and ask, will a Biden presidency simply opt to return to the pre-Trump status quo? Will his office seek to further advocate for the Kurdish community? Some are not so convinced that Biden has true ideological commitments for foreign policy. Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute wrote this summer that Joe Biden has been wrong a lot, on foreign policy and defense policy. This year’s presumptive democratic presidential nominee voted against the 1991 Gulf war in which the United States and abroad multinational coalition quickly achieved their goal and [voted] in favor of the 2003 Iraq war and regretted both votes. Years and hostilities, he opposed the troop surges that brought some stability to both Iraq and Afghanistan and even insisted that the Taliban per se is not our enemy.
He argued for carving Iraq into sectarian states and even as the Iraqis voted for cross-sectarian political lists. And he opposed the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. These stands suggest not only that he lacks intra-philosophy of how to use foreign military force effectively, but also that his instincts on when to use it are often faulty. So which Biden will we see? There is much for Biden to fix in the next four years, how he chooses to go forward with his Kurdish policy, will have profound ramifications for Washington’s Middle East policy. Indeed one could make the argument that Washington’s Kurdish policy will be a microcosm of how its worldwide foreign policy will move forward from the Trump era. The Kurdish cause has never been more popular among the American public. Will the next four years choose to be a definitive moment in the history of Kurdistan?