Opinion: Bad judgment and the Biden Pentagon

President Biden chose Kahl as undersecretary of defense for politics, one of the most important non-ministerial positions in the federal government. While the Secretary of Defense deals with high-level defense policy and the deputy secretary runs the department on a day-to-day basis, the undersecretary plays the leadership role in defining the strategy – including representing the department at Security Council deputy meetings National.

Kahl’s strategic misunderstandings in the Middle East have been pronounced. In 2015, as Biden’s national security adviser, Kahl defended easing sanctions on Iran, declaring that they “will not spend the vast majority of money on weapons, most of it will go to butter”. At the event, Tehran took advantage of the windfall to increase funding for prosecutors in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Outside the government, Kahl relentlessly attacked the Trump administration’s reorientation of Iran’s policy, tweeting in 2019 that “hawks” in Congress “will not be satisfied until they get the war they’ve been pushing for decades.” Democrat Joe Manchin, the decisive vote by the Armed Services who opposed the Iran deal and applauded President Trump’s withdrawal in 2018, may be interested in whether Kahl thinks he is also a promoter of the war.

Kahl seems unable to see the strategic benefits to US interests in containing Iran. He sees only apocalyptic risks. After the US attack that killed Iranian terrorist commander Qasem Soleimani, who had the blood of thousands of Americans on his hands, Kahl’s reaction on Twitter was that “Trump started a war with Iran in Iraq”. The war never came.

When the United States decided to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Kahl declared that “Trump’s decision in Jerusalem further isolates the United States” and warned of a “third Intifada”, or Palestinian uprising. Even so, the Embassy’s action strengthened the United States’ ties with its closest ally in the Middle East. The Middle East’s broader rebalancing of the Trump administration towards Israel and the Gulf states helped to broker closer Arab-Israeli ties, culminating in the 2020 Abraham agreements.

Mr. Kahl described the agreements at his audience as “the culmination of a set of trends, frankly, that has been in the region for about a decade”. Even so, he does not recognize how US dating Iran can destabilize the region. He does not appear to have revised his thinking about the 2015 nuclear deal, although even some proponents of the deal recognize that the Trump administration’s sanctions on Iran have had more of an impact than they thought possible.

Last week, senators also put pressure on Kahl over the idea of ​​a “no use first” nuclear policy, which would undermine the credibility of American deterrence and which Joe Biden endorsed when Kahl was his adviser. Kahl did not give a clear position in a written response to the committee, although at the hearing he opposed it. A 2017 tweet also seems to suggest skepticism about America’s planned ground-based strategic deterrent missile system.

Democratic governments depend more on diplomacy and soft power than on Republicans, and this is clearly Biden’s preference. But with the State Department full of liberal internationalists and John Kerry as envoy to the cabinet-level climate, it is important for the Pentagon to provide a counter-perspective.

Kahl’s nomination is at risk for bombastic tweets as his claim that “every Republican senator” who supported arms sales to Saudi Arabia “shares the property of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”. But there are solid political reasons for the Senate to exercise its power of advice and consent to demand a more stubborn strategic thinker for this important national security post.