Washington folklore states that a foreign conflict cannot make or break a president unless it dominates on polling day. It’s certainly true that voters have short time horizons and Biden’s saving grace might be that the crisis in Afghanistan has occurred early in his presidency. Biden started his term in the White House by proclaiming that ‘America is back!’ but a withdrawal from a foreign conflict makes his administration look anything but an America in ascendancy. To avoid losing credibility, it will be important for Biden to frame his narrative and his decision to leave Afghanistan in an easy to swallow pill for the American people.
As our blog post points out, a narrative can ‘provide a protective power that aids an organisation in a crisis’: this is true in both a political and a corporate context. Biden’s narrative needs to achieve three key things - provide context and create emotion, be credible and be forward looking - if it is to succeed in keeping the American people on side. Let’s explore each of these aspects in turn.
In terms of providing context and emotional engagement, the best narratives are ones that are shared, and a story with emotional engagement can directly involve your audience. Biden has certainly tailored his language to remind Americans of the shared loss suffered through decades of conflict. In his address a day after US troops left Kabul, Biden asked with great rhetorical flourish: ‘How many generations of American sons and daughters would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war, when Afghan troops will not?’ Here, Biden’s words not only hit home emotionally around the sense of loss perpetuated through generations, but they also create a feeling of shared grief.
A sense of credibility is critical in a narrative as it provides trust, and in a crisis trust is paramount. Throughout his address, Biden looked to push the blame for the disastrous withdrawal onto previous presidents and the Afghan government (among many others). Blaming previous presidents is especially contentious since Biden has been embroiled in decisions made by previous administrations and notably even supported Obama’s position when he was Vice President. By rejecting personal responsibility for previous mistakes Biden risks looking dishonest and hypocritical which in turn will affect his trustworthiness. Biden stated that intervention was ‘never supposed to be [about] creating a unified centralised democracy’. Yet, in 2003, he also said that the ‘alternative to nation building is chaos, a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug traffickers and terrorists’. Playing the blame game, especially when Biden was involved in the conflict as Vice President, is a risky strategy that could damage the credibility of his presidency.
In a crisis, effective narratives should look to the future, as this allows a fresh start and a move away from the failures of the past. In fact, there is some evidence of Biden being forward looking in his narrative. His speech details how America cannot get bogged down in a foreign conflict whilst Russia and China gain in strength and that America must move away from ‘nation building’. Here, Biden explains his broader view on American intervention and foreign policy in the future and creates a narrative that helps people understand why he made the decision to leave Afghanistan. What is perhaps hindering the effectiveness of his message is that looking into the future is fundamentally at odds with the backward nature of blaming others for the crisis in the first place. Additionally, Biden’s position of moving on from America’s role in nation building is incompatible with his comments in 2003. Biden’s message could benefit from reconciling these contradictions. By avoiding blame and even admitting a personal change from his previous perspective on foreign policy, he can break away from past mistakes and help his audience understand his ultimate goal in making the decision to withdraw.
Overall, Biden has successfully built context and emotion into his narrative over the withdrawal from Afghanistan. To make his message even stronger, Biden should do away with looking backwards at past failures and continue to focus on the future and his wider belief that American foreign policy must adapt to a changing world. If Biden continues to do this people will understand better his decision and are more likely to support him on the journey that he’s on and, when it comes to polling day, he will hope this message will stick in voters’ memories more than the crisis itself.
