[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Tensions at the Ukraine-Russian border intensified over the weekend, prompting French President Emmanuel Macron to step up his role. Macron travels to Russia on Monday to help defuse the rising tensions as a hundred thousand Russian troops stationed at the border continue to fuel the anxiety of the US and other NATO allies.

The Ukraine crisis is not the only international news dominating headlines. At the end of last week, President Biden announced that US special forces had conducted a raid in the countryside near the Syrian-Turkish border that resulted in the death of the current leader of ISIS, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, or sometimes called Hajji Abdullah.

Joe Biden: We all remember the gut-wrenching stories, mass slaughters that wiped out entire villages. Thousands of women and young girls sold into slavery. Rape used as a weapon of war. Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more.

Melissa Harris-Perry: To avoid civilian casualties, Biden said the administration opted to dispatch US special operation forces rather than use missiles or drones.

Joe Biden: Knowing that this terrorist had chosen to surround himself with families including children, we made a choice to pursue a special forces raid at a much greater risk to our own people rather than targeting him with an airstrike. We made this choice to minimize civilian casualties.

Melissa Harris-Perry: US officials say there were no American casualties in the attack, but the ISIS leader detonated an explosive that killed both his family and himself before special forces can reach him. According to the White Helmets, a Syrian civil defense group, rescuers who were on the ground after US forces left said they found the bodies of at least 13 people, including six children and four women. Now, all of this came just a week after Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin pledged to do more to limit civilian casualties caused by the US military.

Lloyd Austin: I know personally how hard we work to avoid civilian harm and to abide by the law of armed conflict. I've also said that we need to do better and we will.

Melissa Harris-Perry: A year into Biden's presidency, we're going to start today by looking at his strategy for foreign policy. What is The Biden Doctrine? Joining me now is Robin Wright, columnist at The New Yorker and a Wilson Center Distinguished Fellow. As always, thanks for being here, Robin.

Robin Wright: Great to be with you, Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's start by talking about the special forces attack on the ISIS leader. What happened in that case?

Robin Wright: This was important for many reasons. One, it comes about six months after the US withdrew from Afghanistan appeared to lose its longest war and a militant Islamist group took over Afghanistan, a strategic property in South Asia. The United States was very careful in this raid and used special forces as you pointed out because it wanted to avoid the heavy civilian casualties that had resulted from the US withdrawal in Afghanistan. It was a raid that lasted two hours. It went in, Hajji Abdullah as they call him blew himself up very early in the operation.

His deputy, however, on the second floor fought alongside his wife against the US forces. They were killed. The United States took in bullhorns and called on people within the building to move out. They were trying to prevent the deaths of children, and they claimed to have evacuated 10 people, including eight children. It was a very concise military operation. It did, however, draw in another group. The US believes this is a group that was affiliated with Al Qaeda.

This is an area of Turkey up in the Northwest corner where both Turkish-backed fighters and rebels with an Al-Qaeda faction are based, and they were drawn to this site, and the US open fire and killed two of them as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay. I want to play-- this is a little longer, but I think it's worth replaying. I want to listen here for a moment to NPR's White House Correspondent Ayesha Rascoe. She's asking some follow questions to the White house Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, about this question of who is responsible for those civilian casualties during this raid. Let's take a listen.

Ayesha Rascoe: Will there be any evidence or release to support the idea? I know the US has put out its statement that they've detonated the bomb themselves, but will the US provide any evidence because there may be people that are skeptical of the events that took place and what happened to the civilians?

Jen Psaki: Skeptical of the US military's assessment when they went and took out the leader of ISIS, that they are not providing accurate information and ISIS is providing accurate information?

Ayesha Rascoe: Not ISIS, but I mean the US has not always been straightforward about what happens with civilians. That is a fact.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay. Obviously, there's a little bit of tension in that moment, but I'm wondering here, Robin, is this a false choice, you either believe the US or you believe ISIS? I think clearly, there are reasons to always ask questions when civilians die in this kind of thing.

Robin Wright: Absolutely. The White Helmets, which is a rescue group not affiliated with the government, made its own claim, its own calculations. One of the notable things about this US operation is that unlike the attack against Osama bin Laden in his hideaway in Pakistan 11 years ago, the United States opted to leave all of the bodies behind. It took fingerprints of Hajji Abdullah and DNA to confirm that he indeed was the leader of ISIS who they were targeting. Unless you're on-site, it's very hard to tell, but you're absolutely right. In these tense times, in these controversial operations, the long and very rocky record of US credibility will come up time and again.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's talk about that moment or this question of US credibility of what it means for our broader global position and how President Biden, and obviously having spent eight years as the vice president with Barack Obama and then previous to that, important role in the US Senate, how is this concern about our global credibility impacting the creation of this thing that is now The Biden Doctrine?

Robin Wright: Well, during the Trump administration particularly, but under other presidents as well, George Bush and the excuse of going to war in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction which turned out not to be there, there is this problem of, is it true what the United States is saying? I think this will be a recurrent theme going forward. It's particularly a concern today in the midst of negotiations with Iran's nuclear program, with dealing with Ukraine, and of course, there's still ongoing questions about what happened when we withdrew from Afghanistan and who is responsible for the deaths of the Americans and the deaths of civilians in a US drone attack.

The real dangers of using these high-tech weapons is that you can see something that looks like it could be a bomb because it has a great deal of heat, it's inside and leads to conclusions that aren't always true. In this case, in Afghanistan, several children were killed. It's anguishing, it's anguishing, and it's unfortunately part of war, and the US certainly has a flawed record.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, to the issues around weapons of mass destruction, and of course, what President Biden himself has said has been this loss of credibility under the Trump years, but I guess I'm also wondering specifically about the critiques that emerge on the left during the Obama years about, for example, the use of drones.

Robin Wright: Well, the roots of drones is very controversial and will continue to be because they often target individuals and there are others around, but the danger is do you want to send in troops where there is the danger of hostile fire and losing human life? Drones have been a kind of expeditious or efficient weapon because they have intelligence capabilities as well and can identify where people are in a building.

The tragedy of war is that killing is involved, and I'm always for diplomacy. I think we face a really huge challenge right now in Ukraine because if diplomacy doesn't work, there could be a lot of killing and a lot of questions about who's credible, whose weapons caused what deaths?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's go back one more-- I promise we're going to get to Ukraine, but I want to go back to Syria a bit. Again, back to the Obama administration for a moment in here. Because of the question of Syria, President Obama took great critique at that moment about this question of the bright red line, and then what is allowed and what isn't. The US clearly, after 20 years in Afghanistan, seems to have lost an appetite, if there ever was one, for these forever wars. How does this affect impact how President Biden is thinking about addressing this ongoing, as you said, loss of life in the civil war in Syria?

Robin Wright: The civil war in Syria has basically been almost forgotten in the United States. We have a very small residual force of somewhere under 900 people who are there to try to help our US back allies, the Syrian democratic forces who were instrumental in this raid.

They provide a lot of the ground intelligence, they provide almost all the manpower except when we send in small teams of special forces as we did in this case, but remember, this is a militia, and they've been stuck with tens of thousands of ISIS families and fighters in prisons and detention camps that four nations simply won't take back because they don't want their own ISIS at home, and so this group has been forced to keep them. The US has very little interest in having a major military footprint in the Middle East. President Biden is fully intent in moving to China.

He keeps getting distracted by whether it's Russia's tensions on Ukraine, or the kind of attack we saw a week before we went in to get the leader of ISIS when there was a prison break and there were over 3,000 ISIS fighters and 700 minors in this prison. There was a prison break, and it looked all of them might be freed. The US was sucked back in using airstrikes, having its troops offer advise and consent deploy.

They were deploying Bradley vehicles to try to prevent the exit because several of the ISIS fighters escaped. ISIS as a caliphate is over, but ISIS as a movement is not, and it has strong ideological appeal not only in the Middle East, and so the Biden administration is trying to multitask with many areas but giving its heaviest focus to another part of the world that is reflective of the 21st century, and it's really hard to make that pivot.

Melissa Harris-Perry: President Xi Jinping of China met with Putin in Beijing ahead of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics. What are the implications there?

Robin Wright: It's a very important meeting, and I think historians will look back on it as the beginning of a different kind of alignment in global politics. The two men issued a sweeping 5,000-word statement that declared a new era in the global order and, at least in the short term, endorsed each of their territorial ambitions: Putin in Ukraine and Xi Jinping in Taiwan. It also was sweeping in the sense that it challenges the United States as a global power.

It challenges NATO as a cornerstone of international security. It took on liberal democracy as a model for the world. In one of the most striking declarations, it pronounces that friendship between these states has no limit. There is no forbidden area of cooperation. This is a moment where the two leaders basically joined forces against the United States and the West. It was a startling statement I think that has taken many experts who've long followed the trajectory and ties between these two European and Asian powers.

Agreements between Moscow and Beijing have in the past been laden with lofty if vague rhetoric that have faded into forgotten history, but this is a very new and detailed agreement that is not the usual collection of tropes. It's a pledge to stand shoulder to shoulder against the United States and the West ideologically but also militarily.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you tell me, what is the false flag operation that US officials have said Russia is engaging in right now?

Robin Wright: Russia is, as you know, amassed on the Ukrainian border, and it also has a very heavy presence during exercises in neighboring Belarus. The United States believes that Putin is intent on invading anytime over the next three or four weeks, and that to provide the excuse, he is engaged in creating propaganda videos to show that he had been provoked, that there were already operations. The videos reportedly will show men bleeding and damaged facilities that had come under purported artillery attack. Of course, none of this has happened, but this is the kind of thing that would create an excuse for Putin to say we were provoked, and now we're going to invade.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, so it's a bit of a wag the dog. I do want to just point out again, we had exchange that wasn't that dissimilar. As what we was listening to earlier with Ayesha Roscoe from NPR, this is AP Diplomatic Writer Matt Lee pushing back on information from US officials. I just want to take a listen to this as well.

Speaker 7: We told you a few weeks ago that we have information indicating Russia also has already prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in Eastern Ukraine, so that, Matt, to your question, is an action that Russia has already taken.

Matt Lee: Well, it's an action that you say that they have taken, but you have shown no evidence to confirm that. I'm going to get to the next question here which is, what is the evidence that they-- This is like crisis actors really? This is like Alex Jones territory you're getting into now. What evidence do you have to support the idea that there is some propaganda film in the making?

Melissa Harris-Perry: What do you make of this pushback?

Robin Wright: Well, I think, first of all, we're a polarized nation, and people believe what they want. We don't seem to be able to come together at times of national concern whether they're at home or abroad, but there is this very difficult balance for any president. When you can visibly see a danger as we can with the amassing of Soviet or Russian troops on the border, there is a danger of how far do you go in putting the Russians on notice that we know what you're doing without exposing your intelligence.

Of course, with intelligence, there are boundaries because of exposing ways and means, but this is the same issue that came up with the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you know, "Prove it. Where are they?" I think the questions you'll see now and down the road as all of this plays out not only between the United States, Russia, and Ukraine, but I think just going forward in general, the United States has credibility problems within its own people, not just in convincing forward allies. Is this the kind of excuse that the questions are being asked that US wants to claim to be able to push back and unify the west against Putin?

Melissa Harris-Perry: When I think of president Biden's domestic strategy, he certainly has articulated a desire to heal precisely those kinds of riffs. Particularly, for example, if we think about in addressing the pandemic, to get to a point where Americans do feel a sense of certainly disagreement about all sorts of things politically and ideologically, but a basic sense of trust between government and its people.

When he articulates it, it is about less about bipartisanship and more about healing that rift with we the people. I'm wondering how much, if there is a single Biden Doctrine or a multi-pronged one that you've heard him articulate, where does that healing aspect around information, around a sense of trust with the American public and the government, how central is that to his doctrine?

Robin Wright: Well, it's central to the success of his doctrine because you have to have the American people and foreign allies behind you when you make major decisions about your own security and what you're going to do if you feel that the West, in general, and the United States specifically is being threatened. I think the challenge is that we have been, as a nation, under many presidencies so untruthful or so flawed that it's very hard for any president to say or do one thing that is going to heal that.

This is going to take I think many years in and potentially many presidencies, but it is true, we can see those pictures of the tanks and troops amassing on the border. I think the concern is what's happening that we can't see. Whether it's false flags, whether it's cyber attacks, what really is the intent of this? If it is what we fear, it would be the biggest war in Europe since World War II.

It seems a little unusual to think that you would have that many troops on Russia's borders just for an exercise. They have 70% of what they need now to actually invade Ukraine. Truth is everything to the success of any president's doctrine, and there has to be a sense of truth and faith in a president to win backing for what could be a very important operation in the fate of the world.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Robin Wright is a columnist at The New Yorker and a Wilson Center Distinguished Fellow. Robin, thank you so much for joining us on The Takeaway.

Robin Wright: Always great to be with you.

[music]

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.