One year into its tenure, the Biden administration has made foreign policy and national security a major cornerstone of its agenda. The exit from Afghanistan, perhaps the administration’s most controversial action, brought mixed reviews from several camps within the D.C. foreign policy establishment. Ongoing negotiations with Iran and Russia may yield significant developments in the international balance of power and regional politics, yet much remains to be seen on their outcomes.

On the most recent episode of Press the Button, Matt Duss, foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the former president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, offered his assessments of the first year of the administration’s foreign and national security policies.

“This was a courageous decision,” Duss told co-host Tom Collina, referencing the administration’s exit from Afghanistan. “No one can deny that the images we saw as the withdrawal happened in August were painful, no one should diminish the human costs of what we saw,” he added. “Ending a war is ugly—and not just ending a war but losing one. And that’s what we are talking about in Afghanistan: after twenty years of a failed nation-building project, an initial victory against the Taliban turned into a twenty-year nation building project that failed at the cost of enormous sums of money and thousands and thousands of lives.”

In Duss’s view, the Biden administration’s commitment to follow through on the withdrawal from Afghanistan is a welcome deviation from a deeply entrenched foreign policy status quo in Washington that upholds and maintains the project of American empire.

“There is no longer any doubt how deeply emotionally, professionally, and intellectually—and sort of religiously—invested so much of the Washington establishment, and not just the foreign policy establishment but our media elite and our political elite, is in this project of empire,” Duss argued. In making his point, Duss highlighted the lack of media coverage on the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan caused by U.S. sanctions. “Compare the coverage of the withdrawal to the vanishingly little coverage that has being given to this catastrophe—it just kind of gives the lie to the claim that ‘we’re just concerned about Afghan civilians.’”

In other areas of the Biden foreign policy agenda, Duss sees significant room for improvement. Like many, he views the bloated size of the defense budget—the recent NDAA approved by President Biden allocates $768 billion to defense and defense-related costs, an increase from the last NDAA approved by President Trump—as an area that needs serious reform, but also one that would benefit from a more nuanced debate among foreign policy circles.

“If we are talking about seriously cutting our defense budget, as we should, that requires a real debate about what strategic choices we are willing to make: what do we actually want to achieve in the world? And that is one we are inching towards, but we are not close to being ready yet,” Duss noted.

As the administration enters its second year in office, the window of opportunity to enact transformative change to our foreign and national security policies will only grow smaller. With this in mind, Duss sees a growing responsibility among the progressive foreign policy community to maintain the pressure on the administration and challenge this status quo: “Those of us who want to promote a more progressive, or at least less interventionist and less militaristic approach to the world, have to do much, much better in our ability and our capacity to defend these moves.”

The entire interview with Matt Duss is available here on Press the Button.

Harry Tarpey is the Foundation Relations Officer at Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation.

Image: Reuters.