A Long War and a Short Temper: A Bureaucratic Politics Analysis of the Trump Administration’s Policy in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made clear that he loathed the nation-building missions that previous administrations had initiated and continued; chief among them was the then 15-year-old war in Afghanistan. Despite his oft-stated desire to end the war, during his first year in office, Trump decided to maintain the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and added thousands more soldiers to the conflict. Later in his term, the U.S. signed a peace agreement with the Taliban and began a phased withdrawal in 2020. However, when Trump left office in January 2021, 2,500 U.S. soldiers remained in Afghanistan. To explain the gap between the President’s clearly stated preferences and U.S. policy, I employ the bureaucratic politics model of foreign policy analysis. I examine two crucial intra-administration debates over the future of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. The first occurred in 2017 when the new President ordered a comprehensive review of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. The second covers the period from 2018–2020, when the Administration pivoted to seeking a diplomatic solution to the conflict and debated the pace of U.S. withdrawals. In both instances, I find that members of the President’s national security team successfully persuaded the President that the political and strategic risks of a total withdrawal from Afghanistan were prohibitively high.