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Out From Under the Leaking Roof and Into the Rain

If this is foreign policy for America’s middle class, who is it not for?

Words: Laicie Heeley
Pictures: Marc Johns / Cast from Clay
Date:

One of Biden’s biggest foreign policy moves so far has been sticking with Trump’s Afghanistan withdrawal plan. The move comes after 20 years of war, which killed more than 241,000 people on all sides according to Brown University estimates. But how does it fit into Biden’s foreign policy for the middle class? And what does our exit mean for the lives of middle-class Afghan women who fear a Taliban resurgence?

Listen and subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get your podcasts to receive a new episode every two weeks.

GUESTS: Metra Mehran, Institute of Diplomacy at Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kabul; James Traub, Foreign Policy

ADDITIONAL READING:

Biden’s ‘Foreign Policy for the Middle Class’ Is a Revolution, James Traub, Foreign Policy.

The People We’re Leaving Behind in Afghanistan, Steve Coll, The New Yorker.

US Troops Are Packing Up, Ready or Not, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Najim Rahim and Fatima Faizi, New York Times.

Author bio

Laicie Heeley

Editor in Chief

Laicie Heeley is the founding CEO of Inkstick Media, where she serves as Editor in Chief of the foreign policy magazine Inkstick and Executive Producer and Host of the PRX- and Inkstick-produced podcast, Things That Go Boom. Heeley’s reporting has appeared on public radio stations across America and the BBC, where she’s explored global security issues including domestic terrorism, disinformation, nuclear weapons, and climate change. Prior to launching Inkstick, Heeley was a Fellow with the Stimson Center’s Budgeting for Foreign Affairs and Defense program and Policy Director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Her publications include work on sanctions, diplomacy, and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, along with the first full accounting of US counterterrorism spending after 9/11.

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