Gil Barndollar
Senior Fellow
Areas of expertise: American foreign policy and national security, Middle East policy, grand strategy, international relations, maritime security, counterinsurgency, anti-terrorism
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Gil Barndollar is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities and a senior research fellow at the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship. From 2009 to 2016 he served as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps, deploying to Afghanistan twice, to Guantanamo Bay, and to the Persian Gulf. Gil has written for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Los Angeles Times, and U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, and has appeared on CNN, Fox News, the BBC World Service, and other national and international media outlets. He holds an AB in history from Bowdoin College and MPhil and PhD degrees in history from the University of Cambridge.
Media Clips
Research and writing
The Biden Administration’s forthcoming Global Posture Review—a top-to-bottom examination of all overseas U.S. military bases and deployments—should jumpstart a needed shift in U.S. strategic thinking away from the leftover assumptions of the Cold War and the War on Terror. Through balancing and burden sharing in Asia, major troop reductions in Europe and the Middle East, and limiting presence deployments to preserve military readiness, the United States can realign its military posture to sustainably confront the challenges ahead.
The U.S. should not keep troops in Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS’s remnants. ISIS’s loss of territory left its fighters operating in small groups, struggling to survive, and devastated its capacity to plot attacks. Local forces—Syria, Iraq, Kurds, Iran, and Shia militias—eagerly attack ISIS’s remnants. Misgovernment and sectarian divides might allow ISIS or some other radical Sunni jihadist entity to regain capability. But deployed U.S. forces do little to prevent that and risk sparking war with Iran or another state. If an ISIS dangerous to the U.S. does re-emerge, U.S. airstrikes and local allies can again target it.
The U.S. was right to punish and deter Al-Qaeda and the Taliban for harboring them following 9/11. But after swift victory, Washington transformed the mission to an unnecessary, costly nation-building effort. The outlines of a U.S.-Taliban agreement rest on four pillars: (1) the Taliban renounce Al-Qaeda and all terrorists, (2) a cease-fire covering all parties, (3) the Taliban agree to negotiate with the Afghan government, and (4) the U.S. military will draw down its forces. But only a full withdrawal is necessary for U.S. security, and that requires no agreement with the Taliban.
