The headline of the year, perhaps of the century, appeared on the website of nbc News on August 19, 2021. This was four days after the Taliban captured Kabul, forcing the Afghan president to flee the country and the United States to evacuate its embassy, and three days after President Biden’s address to the nation in which he said, “I do not regret my decision to end America’s war-fighting in Afghanistan.” Never mind that this was a fudge, one of many in the speech. “America’s war-fighting in Afghanistan” had for all practical purposes ended some time ago. What he had ended was America’s military presence in Afghanistan as a backstop and support for the Afghan national army, which everybody knew (or ought to have known) could hardly be expected to stand against the Taliban without it. To say that he had no regrets about that was tantamount to saying to hell with the Afghans, to hell with twenty years of American and allied military effort in Afghanistan, and to hell, especially, with all those, Afghan and non-Afghan, friends and enemies, who put their trust in America and America’s word. We’re out of here.

At the time, it seemed almost unbelievable that he could treat what was, by any reckoning, a national humiliation of the United States on a scale not seen in nearly half a century with such insouciance—even suggesting, by saying he had no regrets, that that humiliation was what he’d envisaged all along. It