WASHINGTON (AP): For reasons it is called the loneliest job in the world.
Surrounded by all that a superpower can offer and watched by everyone, President Joe Biden shone the weight of a lonely man as he faced the deadly end of the American effort in Afghanistan in recent days and tried keep the focus on what, for him, is the conclusion.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said as the death toll rose in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, “it was time to end a 20-year war.”
The need for crisis-driven leadership reaches all presidents. Now, on several fronts at once, it has come to him quickly.
Following the suicide bombing of Kabul that killed 13 U.S. soldiers and more than 170 Afghans, U.S. military forces are vying to get citizens, aligned Afghans, and themselves out of the country before Biden’s deadline on Tuesday. .
Biden encountered a real-time crisis that surpassed the platitudes he offered when he ran for office and the first months of his presidency. “America is back,” he likes to say. But in Afghanistan, after the longest war in U.S. history, America is clearly leaving.
The United States is marching with Taliban forces that have long struggled to regain control and with a subsidiary of the Islamic State group – an organization declared defeated by the last US president – that reaffirms its virulence in the devastation in Kabul airport.
Goodwill ran through Biden during his first six months or so, when he scored points with the public and much of the world simply for not being Donald Trump. The United States also appeared on the brink of victory over the pandemic. Vaccine supplies increased, cases fell in response, and even Republicans gave Biden a measure of credit.
Those days seem like a distant memory. Criticism rained down on him, with Republicans blaming him for the disaster in Kabul and even Democrats falling for it for the first time on a major issue.
Asked if Biden feels frustrated or has a sense of resignation to the turmoil of the moment, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said “right now there’s not much time for self-reflection.”
For Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis, the bloody scenes the world is watching from Kabul are not the result of poor planning for the evacuation or incompetence of the United States, but simply of defeat.
“It seems to me that we are seeing something happen that was inevitable once we intervened,” he said. “There is no memory here. That’s what happens when you lose a war. “
Presidents are defined by how they handle crises and Biden now faces more than one, which requires urgent attention.
As the drama unfolds in Kabul, the delta variant of the coronavirus threatens to undo much of the progress its administration had made during the first six months. In addition, it has had to deal with deadly flooding in Tennessee, devastating fires in the west, a hurricane that grazed the east coast, and relief efforts for the Haiti earthquake.
Last week, the Supreme Court also suffered setbacks. First, the judges ordered reinstatement of a Trump-era policy that forced immigrants seeking asylum in the United States to wait in Mexico, often in appalling conditions.
Then, as pandemic-era housing assistance is blocked to state and local governments, the conservative majority in the court blocked the Biden administration to impose a temporary ban on evictions, leaving perhaps 3, 5 million people at risk of losing the home.
For now, Afghanistan is eclipsing everything. Biden said “the dollar stops with me,” however, he has alternately blamed Afghan forces and his government for giving in to the Taliban and Trump for negotiating a bad deal for the exit of the United States.
Still, it was Biden’s option to execute the U.S. withdrawal requested in this agreement, albeit a few months later, and it will be measured by the consequences of having done so. One of his fundamental reasons for the presidency is being verified: that four decades of experience at the highest levels of government prepared him to face the pressures of the office with experienced competencies.
Cal Jillson, presidential historian at Southern Methodist University, said there was no good way out of Afghanistan.
“You can’t stick the disassembly,” he said. “Unless he wins, he will surely be ugly. And we didn’t win. “
He said that “while Trump reached a deeply flawed agreement with the Taliban, it was Biden who pledged to implement that plan, with minor revisions.” Biden said, “along with the public, he wanted to get out of Afghanistan, the sooner the better. Nobody likes going out ”.
Crises can forever tarnish the legacies of presidents or they can happen.
President Bill Clinton in his first year endured the bloody tragedy of the Battle of Mogadishu, Somalia, while President George W. Bush had the false predicate of weapons of mass destruction to start a war with Iraq. President John F. Kennedy survived the embarrassment of Cuba’s invasion of the Bay of Pigs. Trump survived himself.
At least one of these presidents was a history student enough to know that the loneliness of the office, of which William Howard Taft spoke when he left office in 1913, would come with the territory.
“He’s alone, at the top, in the loneliest workplace in the world,” Kennedy said at a 1960 Democratic dinner. before his election that fall.
“He cannot share this power, he cannot delegate it, he cannot postpone it. … He alone has to decide which areas we stand for, not Congress, the military or the CIA. And, certainly, not a general besieged on an island.
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Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.