Mr. Biden's Competence

Dan McLaughlin at National Review has written what may be the definitive article on the history, character and qualification of Joe Biden to be president of the United States. Here's his lede:

Joe Biden has badly, visibly bungled America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has compounded the problem with his sluggish and dishonest public statements. This has gone so badly that even people and institutions that are normally sympathetic to Biden and his party have noticed.

American allies have been appalled, and vocal about it. What is slowly dawning on people is that Biden’s critics were right about him all along. Not since James Buchanan has America had a president who came so prepared by experience for the job, yet had so little clue how to do it.

McLaughlin offers much about Biden that everyone knew, or should've known, but which didn't seem to matter to a lot of voters last November. Biden wasn't Trump, and he didn't send mean tweets, and that's apparently all that mattered to many Americans.

I'll reluctantly skip over McLaughlin's treatment of Biden's history and character and excerpt from what he writes about Afghanistan:

American allies have been aghast at this performance, given that we acted unilaterally and high-handedly in ending a collective NATO operation, and did so with little consultation with them.

In his Monday speech, Mr. Biden made only a glancing reference to NATO and none to America’s European allies in his account of the conflict. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly had to wait a day and a half after requesting a call with the President to get Mr. Biden on the phone.

The Washington Post, maybe the newspaper with the most important readership among the center-left Washington establishment, published a column on Thursday titled “Withdrawal from Afghanistan forces allies and adversaries to reconsider America’s global role”:

President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan has triggered a globe-spanning rethink of America’s role in the world, as European allies discuss their need to play a bigger part in security matters and Russia and China consider how to promote their interests in a Taliban-led Afghanistan. . . .

In the European Union, which held an emergency session of foreign ministers on Afghanistan on Tuesday, officials offered rare criticism of Washington for risking a flood of refugees to their borders and the return of a platform for terrorism in Central Asia. . . .

Germany’s conservative candidate to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel, Armin Laschet, on Tuesday called the withdrawal of forces “the greatest debacle that NATO has experienced since its foundation.”

Weren't we told during the campaign that Mr. Biden would heal the rift with NATO that President Trump had caused? In fact, as Mclaughlin states, it appears that Biden lied to our allies about his intentions:

President Joe Biden told key allies in June that he would maintain enough of a security presence in Afghanistan to ensure they could continue to operate in the capital following the main U.S. withdrawal, a vow made before the Taliban’s rapid final push across the country, according to a British diplomatic memo seen by Bloomberg.

Biden promised U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other leaders at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, England, that “critical U.S. enablers” would remain in place to keep Kabul safe following the drawdown of NATO forces, the note said. British officials determined the U.S. would provide enough personnel to ensure that the U.K. embassy in Kabul could continue operating.

Critics in the British Parliament were scathing on Biden’s “dishonour.” As the BBC summarized the reaction in the British press:

A number of papers also highlight anger at Joe Biden — with the Daily Telegraph headline: “Parliament holds the president in contempt”.

The BBC, hardly a redoubt of hawkish or right-wing sentiment, has been blasting away at Biden all week. North America editor Jon Sopel, for example, thundered:

The shambolic unravelling of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan comes from a yet to be written textbook of “how to lose at everything”.

Warnings hadn’t been heeded, intelligence was clearly totally inadequate, planning was lamentable, execution woeful. . . .

Did no-one think that it might have been better to have ordered the withdrawal for the dead of winter when Taliban forces weren’t there, poised to fill the vacuum? . . .

After the bewildering events of the past few days, how exactly is America back?

Politico found reactions in Europe to be something on the order of scales falling from their eyes:

Until Sunday, Europe thought Joe Biden was an expert on foreign policy. Now, the American president’s decision to allow Afghanistan to collapse into the arms of the Taliban has European officials worried he has unwittingly accelerated what his predecessor Donald Trump started: the degradation of the Western alliance and everything it is supposed to stand for in the world.

Across Europe, officials have reacted with a mix of disbelief and a sense of betrayal. Even those who cheered Biden’s election and believed he could ease the recent tensions in the transatlantic relationship said they regarded the withdrawal from Afghanistan as nothing short of a mistake of historic magnitude.

“I say this with a heavy heart and with horror over what is happening, but the early withdrawal was a serious and far-reaching miscalculation by the current administration,” said Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign relations committee. “This does fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West.”

Here's Clarissa Ward of CNN reporting from Kabul airport declaring Mr. Biden's withdrawal an utter failure of planning:

But at least he isn't Trump, and he doesn't even tweet at all. So he has that going for him.

You must read the rest of McLaughlin's essay at the link. It's an education that's well worth the ten minutes it takes.