Biden Stiffs NATO

Reviews are coming in fast, and they are not very favorable. The world entire, so it seems, is up in arms about the Biden administration’s ineptitude in Afghanistan. Precisely why anyone would be surprised is surprising.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized this morning that the Afghanistan operation was officially a NATO effort. That is, it was not a unilateral American operation. The point seems to have escaped Biden administration officials.

Afghanistan was an operation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and America’s NATO allies have invested significant blood and treasure in the conflict. That includes tens of thousands of troops over 20 years, more than 1,100 of whom were killed, and billions of dollars spent on the military operation and reconstruction effort.

Biden did not consult with NATO allies. He did not inform them in a timely fashion. He simply went it alone-- all the while insisting that Donald Trump was the enemy of international alliances. The irony is pungent indeed.

Yet everything about Mr. Biden’s Afghan withdrawal has been a slap to those allies. They didn’t want the U.S. to leave, but he did. The botched execution has left them scrambling to airlift out thousands of their citizens and thousands more Afghan translators and others who assisted each nation’s war effort.

The Prime Minister of Great Britain had to wait a day and half before he got Biden on the phone:

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.

Before putting this down to malice and incompetence, the more likely explanation is that Biden was incapable of holding an intelligent conversation. Perhaps his cognitive impairment is worse than anyone imagined. 

Yes, he did do an interview with ABC News, but the transcript exposes his many gaffes, blunders and mistakes. There were too many to attribute it to a stutter-- who, after all, was dumb enough to believe that Biden’s gaffes were the result of a stutter.

As for the rest of Great Britain, the reviews have been very bad, indeed:

U.K. Defense Minister Ben Wallace called the Trump -Biden agreement with the Taliban “a rotten deal,” in an interview this month after the Taliban started capturing chunks of the country. In Parliament on Wednesday, Tom Tugendhat —chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee who served in the British forces in Afghanistan—called Mr. Biden “shameful” for blaming the retreat on a supposedly pusillanimous Afghan military. Former Prime Minister Theresa May criticized Mr. Biden for following President Trump’s lead in a “unilateral” negotiation with the Taliban.

The reviews from the French government were no better:

French President Emmanuel Macron took considerable flak in 2019 for saying NATO is experiencing “brain death.” He warned that with or without President Trump in office, the U.S. was becoming a less reliable ally and argued that Europe would need to “reassess the reality of what NATO is in light of the commitment of the United States.” Mr. Biden has made him seem prescient, and the wonder is that Mr. Macron has been too polite this week to point it out. French leaders are now planning for the refugee crisis Paris fears Mr. Biden has unleashed on Europe.

Give it enough time and they will start missing Donald Trump.