Can the World Unsee What It Has Seen?

As the world turns, today it is turning against Joe Biden. Witness the sober analysis offered by Edward Luce in the Financial Times. 

Biden will undoubtedly attract far more of the blame than he deserves for the closing chapter of America’s longest war. The defeat to the Taliban was a whole-of-government, bipartisan, multiple-presidency operation. But Biden’s name will always be associated with the manner of America’s pullout.

On Thursday, he dug a deeper hole for himself. As the US evacuation was accelerating, Biden vowed that “America will not be intimidated”. He promised the US would strike back against the terrorists “at our time, at the place we choose and the moment of our choosing”. The gulf between this boilerplate rhetoric and the reality of a retreating superpower will be hard for White House aides to spin away.

Weigh the last sentence. Luce derogates Biden’s tough guy rhetoric and contrasts it with the image of a retreating superpower. True enough, the Biden team will try to spin it away, but they are no longer fooling anyone.

Luce remarks that Biden looked like he did not know what he was doing. No one should be surprised, and yet, those who imagined that Biden was suffering from a lisp will be shocked by reality:

As Biden addressed the nation, it was hard to escape the conclusion that he was not the master of his brief. The president, whose life has been marred by personal tragedy, welled up when he spoke of the sense of loss that the families of the dead US servicemen would feel. He mentioned his son, Beau, a former US army officer who served in Iraq and died of brain cancer in 2015. “You get the feeling like you’re being sucked into a black hole in the middle of your chest. There’s no way out,” Biden said of the grief that will hit the families. The poignancy was enhanced by the fact that Biden might have been speaking about what it is like to be in his job now. The political black hole beckons.

Is Biden facing a political black hole? Luce concludes:

There can be no unseeing what the US and the world has seen.