Put it down to a hyper-caffeinated media. A few weeks ago, Joe Biden’s presidency was widely hailed as a triumph. Coronavirus was in retreat. The US economy was roaring back. And Democrats looked on course to pass Biden’s ambitious economic bills by early autumn. Rash comparisons between Biden and Franklin Roosevelt were being bandied about. 

A few weeks of setbacks have changed everything. The rampaging Delta variant has dented consumer sentiment and created a bad jobs report. Forecasts of a Democratic defeat in the midterm elections next year are now commonplace, which would turn Biden into a lame duck. All of a sudden people are proclaiming Biden’s “failed presidency”. Others are chronicling “How Delta beat Biden”. 

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Biden’s biggest setback, however, was the botched nature of the Afghanistan withdrawal. The July 2 pullout from Bagram air base occurred in advance of his self-imposed deadline of August 31. But the way it happened undermined Biden’s reputation for competence, which was probably his most important quality in defeating Donald Trump. No amount of White House special pleading can alter the fact that America’s exit has damaged US interests. Since then Biden’s approval ratings have fallen by roughly six percentage points, which is steep. In terms of media narrative, his presidency is now in freefall. 


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Nothing that Biden faces yet compares with that. For all its flaws, the Afghanistan exit is still popular with the US public, though the president has personally taken a hit over its handling. The real test of his fortunes will come in the next few weeks when we find out whether he can push through his $1.2tn infrastructure bill and $3.5tn “American families plan”, both of which would have a big impact on working Americans. One of the reasons most Republicans oppose the first bill and are unanimously against the second is because they know how popular they would be. 

https://www.ft.com/content/117c7687-9354-4f45-8ddc-145cec24acb3

“Straight news” has chosen sanctimony over circumspection.

America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has yet to cost our nation a single casualty. Evacuations of U.S. citizens and allies from Kabul’s airport are proceeding at a faster pace than the White House had promised, or than its critics had deemed possible. Afghanistan’s decades-long civil war has reached a lull, if not an end. On the streets of Kabul, “order and quiet” have replaced “rising crime and violence.” Meanwhile, the Taliban is negotiating with former Afghan president Hamid Karzai over the establishment of “an inclusive government acceptable to all Afghans.”

In other words, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a “disastrous” and “humiliating” “fiasco,” in the words of the mainstream media’s ostensibly objective foreign-policy journalists.

This may be an accurate description of what recent events in Kabul have meant for the president, politically. The latest polls have shown sharp drops in Biden’s approval rating, driven in part by widespread opposition to “the way” his administration handled its (otherwise popular) exit from Afghanistan. Yet this political fiasco is not a development that the media covered so much as one that it created.

The Biden administration made some genuine errors of contingency planning. It could have done (and should now do) more to facilitate the mass resettlement of Afghan refugees. But as far as conclusions to multi-decade wars go, America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is thus far proceeding with relatively little chaos and tragedy. And it’s far from clear that the withdrawal could have been much more orderly had the White House only executed it in a better “way.”