Is US President Joe Biden up to the job?

Joe Biden has favoured ending America’s longest war for 12 years and is convinced history will vindicate his decision to cut the cord. Picture: AFP

It was a moment to trouble anyone who believes in or relies upon American power.

During a press conference on Friday (AEST), a combative reporter from Fox News asked President Joe Biden if he bore any responsibility for the deaths of 13 US soldiers in Kabul, killed along with at least 79 Afghans and two British nationals in a suicide attack at Hamid Karzai airport.

As the pair went back and forth, Biden rested his head on his hands for several seconds. Frustration, exhaustion: both could be read in the US President’s expression. Having arrived 25 minutes late, Biden’s answers throughout were long, slow and unfocused.

Nothing about the man who leads the greatest military force the planet has seen inspired confidence or fear. One can only wonder how his performance was received in Moscow, Beijing or indeed Kabul. It certainly didn’t convince many Americans.

Is Biden up to this? Having been elected largely by virtue of not being Donald Trump, is he actually any improvement on his predecessor when it comes to world affairs? Might he possibly be even more dangerous — for Americans and the world — than Trump?

Biden is only seven months into his term of office, but the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which now has a deadly price, is already taking on a presidency-defining hue.

Meanwhile, inflation is at a 13-year high and in July US Border Patrol reported nearly 200,000 encounters with migrants along the US-Mexico border, the highest monthly total in more than 20 years. Because of the Delta variant, the US is also now averaging more than 1,200 Covid-19 deaths per day.

In Kabul, 13 Americans are now dead. Up to 1000 are still trapped in Afghanistan with only a slim chance of being evacuated. Thousands of at-risk Afghans are in a similar position. The Taliban has been gifted a powerful military arsenal, including as many as 100 military helicopters and 2000 armoured vehicles. This is a grave challenge to American power and prestige, yet the few times Biden has been exposed to real questioning over Afghanistan, he has appeared shaky, defensive, even at times somnolent.

Volunteers and medical staff bring an injured man for treatment after two powerful explosions outside the airport in Kabul on Friday (AEST). Picture: AFP

This President has favoured ending America’s longest war for 12 years and is convinced history will vindicate his decision to cut the cord. He may yet be proven right. But between the Covid surge, the migration spike and the prospect of more American lives being lost to terrorism in Afghanistan — the very thing he was striving to avoid — Biden’s presidency is approaching something close to crisis.

Just one in four Americans support the manner of the Afghanistan withdrawal. One USA Today poll last week put the President’s job approval rating at 41 per cent, versus 55 per cent who disapprove. Whereas before Afghanistan and the recent Covid spike, Biden was still in his honeymoon phase and enjoying a healthy plus-50 per cent rating.

There is fury across the capitals of Europe too, fraying the alliances that Biden began his presidency hoping to renew. “Europeans were often offended, disgusted and perplexed by Trump, but I never saw this kind of anger over a specific issue,” says Bruno Macaes, an author and Portugal’s former secretary of state for European affairs. “This is in a way worse (than the previous administration), because fissures in the Western coalition are more important than the personal offensiveness of Trump.”

What’s keeping Democrats up at night is the fear that their 78-year-old President is simply not forceful or deft enough to lead; that the “Sleepy Joe” moniker deployed by Donald Trump in last year’s presidential campaign is beginning to resonate with Americans who are tuning into Biden’s lacklustre press conferences.

Major Tim Glover, part of the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Picture: ADF

“Biden feels like an ageing rock band that still thinks they’ve got the juice, but it’s just not working,” says Luke Thompson, a Republican political consultant. “He’s trying to play the hits for one final tour, but the energy just isn’t there. It felt Brezhnevian, frankly.”

Peter Wehner, the vice-president of the Ethics and Public Policy Centre, a right-wing think tank, is a conservative who supported Biden’s election. He feels let down over Afghanistan. “Empathy is usually a part of who Biden is,” says Wehner. “But in this case he’s lost his empathy because he’s become defensive. There’s a kind of dogmatism. A determination to say this is what I’m going to do, come hell or high water. He says ‘the buck stops here’, then he blames everybody but himself.”

Thursday’s horrifying attack in Kabul came just as the President and his media outriders had been making some headway in justifying their approach to Afghanistan. Yes, the withdrawal had been chaotic, they acknowledged, but losing wars is always ugly and this denouement was long overdue.

After a difficult start, the evacuation had drastically picked up pace, with more than 100,000 evacuees whisked out of the country in a week, the largest airlift in history. And, crucially, this had all been done without the loss of a single American life, a point that was repeated ad infinitum.

Had this remained the case, the White House’s arguments might just have worked.

“Americans are very parochial,” says Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster. “Whatever the reality on the ground in Afghanistan, the longer-range impact of the withdrawal on Biden hinged on one central question: do Americans and our troops get out of the country alive? Given America’s support for exiting Afghanistan, if no Americans had died, national focus here would drift back to domestic issues. Now that’s far less certain.”

With American lives lost, Biden faces a very different calculus. The bombing itself has been claimed by Isis-K, an Afghanistan-based offshoot of Islamic State, and in his speech to the nation Biden vowed to “hunt down” the perpetrators. Rhetorically, at least, this sounded much more like George W Bush-era “war on terror” talk than a president committed to bringing the troops home. The extent to which Biden will follow through on this threat remains to be seen after Friday night’s drone strike that killed an Isis-K “planner”.

Refugees who fled Afghanistan in the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi. Picture: AFP

Biden does still have plenty of arguments working in his favour. According to the latest polls, taken before Thursday’s attack, many Americans — 47 per cent — continue to support the withdrawal from Afghanistan even if it leaves the Taliban in charge of the country.

The President is also right to point out that he inherited the Afghanistan mess from his predecessors. It was Trump who signed a peace deal with the Taliban. The agreement, made in Qatar in February last year, created the preconditions for this northern summer’s debacle.

In the deal, America promised to leave Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, in return for the Taliban ceasing attacks on US service members and not allowing the country to become a haven for terrorists. Trump also agreed to release 5000 Taliban prisoners, some of whom are now fighting in the ranks of America’s enemies.

The agreement had no mechanism to force the Taliban to keep its word. Nor did it give any role to the Afghan national government at the time, nor any protection for the Afghan army from Taliban attacks, which came in their dozens.

Biden is also on the brink of achieving what both Barack Obama and Trump wanted to do but couldn’t: a full withdrawal from the quagmire of Afghanistan.

“It takes political courage, it also takes conviction,” says David Rothkopf, a US foreign policy expert. “The reason Obama didn’t leave was in part because of concern you might end up with a situation like this and it might be ugly.”

Taliban fighters at a restaurant in Kabul. Picture: AFP

Biden hopes this retrenchment will allow America to focus on things like the $US4 trillion ($5.46 trillion) round of government spending on infrastructure and energy that he and the Democrats are pushing through US congress, with some success.

“He’s trying to pivot the US out of the post-9/11 era, where our focus was the war on terror,” says Rothkopf. “He’s moving towards a different US world view, where we focus on investing in ourselves, major power rivalries, competitiveness and growth for the rest of the century.

“The attacks on him are preposterous. There is wisdom and political conviction driving this big decision, with an experienced team in place to manage what was always going to be a difficult process.”

Biden’s problem, though, is that he doesn’t appear to be delivering on his election pitch to the American people. After four chaotic years of Trump, America trusted Biden’s promise to restore competence and decency to the White House. He was supposed to get a handle on the pandemic and heal divides with his warm-hearted empathy. But Americans are yet again living with the fear of Covid’s next wave. This may not be Biden’s fault, but it’s happening on his watch.

Biden and his Democratic allies won’t be panicking just yet; presidents typically lose popularity in the months after their election, as the hard reality of governing sets in. Their domestic agenda is still in decent shape. But this does not look like a man who will be fit for re-election in four years’ time, nor even to convincingly see out his first term. There’s a strong whiff of decline in the air.

“This is who Joe Biden has always been,” says Thompson. “The man is temperamentally, morally and intellectually suited to run three mid-Atlantic car dealerships. Instead he’s fallen ass backwards into the most powerful job in the world.”

The Sunday Times