It is the general rule of history that an American President will face a foreign policy crisis in his first year. In 1993, Bill Clinton had a crisis in Somalia when the UN tried to capture the warlord Mohammed Aideed. American forces ended up having a massive firefight in Mogadishu. John F Kennedy had two crisis in 1961, one was the Bay of Pigs disaster in April and the other was the building of the Berlin Wall by the East German government in August. George W Bush faced a huge crisis when Al Qaeda launched its attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. All Presidents were relatively new on the international stage.

Joe Biden has made a huge strategic blunder regarding Afghanistan. By announcing an arbitrary date for the American forces, the American President has done two things. He gave the Taliban the green light to step up their offensive against the Afghan government and even worse, it triggered the collapse of the morale of the army. Why fight on when the West was effectively turning its back and heading for the exit door?

The West may have breathed a sigh of relief when Joe Biden won the Presidential election. Gone was the erratic and petulant behaviour of Donald Trump. We thought that Joe Biden, a Washington insider with years of experience, would be an improvement. After all, he served as Barack Obama’s Vice President for eight years. Prior to that, he sat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He’s no novice to foreign policy and intelligence matters.

However, this crisis in Afghanistan has called into question his leadership of the Western Alliance. Granted, he did not sign the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban, but he accelerated the process by the signalling to the Taliban that he would withdraw American forces by September. Publicly he said that the Afghan had a large army and still had Washington’s support. However, any objective observer would see this as a strategic bolt. Biden must have realised that the other NATO countries would not stay once the Americans left, to think otherwise was either foolish or naïve. What would be psychological impact on the government in Kabul?

The Vietnam War is often cited. Richard Nixon adopted a Vietnamization policy, as he began to withdraw American forces from South Vietnam, effectively he was leaving Saigon to fend for itself. Like the Afghanistan Army, the South Vietnamese military was given the latest American weapons including aircraft and helicopters to fight the Viet Cong and the NVA. Unfortunately, low morale, high desertion rate, poor leadership and corruption will undermine any army. The Afghan Army may have over 350,000 but how effective is it?

The Taliban look set to taking over Afghanistan. Make no mistake, this is a strategic defeat of the West. It is also a dark day for the Afghan people as yet again, they have been abandoned.