There is a reason that Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin was confident he could invade Ukraine with virtual impunity — precisely why he launched the first phase of that “minor incursion,” as Joe Biden previewed it, this week.

As I outlined thoroughly almost three months ago in “Putin the Tyrant v. Biden the Appeaser”: “China and Russia are tag-teaming, testing Biden’s lack of resolve to confront authoritarian tyrants, as aptly demonstrated by his surrender and retreat from Afghanistan. That test case demonstrated that Biden was not willing to take on the Taliban, a far less threatening adversary than either Russia’s dictator Putin or China’s dictator Xi. As I have warned repeatedly, Putin is a de facto surrogate of the ChiComs, so while confronting Putin on the eastern front, watch for Xi to move on the western front with Taiwan, creating massive national security threats on two fronts.”

Clearly, Biden’s demonstrable ineptitude in Afghanistan has green-lighted Putin and Xi — and they are on the move.

Earlier this month, we covered the Army’s brutal 2,000-page after-action report about Biden’s abject and deadly ineptitude regarding the Afghanistan exfil.

Bolstering that analysis was a lengthy article in the left-leaning Atlantic magazine entitled “The Betrayal,” written by George Packer. That article is pay-walled, but Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle provides a good summary of Packer’s critical assessment of Biden’s failures.

Von Drehle writes:

[Packer’s] indictment takes aim at the apparently willful failure to offer an orderly exit from Afghanistan for combat interpreters, embassy support staff, intelligence informants and so on. Many of these individuals have been denounced as traitors and are at risk of death — if they haven’t been killed already.

Biden is quoted saying more than once that the United States had no duty to protect those who relied on or worked beside us. And so advocates of honorable assistance met one brick wall after another. A proposal to relocate Afghans to the U.S. territory of Guam while processing their visa applications went nowhere. Bipartisan delegations of U.S. veterans beseeched the White House for action — but concluded that they were being ignored. Further, they surmised that, considering the multitude of humanitarian policy promoters at senior levels in the administration, the cold shoulder could only be coming from the very top.

Von Drehle continues:

Though no one from the White House would say so on the record, Packer reports that Biden’s people continue to claim there was no way they could have foreseen how quickly the Taliban would complete its takeover. But it was foreshadowed, notably by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker in March of last winter. His report portrayed a robust Taliban and an Afghan government already collapsing. The Taliban controlled Afghanistan’s highways, operated de facto governments in the provinces and maintained an open, armed presence even in the capital, Kabul. Meanwhile, the Afghan army couldn’t fill its ranks even by dangling money, and the public had given up on the corrupt administration of feckless Ashraf Ghani, the former president who fled the country.

Failure to plan equals planning to fail, the saying goes — and it was true. Biden’s failure to plan for an honorable, orderly retreat from Afghanistan produced the very scenes of chaos and abandonment he had hoped to avoid.

According to Von Drehle, Biden’s claim that his airlift was a great success is fallacious:

By one estimate [that of Human Rights First] 90 percent of Afghans eligible for relocation were left behind. Most of those who did get out were rescued only by the initiative of conscience-stricken troops and diplomats in Kabul, and by a loose network of tireless volunteers working around-the-clock stateside.

In conclusion, Von Drehle notes: “Biden’s approval rating plunged during the days so grippingly recounted in Packer’s article. So far, it hasn’t recovered. The more one learns about the pullout from Afghanistan, and the willful betrayal of our friends, the more perceptive and just that judgment appears.”

As for Packer, he concluded: “The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency — and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden.”

As for Putin and Xi, the Afghanistan betrayal six months ago was instructive, and the impotence, the dearth of political fortitude demonstrated by Biden and his “negotiators” responding to the pending Russian invasion of Ukraine, was fully anticipated.

As Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) summarized the “feckless appeaser”: “The weakness Biden has demonstrated, whether against Russia, whether against the Taliban, whether against the Chinese communists, that weakness is dangerous.”

Meanwhile, commander in chief Biden is busy issuing military “Diversity and Inclusion” directives — surely Putin will retreat in fear.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776