Ironically, the Biden Administration’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 may have encouraged Putin’s plan for invading Ukraine, out of the belief that America and the West were impotent. The Afghanistan failure may also have forced the Biden Administration to pull together bureaucratically for the sake of future crises. Without the messy Afghanistan withdrawal, that is, the administration may not have performed as well as it did in the early part of the Ukraine War. History is full of such ironies.
