What happened to President Joe Biden’s mind? What compelled him to make that unexpected turn and accelerate America’s downfall? What does he mean by “laser-focused,” a phrase he refers to so often? Does he still think he can bend the arc of history in America’s favor? We do not know exactly what is going on because there has been no leaking of information from the White House during this presidency so far. But the world is talking. And many American friends and allies are perplexed about the president’s decision to abandon Afghanistan overnight, leaving his allies to their own destiny and surrendering the nation to the enemy that Americans have been fighting for twenty years. 

The American government invested heavily in a country that, in the end, preferred the local enemy to the rich American friends. Likewise, it’s incredible how many individuals and countries who had opposed the occupation of Afghanistan turned against the Americans when they finally decided to go home. Leaving Afghanistan is not a good decision, many of them said. 

Now, we all feel horrific as we see the images of the desperate — foreigners and Afghans trying to run for their lives before the Taliban’s rage explodes again. Why didn’t the Americans take care of all their citizens and allies before leaving? It is unexplainable. Are the Taliban now America’s main contact in Afghanistan? It would really seem so, and yesterday’s news confirmed a (no longer) secret meeting between CIA Director William Burns and Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar in Kabul. 

This news is mind-blowing. It demonstrates the cynical power game of international politics. It births dozens of new hypotheses about the destiny of Afghanistan. It gives the Taliban an opportunity to insert themselves in the potential conflict between the U.S. and China. This is the way power works. 

Until the moment of confirmation from Kabul, the cynicism seemed to be coming from Biden’s side only. Not because of presumed lack of strategic patience, of which former American ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan C. Crocker, accused Joe Biden.  Like many other experts on Afghanistan, Crocker’s column was a rage against President, published after Biden’s speech on Monday, August 16, and after the group photo of the Taliban commanders sitting in former Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani’s office was released. 

The photo was eerily similar to the photos from earlier this year, when extreme right-wing Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, bragging about taking back their country. Horrified by the images of the possible collapse of American democracy, Joe Biden, then president-elect, could not act. But Congress could. As soon as the building was secure and the invaders had been kicked out, the congresspeople got back to work and certified 78-year-old Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States. It was a special night, in which Congress gave Biden the mandate to restore democracy. It’s a mandate that Joe Biden is very much aware of. Things went well for a while, but the reality is that America is in uncharted territory —  it has returned to democracy after four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, with Americans more divided than ever. 

On August 16, Biden was forced to interrupt his isolation in Camp David and address the nation from the White House because of the collapse of the Afghan government.

 “I’m deeply saddened by the facts we now face,” he said. “But I do not regret my decision to end America’s war-fighting in Afghanistan and maintain a laser focus on our counterterrorism mission, there and other parts of the world. Our mission to degrade the terrorist threat of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden was a success. Our decades-long effort to overcome centuries of history and permanently change and remake Afghanistan was not, and I wrote and believed it never could be.” 

This is intransigent Biden. No longer the father of the nation and full of empathy, but a man who understands how power works. But Biden also knows that he does not have much time left. His game may very well end next year after midterm elections when the opposition, as it seems likely, might win back both the Senate and the House. Biden therefore must hold the bull by the horns and ride it for as long as he can. That seems to be his big strategy, at the peak of which he foresees an encounter with China. Beijing, no longer Kabul, is on Biden’s mind. He said it on his first day in the White House and repeated it later, after the first meeting between his team and the Chinese administration in Alaska, as I noted a few months ago:

A week after the Alaska meeting, Joe Biden held his first press conference. Compared to Trump’s cabaret performances, the Biden presser was a work of art. He was short and concise. But the most important thing he said was the dilemma of our time: it is about the race between two different society models — meaning that the future will be either an authoritarian one or a democracy. Biden’s goal is to revive the latter.

There is no doubt that China is the center of American national interest. That is after America resolves its domestic problems. Then, it can gear up to compete with China again. In order to follow this strategy, America needs to implement all the necessary legislation that will provide finances to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, launch research and education and make democracy more efficient. This is a plan Biden does not want to compromise on. The condition necessary to achieve this first step is victory in the midterm elections in 2022. Regardless of the uproar after the fall of Kabul, almost 70 percent of Americans still agree with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden made the right calculation. With two trillion dollars spent on weapons, the salaries of 300,000 members of the Afghan army, and losing 2,000 of its own soldiers, Afghanistan can no longer represent American interests, Biden said. If the same money was spent in the U.S., the American economy could be booming. America could rebuild its infrastructure and catch up with China’s high-speed railway system, for example.

“With the retreat of Americans, Afghanistan runs a current account deficit that has to be funded. Money needs to be found from somewhere to help balance the books. The United States provided hard currency backing for the Afghan afghani through regular shipments of pallets of US dollars,” wrote Neal Kimberley, a financial expert for South China Morning Post (SCMP).  

America pumped pallets of dollars into Kabul every few weeks. The economy and the corruption ran on cash in Afghanistan, where only ten percent of the population has a bank account. According to SCMP, the last dispatch of dollars was due a few days before the fall of Kabul. But it did not arrive and the Taliban found the door open. The question is, how much of all this has been controlled by Washington? Was clearing of the space and drying the country of necessary cash a trap Washington is setting for Beijing? Afghanistan is rich in minerals and rare elements like lithium that are of strategic importance for a country like China. Beijing shares a large border with Afghanistan and prefers a stable government in Kabul. Could the Taliban become a partner of the Chinese Communist Party? China does have a strong presence in Pakistan, the country that has longterm support base for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. 

As the Americans withdraw from Afghanistan, Biden’s policy echoes Trump’s “America first” stance. This resemblance surely irritates longterm American allies, who expected more communication from the White House after Biden’s arrival. All of Biden’s excuses, namely that it was Trump who signed a peace deal with the Taliban, is empty talk. Biden does not need to respect something Trump signed. The only way to better understand what was happening behind the scenes would be to know details of the conversation between Biden and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani when the latter visited the White House two months ago. Or even better, some of the spat between Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar and CIA Director William Burns just yesterday. But like I said earlier, there are no leaks this time. 

And yet, there is no doubt that the American president knew all of the details of the evolving situation. When Biden isolated himself in Camp David, he knew the storm was coming. Perhaps he did not foresee the size of it and ignored the possibility that the consequences of the Taliban takeover would be so resounding. Biden wanted to avoid the heat, and sent his Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, into the media fire instead last Sunday. But the dramatic scenes from the Kabul airport and the loss of geopolitical equilibrium after the Taliban demolished the Afghan government demanded an explanation from the president. 

With the Taliban in control over the entire country, Afghanistan has once again become a potential center of international terrorism. This reality has created anger and raised many questions that need the president’s explanation. But could Biden, for instance, admit that America is no longer powerful enough, that its strength is overstretched? Or is he hoping that opening up Afghanistan to Al Qaeda and ISIS will force the Chinese to get involved in Afghanistan? 

There is no doubt that the way America withdrew from Afghanistan represents the biggest debacle of Biden’s administration. The absence of a plan for the rapid collapse of Afghanistan’s government is a combination of scandal and a cynical act. Yet, the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan might prove to be the right one and America might, in the end, be able to focus on China. But Biden’s act cannot be justified in any way.  Biden’s debacle might only be diluted if he manages to redeploy the resources from the Middle East to Asia.