Biden

Our administration would have us believe that Joe Biden is the leader of the free world. But he isn’t — and our relative inaction on Ukraine should firmly put to rest the idea of “American exceptionalism.” While Ukrainians were heartened by British prime minister Boris Johnson’s April trip to Kyiv, our commander-in-chief has adopted a different strategy for this active war zone: send in the women. Security concerns are ostensibly to blame for Biden being MIA, but sending in three of the country’s most important ladies — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Kyiv, First Lady Jill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to neighboring countries in Eastern Europe — seems an odd way to demonstrate that the administration is worried about security.

After an embarrassing two-month start to its war in Ukraine marked by pictures of abandoned armored personnel carriers, destroyed tanks and stalled armored columns outside Ukraine’s major cities, the Russian army is re-tooling and re-arming itself for a more manageable fight in the east. I use the word “manageable” not because the battle in the Donbas will be easy for Russian forces, but because the objective of expanding Russian control over the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk is more realistic than overthrowing the Ukrainian government and occupying the entire country. Capturing, let alone holding, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Chernihiv would have entailed a massive number of personnel and a long-term commitment Russia doesn't have the resources to sustain.

India and the United States have rediscovered each other after the cordial hostility of the Cold War. Those years of isolation have made India’s political and financial elites susceptible to flattery. America’s courtship of India, lubricated by the economics of globalization and the post-9/11 zeal to spread democracy, is now being consummated in the American search for a democratic counterweight to China. But India is a chaotic democracy in a volatile neighborhood. Can it hitch itself to America without forfeiting its autonomy? Foreign strategic experts exhort India, which is non-interventionist to its marrow, to act like a global power.

The collapse of the Afghan army and state was so rapid and so total that, mercifully, talking heads have already moved on from debating whether the country might have been saved from a Taliban takeover. Everyone now agrees that was impossible, and the trillion dollars spent to prevent it was thoroughly wasted. Instead, because pundits and politicians must fight over something, the scrum has been over the frantic manner of America’s withdrawal. Was the Biden administration warned that Afghanistan would collapse in the amount of time typically reserved for a test cricket match? And if so, did it simply ignore those warnings?