Democrat foreign policy is designed only to secure votes from people who want to sponge off their fellow citizens but virtually never care about what is happening anywhere else in the world. What’s Afghanistan got to do with someone who is interested in higher welfare payments, other than as a diversion of money they would prefer to go to themselves. Mike Pompeo lays out the difference that a genuine foreign policy approach would have consisted of.

“Were I still the secretary of state with a commander in chief like President Trump, the Taliban would have understood that there were real costs to pay if there were plots against the United States of America from that place,” Pompeo said. “Qassem Soleimani learned that lesson, and the Taliban would have learned it as well. . . “

“. . . it’s worth noting this did not happen on our watch. We reduced our forces significantly and the Taliban didn’t advance on capitals all across Afghanistan. So it’s just a plain old fact that this is happening under the Biden administration’s leadership now almost a quarter of our way into his first term, this is not the way leaders lead, by pointing backwards.”

“We had a bad deal we inherited — the JCPOA [Iran nuclear deal]; we got out of it,” Pompeo continued. “We secured America from the risk from Iran. We inherited a horrible deal in Syria where ISIS controlled real estate the size of Great Britain. We crushed them. Every president confronts challenges. This president confronted a challenge in Afghanistan. He has utterly failed to protect the American people from this challenge.”

To the left side of the political divide, there is no crisis and nothing of significance has changed. But everywhere else among the democracies there has been a reassessment of what will be needed to protect their own sovereignty. I thought this was a very on the money point, cruel as it might in reality be.

When in the future there is an assessment of the Decline and Fall of American Democracy no one will really be able to make any sense of it because it will look utterly insane, which it is.