When an aging U.S. president, refusing to consider the conditions on the ground, overrules his military generals and intelligence agencies and orders a precipitous and ill-planned action, it is a sure recipe for a foreign policy disaster.

The blame for the international humiliation wrought on the United States by the terrorist capture of Afghanistan must be laid squarely at the door of President Joe Biden.

There was no strategic or domestic imperative for Biden to order a hasty, total pullout of the U.S. force in Afghanistan that had been drastically cut to just 2,500 soldiers by the time his predecessor, Donald Trump, left office. Yet Biden, the oldest American to assume the presidency, rebuffed his top military commanders’ advice in April and ordered all American troops to return home.