"No one gets it out of my head that without the outrageous withdrawal of troops from Kabul yesterday, we would have never seen the tragic siege of Kiev today, and certainly no one would be preparing to see Taiwan occupied tomorrow."
— Giorgia Meloni, who believes The Lord of the Rings is "sacred text" and is possibly Italy's next PM
Her point was that western displays of weakness invite aggression of our adversaries. It was certainly mishandled, but withdrawal was not weakness. Staying and leaving Afghanistan for a future administration would have been.
Weakness is a President who ran in his primary on a “humble foreign policy” getting us bogged down in two major quagmires. Weakness was his successor, who ran specifically on peace, keep us there even after Bin Laden was killed. Weakness was Trump, who ran in part on “stupid” and “disastrous” Bush “forever” wars and used them to humiliate Jeb!... leaving a timetable of withdrawal for the next guy rather than getting it done himself. Weakness was Biden deciding to extend the date of departure unofficially to avoid giving any credit to the last guy but officially in order to get it right, only to bungle the whole operation at a future date anyway.
If Russia was going to learn a valuable lesson from Afghanistan that impacted whether or not they invaded Ukraine, they should have learned from their own experience in the 80s and not attempted to replicate that mistake closer to home.
