MICHAEL WALSH: Botched Pullout From Afghanistan Signals End of ‘Liberal World Order.’

It’s fitting that the end should come with Biden, a lifelong, legislatively undistinguished congressman first elected from Delaware in 1973, and who served as President Barack Obama’s vice president from 2009 to 2017. Over the past seven months as president, however, he has ruined the economy, expanded the welfare state, encouraged anarchy, criminalized dissent, destroyed the First Amendment, elevated a superannuated apparatchik such as Dr. Anthony Fauci to a position of unconstitutional authority, and crippled patriotic Americans’ faith in their country and its ideals.

Biden couldn’t do it alone, of course. But with partners such as Gen. Mark Milley as the “woke” chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Antony Blinken at State; Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon; William Burns at the CIA, which just put another “O-fer” on the board by failing to accurately assess the situation in Kabul; and veteran Democrat operative Ron Klain as his chief of staff, he’s had plenty of help, particularly from the country’s malignant media, which fans the flames of “social justice,” gender studies, largely manufactured racial resentment, and sexual deviancy.

Biden did stumble upon one important truth in his speech: The United States should never again engage in fruitless wars of choice and nation-building against third-rate, largely imaginary countries in which we have no vital interests. He thus implicitly endorsed the position held by presidents as disparate as George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower, and to whose sage advice about foreign entanglements and the ravenous military-industrial complex we should have been heeding more often, instead of international adventurers such as Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama.

Their so-called liberal world order has given us the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War (which ended with Saddam Hussein still in control of Iraq), and the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine a world designed and run by the Council on Foreign Relations and other interventionist think tanks, and you’ve pretty much got it.

In his speech, Biden should have stopped there, but, of course, he didn’t—and that was even more illuminating. Biden directed the bulk of his ire not toward former President Donald Trump, or his defeatist military, or his incompetent advisers or even his AWOL vice president, Kamala Harris, but at the Afghans themselves, including their formerly 300,000-strong armed forces.

“We gave them every tool they could need … every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.”

He and the rest of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party establishment should look in the mirror. The will to fight has been absent from American “warfighting” practically since the War Department became the Defense Department, and the Pentagon was built. Warfighting without victory has, in fact, become the Pentagon’s mantra, the better for its insatiable maw to consume American blood and treasure in pursuit of tax dollars. The reason we fight wars of choice isn’t because we need to, but because we can.

During the Civil War, Grant had no sooner received Robert E. Lee’s surrender than he planned to immediately return to Washington because, in the words of his adjutant, Gen. Horace Porter, “he was anxious above all things to begin the reduction of the military establishment, and diminish the enormous expense attending it, which at this time amounted to nearly four millions of dollars a day.”

The idea of a huge, permanent standing army was anathema to American sensibilities. And America as world policeman? Perish the thought.

The “front row kids” haven’t turned out to be very good at what they do, despite their constant references to how smart and competent they are.

Related: The Suicide of Expertise.