The Biden administration is being tested by two very different crises which will impact its ability to govern through 2024. The withdrawal from Afghanistan is being handled about as well as can be expected considering the policy goals Biden has advocated for years. No matter what the armchair generals and keyboard commandos say, there was no realistic way to make up for 20 years of bad decisions in 6 months. Combine that with the military brasses' slow motion sabotage of the withdrawal and you have handed the war cheering media a club with which to beat the government.
The Covid crisis presents a very different problem to Biden's administration. A small but very vocal anti-vax and right wing minority are willing to swallow any anti science stupidity if it advances their nihilistic agenda. Again, the media has in many cases played the useful idiot for the unvaccinated, portraying thugs like Ron Desantis as heroes. Meanwhile, no matter what we do in the US, the majority of the global population remains out of reach of the vaccine and perhaps worse strains than the Delta variant are even now breeding among them.
As Ezra Klein points out in a column in the NYT, America's foreign policy for too long has defaulted to a militaristic solution. We have put ourselves in an impossible position in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan by using military force as policy. We can do better.
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