Foreign relations ranks near the bottom of issues about which American voters express concern, but regardless of their accuracy, any perceptions of Biden as incompetent or cowardly may be reinforced by blanket coverage of Taliban soldiers striding through abandoned military bases and sitting triumphantly in Kabul’s presidential palace. For some Afghans who had achieved a certain degree of freedom and stability, the consequences of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan are terrifying. In light of this tragedy, it may seem wrong to focus on such consequences for domestic US politics. Yet the political fallout of withdrawal will influence how much of his domestic agenda Biden is able to implement, not to mention how the United States conducts its future wars. Whether Republicans are able to frame Biden’s withdrawal as a failure, and whether the American public blames Biden for the failed reconstruction of the Afghan state, will be key. At the heart of this question rest assumptions about American power that dramatically underestimate the structural realities of American politics and national security policy, while overemphasising the role and power of individual presidents. It is unfair to blame Biden for a poorly conceived and executed war that predated his presidency by almost two decades, yet that is exactly what has happened – in the media and in élite circles at least.

Failure – or, rather, the idea of failure – tends to haunt the office of the president, regardless of the attributes or achievements of the office-holder. Of course, there are some presidents who really were failures, who either could not or would not use the office to keep Americans and the republic safe while fulfilling their constitutional duties (think James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, or Donald Trump). Thankfully, they have been in the minority. Most presidents work within the limits of their constitutionally determined role. CBS journalist and author John Dickerson has rightly described the office as the hardest job in the world. But contrary to what some presidential scholars have assumed, success in the job has less to do with the managerial competence of any particular president than with a far broader constellation of longer-term political factors, circumstance, and luck.

Despite this, scholars of the presidency and public pollsters are seemingly obsessed with quantifying the effectiveness of particular presidents and ranking them from best to worst, with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (wartime leaders) faring particularly well. The mythologisation of these leaders and their continuing popularity in the American scholarly and popular imagination need rethinking. Not only are rankings theoretically and methodologically unsound (divorcing the presidency from its historical context, the job has changed significantly over time), they also reinforce an idea of the president as a mythic father figure who unifies and watches over the republic. The immediate consequence of this is that any president who does measure up to an imagined Washington or Lincoln is found lacking. Not long after Obama’s presidency was described by pundits as ‘historic’ it became ‘disappointing’, and this label stuck to him throughout his presidency. Of course, President Obama was always going to be less popular than the energetic campaign orator who spoke about Hope, Change, and a more united and perfect union. Obama actively encouraged Americans’ already inflated perception of presidential power; he used it to defeat Hillary Clinton and John McCain. In his rhetoric and his campaign posters, Obama positioned himself as the embodiment of a more unified and hopeful America. While Obama is not wholly to blame for public misconceptions about presidential power, neither is the American public. If blame can truly rest in one place, it is with the US Congress, which has not functioned effectively for decades.

Gridlocked and polarised, Congress has been consistently unable to pass meaningful legislation on any number of issues on which Americans of both parties have generally formed a consensus. This is not a matter of opinion, but rather a fact established by a multitude of empirical studies. Senators have clung to arcane institutional rules that have prevented dynamic and responsive legislation, while simultaneously disregarding traditions and norms that made bipartisan co-operation possible. As the events of 6 January 2021 highlighted, Congress is so dysfunctional that its members can’t even agree on the basic facts of what happened that day or who was to blame. This state of affairs can only be described as institutionalised insanity. One cannot blame Americans for looking elsewhere for stability and good government.

Of course, the executive branch is now far more powerful than it was in the past. Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, the presidency has played a far greater role in public policy and in the lives of ordinary Americans. Despite his patrician background, Roosevelt was able to foster an intimacy with the people through a series of radio addresses that provided Americans with a sense of stability and security during periods of massive economic, social, and geopolitical uncertainty. Later presidents further refined and performed the role of Comforter-in-Chief very effectively (think Ronald Reagan’s response to the Challenger disaster).

In the cases of Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, a strong executive branch was used to actively shape and guide legislation through Congress, to quickly respond to national crises, and to implement much-needed social and economic reforms through federal government agencies. Yet, in both cases, the extension and use of executive power came at a terrible cost: Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 led to the internment of more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were US citizens. Similarly, Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, a decision that ended his career, was both catastrophic and senseless. It was the expansion of the executive branch – supported by Congress – that led to the disastrous War on Terror and the continued occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan, long after the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. The Authorization for Use of Military Force, effectively a blanket approval issued to the president from Congress for any and all military interventions, has enabled the United States to continually wage war without fully justifying those wars to the public.

President Biden, who has often been compared to FDR and LBJ (and who, it should be said, welcomes these comparisons), has also been accused of repeating the failures of previous administrations in Vietnam, by allowing the Afghan government to crumble without the protection of the military. When I spoke with Emma Shortis, historian and research fellow at RMIT (and author of Our Exceptional Friend: Australia’s fatal alliance with the United States, Hardie Grants Books, 2021), she noted the parallels between Biden and LBJ; like Johnson, Biden appears to feel ‘both bound and hemmed in by the American political system, American history and traditions’, experiencing the same tension between a more hawkish foreign policy approach and a radical restructuring of American society.

The failure to properly institute a mass-evacuation strategy that could have transported Afghan interpreters, civilians, and their families from the country – or at least managed the inevitable chaos more effectively – was deeply troubling, and the blame for this undoubtedly rests not only with the president, but also with his national security team, the Pentagon, and military intelligence. Similarly, the 29 August drone strike that killed ten Afghan civilians, including seven children, cannot be condemned enough. Believing that the car had visited an ISIS safe house and had been loaded with explosives, the US military fired their last missile of the conflict at the vehicle, obliterating the children and adults inside. Basic intelligence gathering could have established that the car belonged to a California-based international aid organisation and that the driver, Zamari Ahmadi, visited the home of the organisation’s country director – not an ISIS safe house – and was transporting water, not explosives. This was not a tragic accident but rather the horrific consequence of a fundamentally immoral approach to warfare that has been crucial to US military strategy since the war began.

While the national security establishment and military leadership were frequently critical of, and in conflict with, Trump and his administration, Shortis notes that there have been ‘considerable tensions between Biden and the Pentagon’, and that ‘at least part of the reason that the withdrawal has been such an unmitigated disaster is that the Pentagon was unwilling to plan for the eventuality of an American withdrawal because that system is geared toward perpetual war and perpetual intervention’.

Other analysts have pointed to Biden’s decision to continue Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan as representative of not only the end of American power in the Middle East, but also the end of a broader mission of promoting liberal democracy and Western values. Describing Biden’s withdrawal as both ‘pitiful’ and an ‘abject surrender’ in The Australian, foreign affairs editor Greg Sheridan declared that this defeat meant the death of ‘liberalism as a meaningful driver of policy’. In these debates it is hard to separate geopolitics from the stuff of culture wars. The same Western liberalism that informed democratisation in countries such as Taiwan and South Korea has been fatally wounded, according to Sheridan, by the advent of identity-politics. Shortis dismisses the idea that this represents the end of American intervention in the country, for ‘Biden is a traditionalist in the exercise of American power abroad … there are still drones flying over Afghanistan and the region and beyond’, and ultimately ‘the withdrawal is about a maintenance of American empire rather than the dismantling of it’.

The question for Biden now is will the withdrawal from Afghanistan diminish his popularity with the voters? Probably not. While Americans as a whole do have an outsized understanding of presidential power and are primed to blame individual presidents for events outside their control, the war in Afghanistan has been remarkably absent from American popular culture, the media, and everyday life. However, for those serving in the military, for their families and the families of soldiers who have lost their lives, the human cost of intervention in Afghanistan (and Iraq) has never been something they could afford to ignore. Compared to previous conflicts, the bloodshed of nation-building in the Middle East has left the lives of most Americans (at least since the Obama administration) relatively untouched. It has been this remarkable lack of interest – arguably a failure of the media – that has allowed for such an extended and ultimately unsuccessful occupation.

The good news for Biden is that the withdrawal from Afghanistan will likely not affect the roll-out of his agenda, one that represents the most ambitious set of social, economic, and environmental policies a president has sought to implement in a generation. Some of this agenda has already been fully accomplished, some of it partly. In March 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law, a US $1.9 trillion bill that expanded unemployment benefits and healthcare coverage, provided tax credits to families and emergency paid leave for 100 million Americans, and included direct payments to individuals (among other provisions) in order to stimulate the economy. At the time this article was written, the House had already approved a US $3.5 trillion budget resolution and is set to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that has already received bipartisan support in the Senate. Together, these bills seek to fulfil Biden’s Build Back Better Plan. While they would dramatically increase the national debt, the bills would also expand Medicare and massively redistribute wealth and opportunities to Americans who were struggling before Covid-19. A subset of this program, the American Families Plan, is particularly remarkable in its scope and, if implemented in full, would provide for a robust social safety net that has yet to be achieved in Australia, let alone the United States.

Democrats in Congress are working to pass these two pieces of legislation quickly before the 2022 mid-term elections, when there is a good chance they will lose their majority in the House of Representatives. The Democrats’ majority in the House shrank in 2020, and the first mid-term election in any presidential term usually involves a net gain of congressional seats for the party not represented in the White House. The upcoming mid-terms will similarly offer a test of widespread voter-suppression efforts in the South, and Republican-controlled state redistricting in Southern and Midwestern states, following the 2020 census. When a similar program of gerrymandering (shaping congressional seats to afford maximum political benefit) occurred following the last US Census in 2010, Republicans (who benefit from having a whiter and more rural base, and therefore control more state governments despite winning less of the national vote) swept the House, significantly limiting Obama’s policy influence. Democrats have learnt from this experience, and even during the most heated internal negotiations between progressive Democrats in the House and some of their more moderate colleagues in the Senate, there is a shared understanding that it is really now or never.

The bad news is that the solipsistic nature of American politics, compounded by a pervasive belief in American exceptionalism and a national security establishment that shows no signs of learning from past mistakes, means that further foreign military interventions are likely, and that, just as in Afghanistan, they will continue for much longer than they should. The real and significant achievements of a Biden administration need to be understood within the context of a collective societal failure to recognise the limits and capability of American power abroad. This is the failure that experts, the media, and, most importantly, the American people need to grapple with, long before they critique the performance of any individual president.