TALIBAN AND THE WORLD -how foreign powers are likely to judge and negotiate with the new Taliban-led government in Afghanistan.

On Afghan withdrawal, Biden bucks the consensus of the foreign policy elite.

President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the Oval Office in 2015. Mr. Biden opposed the troop surge Mr. Obama ordered in Afghanistan in 2009.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Catie Edmondson, TNYT, 1 September 21, Washington : When President Biden served as Barack Obama’s vice president, he was often a lonely dissenter in White House debates about military intervention, never more so than on Afghanistan, where he strongly opposed the Pentagon’s 2009 troop surge and was overruled by Mr. Obama and his generals.

Now, Mr. Biden is the commander in chief, and in pressing to conclude the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, even at the price of a frantic, bloodstained evacuation, he has put himself at odds with much of the foreign policy establishment, on the right and left, in Washington and across Europe.

Critics have piled on Mr. Biden, not just for the messiness of the departure but also for his repudiation of the principles that drove the mission in Afghanistan. While the president sees the United States belatedly ending “an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” as he put it on Tuesday in a defiant defense of his decision, critics see a dangerous American retrenchment that could leave the world in deeper disarray.

Members of the Taliban Badri 313 battalion on Tuesday at the airport in Kabul.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

“This was a political decision, pure and simple,” said Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Mr. Biden, he said, had “ignored the advice of his own top generals and his own intelligence community.”

Even Mr. Biden’s fellow Democrats have delivered harsh assessments. Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, has called for hearings into the administration failure to foresee the swift collapse of the Afghan Army. Representative Seth Moulton, the Massachusetts Democrat, called the evacuation “a disaster of epic proportions,” leaving some Americans and Afghan allies behind.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the doctrine of an aggressive, expeditionary foreign policy — in which all options, including military force, are invariably on the table — has become a bipartisan article of faith in Washington. The news media, which covered those wars, played a significant role in amplifying these ideas. NATO allies, which fought alongside the United States in Afghanistan, went along, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Mr. Obama stopped short of pulling troops out of Afghanistan long after he concluded that the mission — to transform the country into a stable democracy — was a futile effort. Even President Trump, who made a career of thumbing his nose at the foreign policy establishment, deferred to his generals when they warned him not to withdraw all American forces.

Taliban forces on a Kabul street on Monday.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

Mr. Biden, a longtime senator who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, once embraced the post-World War II vision of a globally active United States. He voted for the Iraq War. Yet in his years as vice president, his disenchantment with military adventures emerged as one of his core beliefs.

“You have a president who is willing to stand up to the Washington foreign policy establishment in a way that Trump or Obama or George W. Bush were not,” said Vali R. Nasr, a former Obama administration official who teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Mr. Biden’s determination to extricate the United States from costly entanglements overseas plays better with average Americans than with foreign policy elites.  While harrowing images of the evacuation have damaged his approval ratings, polls suggest that many, if not most, share his conviction that the country does not have a compelling reason to stay in Afghanistan.