as we all know, so he is of course still dealing with things that started in the prior administration.
But at some point you own the problems you are presented with in high office, and frankly by this point, as to most of them, Biden does.
This is motivated by the disaster in Afghanistan. A minimal retention of US forces in the country would have kept the Taliban from taking control of the country. While some may hope against hope as to what this means, what it does mean is a return to a hard line Islamic rule by men alone and brutal punishment for all who transgress from an Islamic rule of a severity known nowhere else on the globe. We'll be back, probably from the air, as this grows into a terror problem for us.
We didn't have to take over the country in 2001, but we ultimately did, and once you do that, it's your responsibility. You can't reform a country that is 2,000 years behind the times overnight, and of course we didn't. The Afghanis aren't wanting a hardcore Islamic rule, but they haven't had any experience with a strong central government since the 1970s, and they've never had any real experience with a democratic one. It would have taken time, perhaps a lot of time. It took us fifty years in the Philippines, for example.
That was our obligation.
Every American President has claimed he wanted out of the country since we first went in. President Obama started the process of withdrawing, only to have to engage in the "surge" in order to try to set the stage for that. The stage never set, even though the surge was successful. President Trump started the withdrawal in his waning days of office. President Biden didn't have to complete it.
He still doesn't.
He's going to, even though he shouldn't.
Inflation is also now ramping up distressingly, a lot of which is due to the impact of the Coronavirus Recession abating. That origin isn't his fault, but violently hurling cash at the economy at this point is going to make it worse. Economist have been warning against this, and not warning against it at the same time, as that's how they are, but that's where we're headed.
That needs to be addressed, and immediately, by the President as well. But the temptation to buy everything possible seems to have the Democrats, and even some Republicans, like toddlers in a candy store.
The southern border with Mexico is in complete utter disarray and being flooded with deluded illegal migrants who believe that the US is the answer to all of their problems. Like it or not, this problem was much more under control during the Trump administration. Biden virtually declared the border open before he was even President, and this disaster resulted. It's not being adequately addressed.
There's a lot that needs to be addressed in the nation. The January 6 insurrection put a rift in the population like none other. But events develop due to what a President does and doesn't do, some of which are well outside of their personal control. Wilson didn't want World War One, but he got it. Lyndon Johnson hoped to build a Great Society, but he got Vietnam.
Great, or at least adequate, Presidents rise to the occasion and look the problems in the eye and act on them, and hope to get back to their real focus. Probably Roosevelt and Truman give us the best relatively recent modern examples of that. Johnson might give us the worst.
Things aren't looking too good right now.
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