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       U.S. President Joe Biden walks from the podium after speaking about Afghanistan from the East Room of the White House on Aug. 16, 2021, in Washington. The President said he was forced to choose between withdrawing or escalating the conflict.

       Evan Vucci/The Associated Press

       Pummelled by critics, embarrassed by events, with his credibility eroded abroad and his judgment questioned at home, U.S. President Joe Biden Monday undertook one of the most difficult moves on the balance beam of high-risk, big-power politics: moving from the defensive to the offensive.

       One of those manoeuvres on display in an improvisational East Room appearance Monday afternoon as the situation deteriorated in Afghanistan was the political equivalent of a back handspring, with the President arguing that the unacceptable was unavoidable. And as the situation was moving from grave to disastrous in faraway Kabul, Mr. Biden in essence contended that the incalculable – the diplomatic threat to American prestige, to say nothing of the mortal threat to America’s many handlers and allies in Afghanistan – was inevitable.

       The President said he was “squarely behind” the withdrawal and added that it was “wrong” to order U.S. troops to fight when Afghanistan’s “own armed forces would not.”

       By announcing American withdrawal from Afghanistan Mr. Biden thought he was extricating himself, and the United States, from a problem that seemed to never go away. Instead he prompted a political, and perhaps a moral and civil-liberties, disaster for himself, and the United States, that will not soon go away.

       Canada working ‘closely’ with allies on evacuation from Kabul amid ‘extremely fluid’ situation, Trudeau says

       Nor will the scenes of horror at the Kabul airport, a sad echo of the hasty Vietnam departure from the Saigon embassy rooftop 46 years earlier, but with a different poignancy only four weeks from the 20th anniversary of yet another tragic element of evidence of American powerlessness, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

       This time the desperate clung not to a helicopter but to a giant jet, the symbol both of the modernity spurned by the Taliban and of the implements employed by the al-Qaeda attackers that began the American adventure in Afghanistan, where the terrorist attacks were planned in the first place.

       The President, clearly the victim of faulty intelligence but also of his own determination to extricate the United States from Central Asia, said he was forced to choose between withdrawing or escalating the conflict “and lurching into the third decade” of American involvement there.

       “If anything,” the President argued, “the developments of the past week reinforce that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.”

       Mr. Biden said earlier this summer that he believed it was extremely unlikely the Taliban would overrun the country with the kind of brutal efficiency they employed in recent days. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday the Taliban takeover occurred “more quickly than we anticipated” – a characterization Mr. Biden related word for word Monday.

       Mr. Biden’s remarks that there is “never a good time to withdraw American forces” wrenched attention away, if only for a moment, from the unfolding televised events, a drama that almost certainly will shape a presidency that was born in battling over his legitimacy that spilled over into an insurrection. Moreover, he has, in seven fevered months, struggled to govern in a period dominated by a pandemic, disputes over vaccines, conflict in the Middle East and domestic struggles in Congress.

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       At the same time, on the sidelines, there has been the hectoring and second-guessing of his 2020 opponent, Donald J. Trump, who has undertaken a rearguard attack by a defeated incumbent president rivalled only by the Depression-era critiques Herbert Hoover issued against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The attacks continued this week, with Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. tweeting out a #WheresBiden hashtag, though his father, when president, had ordered a May 1 withdrawal.

       This time the withering criticism is coming from the elite slice of American civic life, with Democrats no less unsparing in their fury than Republicans. The reaction among the public, at least tentatively and measured before the images of chaos were distributed online and on television, was muted. About three-quarters of Americans polled by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs registered their support for the withdrawal.

       “This is not in our national interest,” Mr. Biden said. “It is not what the American people want.”

       Mr. Biden noted that the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was conducted under four presidents, two Democrats and two Republicans. “I will not pass this responsibility to a fifth president.”

       No matter. A similar argument, involving five presidents, did Gerald Ford no good when, in 1975, the American extrication from Vietnam was completed in disgrace.

       “Washington’s influence in the world had sunk to one of its lowest points in the Cold War,” the political scientist Thomas Noer wrote in a retrospective in the Presidential Studies Quarterly in 1993.

       American involvement in the War of 1812, which included forays into Canada and the British burning of the White House, became known as Mr. Madison’s War after a famous pamphlet describing what John Lowell, a self-described “New-England farmer,” characterized as “an offensive and ruinous war.”

       The beginning of a U.S. invasion of the country will always be known as Mr. Bush’s War, though Barack Obama was an enthusiastic prosecutor of the combat there. But the end will be part of Mr. Biden’s legacy forever.

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