It’s been a sobering fortnight for fans of America’s septuagenarian president. Even before he took office, Joe Biden was telling the world ‘America is back’ – a refrain he repeatedly returned to both in official speeches and on his personal Twitter account. But as the scenes of Afghanistan’s rapid collapse have appeared on timelines and televisions across the West, such confident assertions have curiously disappeared from the rhetoric of the supposed ‘leader of the free world.’
The embattled Democrat has repeatedly refused to extend the timetable of America’s withdrawal ahead of the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 despite the failure to evacuate all those Afghan’s most at risk of reprisals. Below Steerpike charts seven times the 78-year old president told his people that he would reverse the perceived drift and decline of America’s foreign policy under the leadership of his predecessor Donald Trump.
In the aftermath of the G7 summit, 20 June 2021:
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