The Biden Administration’s Afghanistan Revisionism Exposed

In the months leading up to Joe Biden’s catastrophically botched withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the president and his subordinates insisted that their hands were tied. It was Donald Trump, after all, who negotiated an agreement with the Taliban that simply had to culminate in an American pullout from Central Asia. That line became even more central to the Democratic Party’s talking points after the withdrawal devolved into a bloody national humiliation. Somehow, it was all Trump’s fault.

“It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself, but it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something,” Biden said on April 14, 2021, in defense of his stubborn devotion to the terms scratched out by his predecessor. As the American position in Afghanistan imploded, Biden leaned hard into the notion that he had been shackled to a bad deal. “I had only one alternative,” Biden said in the immediate aftermath of the Abbey Gate massacre: “to send thousands more troops back into Afghanistan to fight a war that we had already won, relative to the reason why we went in the first place.” Biden’s allies wielded the deal the Trump administration produced with the Taliban in Doha like a “get out of jail free” card whenever their wisdom came into question. And by the third year of Biden’s term, Trump’s responsibility for the mess the administration engineered in Afghanistan had become an inviolable tenet of the faith. “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” a 2023 Biden administration summary of the withdrawal read.

About the Author

Noah Rothman

Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review. His third book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence, was published by Hachette in May 2026.

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In the months leading up to Joe Biden’s catastrophically botched withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the president and his subordinates insisted that their hands were tied. It was Donald Trump, after all, who negotiated an agreement with the Taliban that simply had to culminate in an American pullout from Central Asia. That line became even more central to the Democratic Party’s talking points after the withdrawal devolved into a bloody national humiliation. Somehow, it was all Trump’s fault.

“It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself, but it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something,” Biden said on April 14, 2021, in defense of his stubborn devotion to the terms scratched out by his predecessor. As the American position in Afghanistan imploded, Biden leaned hard into the notion that he had been shackled to a bad deal. “I had only one alternative,” Biden said in the immediate aftermath of the Abbey Gate massacre: “to send thousands more troops back into Afghanistan to fight a war that we had already won, relative to the reason why we went in the first place.” Biden’s allies wielded the deal the Trump administration produced with the Taliban in Doha like a “get out of jail free” card whenever their wisdom came into question. And by the third year of Biden’s term, Trump’s responsibility for the mess the administration engineered in Afghanistan had become an inviolable tenet of the faith. “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” a 2023 Biden administration summary of the withdrawal read.

About the Author

Noah Rothman

Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review. His third book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence, was published by Hachette in May 2026.