Historian Victor Davis Hanson has described Joe Biden‘s botched Afghanistan withdrawal as the United States’ “greatest humiliation since Saigon” — when North Vietnamese troops captured the South Vietnamese capital as U.S. forces fled.
Hanson’s comments came during an interview with Nigel Farage on UK news channel GBNews. Hanson pointed to the withdrawal as the moment Americans — and world leaders — started to view Biden as weak.
“Prior to August 2021, he was polling around 53-54 percent approval. That immediately went down to 42 percent,” Hanson noted. “The American people saw it as a disaster. We had just spent $400 million at Bagram with the biggest airbase in Central Asia, which would give us all sorts of options with Iran, China or Russia,” he continued.
“We could have watched the Taliban and the way they were behaving and we fled in the greatest humiliation since Saigon. We left our allies hanging without notice. We left thousands of American contractors, tens of thousands of sympathetic Afghans who were murdered or are sought out.”
Hanson also suggested that Biden’s display of weakness in Afghanistan influenced Vladimir Putin‘s decision to invade Ukraine.
“We left all this hardware that’s now appearing all over the world,” Hanson said. “Also terrorist contracts. Our enemies thought, ‘if they’re going to do that, they’re not going to do anything to us,'” he continued. “Almost immediately, Putin had mass troops on the border. We heard Biden say that if he goes in it’s a minor offensive, there will be no consequences.”