This month is a difficult one for a generation of our nation’s finest who gave their best years to a twenty year war that ended in tragedy. Three years ago, the current administration executed a plan to withdraw from Afghanistan. The act perpetuated Joe Biden’s 40-year streak of being “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue of the past four decades” in the words of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. 

It shows. Our most reliable foreign partners are hedging against America’s support, all of our adversaries laid out in our National Security and Defense Strategies have grown independently stronger themselves, and also together, and last year’s authoritative Armed Conflict Survey showed that there are more armed conflicts around the world today than any time in three decades.

40 years is quite an arc of failures in foreign policy. As veterans, we’ve sat at the pinnacle of foreign policy catastrophes for the last three and half years, watching the exponential effect of one disaster after another asking ourselves, “how can it get any worse?” 

We’re about to find out. Kamala Harris will reveal her plans for how America will act in the world. If we are to believe mainstream media’s mass psychological conditioning, our vice president “has been much more involved in foreign policy than we realize.” That’s nothing to take credit for.

Three years ago this month, Kabul fell to the Taliban. What happened next was nothing short of absolute chaos that resulted in 13 US servicemembers and hundreds of Afghans dead in a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate, more than 50,000 unvetted Afghans lost somewhere in the United States, and more than 1,200 American citizens left in Afghanistan with an absent State Department that meandered their way to evacuating them to safety. The word “Afghanistan” was not mentioned in President Biden’s State of the Union address in early 2022 and the White House Press Secretary gave exactly zero substantial answers regarding Afghanistan for months following August 31st. We are made to forget the entire thing, like it was one big, bad dream. As much as a generation of military veterans and humanitarians would like to forget those life-altering months working to get Americans and our allies out of Afghanistan, we cannot.

The only thing that saved the Biden Administration from answering tough questions on Afghanistan was another crisis — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal precipitated President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and emboldened Iran and its terrorist proxies to conduct the worst terrorist attack on Israeli civilians. The United States is still the shining city on the hill, but another four years of President Biden’s foreign policy “surrogate” may taint the metaphor.

We await Harris’s foreign policy outlook, but a generation of military veterans and foreign policy onlookers should view any plans with skepticism after the last three and half years.

A Pew Research Center poll found 60 percent of veterans, Republicans and Democrats, viewed President Biden’s handling of Afghanistan as “poor.” More than that, active-duty servicemembers voted with their feet following the withdrawal. Retention dropped off after August of 2021 and recruiting has not been able to sustain previous strength.

Former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster recently said “I think the value of the success…of Trump’s foreign policies and approaches to national security only became apparent to many Americans after Biden reversed them.” 

As many military and intelligence community veterans seethe over unanswered questions about Afghanistan this month, one question we must ask ourselves, “would a President Harris be any better?” I know my answer.

David Cook served a decade on active duty as a special operations non-commissioned officer and is the executive director of the Special Operations Association of America.