Robert Gates, who served as secretary of Defense in the Obama-Biden administration, famously disparaged Joe Biden’s 40-year involvement in foreign policy before he became president: “He has been wrong on nearly every major issue.”

Biden himself has confessed to poor judgment, in opposing the forcible ejection of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990 and supporting his removal from Iraq in 2002.

The core problem for Biden has been in understanding the respective roles of diplomacy and military force in the exercise of American power, both to protect its critical national interests and those of its allies and strategic partners. Except for his administration’s sensible adoption of his predecessor’s transformative policy on China and Taiwan, Biden’s career-long paucity of sound judgment has carried into his presidency.

He largely followed Donald Trump’s ill-considered approach to Afghanistan, where they both condemned what they called the “forever war.” He took a flawed Trump agreement with the Taliban and made it even worse. His precipitous and shameful abandonment of the Afghan government, military and people was a strategic and humanitarian disaster. It severely damaged U.S. credibility in the eyes of friends and foes alike and accelerated the aggressive planning of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Russia was the first to act on the perception that the new sheriff in town was weak, confused and manipulable. Vladimir Putin had already gotten away with invading and occupying Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, when the Obama-Biden administration ignored the greatest act of aggression in Europe since the Nazi invasions in World War II. Barack Obama fulfilled his promise to Putin in 2012 to be “more flexible after my reelection,” and he forgot his........

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