A U.S. Chinook helicopter flies over the American Embassy in Kabul, Aug. 15.

Photo: Rahmat Gul/Associated Press

Joe Biden became Jimmy Carter on Sunday. On Monday he confirmed it in a speech doubling down on the decision that has given us the debacle unfolding in Afghanistan.

Years after President Carter departed the Oval Office, his name still remains a synonym for weak and inept. This reputation was cemented forever on Nov. 4, 1979, when Islamist students overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 American hostages. One year later to the day, Mr. Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan.

For President Biden and his team, the analogies to President Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis might be even more unsettling than the obvious parallels to the 1975 fall of Saigon they are working so hard to deny. 

When the rescue mission Mr. Carter ordered in April 1980 ended up aborted with five airmen and three Marines killed—and the wreckage of U.S. aircraft lying in an Iranian desert—it only made him look more pathetic. A New York Times headline two weeks before the election summed up the Iranian crisis as “a metaphor for American weakness.”

Mr. Biden now owns the weakness. Yes, Donald Trump wanted out and negotiated a deal with the Taliban. But Mr. Biden is president, and the problem isn’t simply the withdrawal but the shockingly naive way he carried it out. All done, moreover, so he could score political points by using the coming 20th anniversary of 9/11 to portray himself as the man who ended America’s longest war. 

But the Taliban understand metaphors too, and they have always invoked Vietnam as evidence that the U.S. doesn’t have the stomach for the long haul. Going forward, 9/11 will be their day of victory and celebration over America. And just as Americans still cringe at Mr. Carter’s errors when they hear the name Islamic Republic of Iran, they will remember that Mr. Biden presided over the rebirth of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.


Weakness unfortunately begets weakness, and Mr. Carter’s problem wasn’t limited to the Iranian students. Everyone walked all over him. Less than two months after the students had taken the Americans hostages, the Soviet Union surprised Mr. Carter by their Christmas Eve invasion of Afghanistan.

The greatest difference between Mr. Biden and Mr. Carter is that it took the latter years to earn his reputation for lacking spine. By the time the Iranian students acted, Mr. Carter was already low in the polls, looking impotent in the face of inflation and gasoline lines. Though his standing nearly doubled to 61% in a Gallup poll taken right after the embassy seizure—likely thanks to an initial instinct to rally around the president—it steadily declined as the hostages remained in Iran and Mr. Carter’s negotiations proved fruitless.

Before Kabul’s fall, Mr. Biden’s approval was polling at roughly 50%. When he started down the road of withdrawal, he did so believing that the American people, tired of 20 years of war, wouldn’t care much about what happened after we left. But public opinion can change quickly. Americans don’t like looking pathetic before the world, and any rerun of the barbarities visited on the people the last time the Taliban held power will be held against him.

For now the Biden effort is focused on denying that this is anything like the devastating loss of U.S. credibility and disaster that was the 1975 Saigon. “This is manifestly not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted on Sunday.

His words echo those of his boss from only a month ago, when Mr. Biden denied any parallel to Vietnam and declared: “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy.” One suspects that the one unequivocal order amid this weekend’s chaos was to direct U.S. helicopter pilots evacuating people at our Kabul embassy to land anywhere but the rooftop, lest the press get a photo that would say it all.

No doubt the next few days will see more Biden administration officials shoved before microphones to deny any talk of a “Saigon moment.” But it is likely to have the opposite effect, with Americans hearing those words as they watch images of helicopters hovering over the embassy in Kabul, Taliban troops lounging in the Afghan presidential palace, and crowds of desperate Afghan allies who had placed their trust in Uncle Sam.

The more common reaction to this disaster is likely to resemble that of Ryan Crocker, Barack Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan: “I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about [Mr. Biden’s] ability to lead our nation as commander in chief. To have read this so wrong—or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care.”

In the history books, the stink of our second Saigon will hang over Mr. Biden’s legacy. But with more than three years left to his presidency, the idea that we have another Jimmy Carter at the helm may be even scarier. Especially if that is the read in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran.

Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.

As thousands attempt to flee Taliban rule, Joe Biden tries to duck responsibility for his calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Images: AP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition