In the spring of 1999, when the government of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had killed tens of thousands of citizens of the former Yugoslavia and forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands more, the Western European democracies turned to America to order NATO to use its armed forces, principally those of the United States, to stop him. This might have been regarded as "Europe's problem," occurring on European soil. With the United Nations even more neutered than usual and their own governments either incapable of acting or politically unwilling to do so, Europe asked President Bill Clinton to put an end to what Clinton rightfully called "deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide."

Our allies were unenthusiastic about alienating the protesters who lined the streets of European capitals to protest what the left called American "aggression." Since it was the Americans who were intervening to halt a humanitarian disaster, the intervention was inherently suspect. One comfortable academic at a Geneva cocktail party that spring had our motivations all figured out. "This is about expanding American markets," she sniffed, leaving her interlocutor puzzled about the extent of American exports to Kosovo.

The grim, humiliating footage of America's withdrawal from Afghanistan has triggered the familiar melange of superciliousness and schadenfreude overseas. America is blamed for what it does, blamed for what it does not do.

It is blamed for what it cannot do, even though no one else can do it either. It is blamed for intervening and for not intervening. It is blamed for invading, and it is blamed for withdrawing.

The collapse of Afghanistan is a political boon for Republicans, who get to claim that the scenes on the ground have undermined America's ability to project strength. They are right: They do.

But to say that Republicans are ill-positioned to point blame for the erosion of American credibility is the understatement of the millennium. It was their own Dear Leader who left no cringeworthy proclamation behind in sucking up unsuccessfully to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. "He wrote me beautiful letters, and they're great letters," swooned former President Donald Trump about his Kiss the Posterior campaign to woo the butcher of Pyongyang. "We fell in love."

It was Trump who gave Saudi Arabia a pass for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It was Trump who, at the bidding of Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, sold out our Kurdish allies, who fought the Islamic State group so courageously. It was Trump who so debased our country by coddling Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin despite the latter's declaration of war against our democracy.

And it was Trump who, as conservative Republican Rep. Liz Cheney put it, negotiated a "surrender agreement" with the Taliban, bringing about the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners and otherwise acceding to the terrorist group's con job.

But President Joe Biden's declaration that "America is back" seems open to ridicule. This is so even if the fundamentals of his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan have been confirmed by the rapid disintegration of the Afghan government, which was unworthy of further investment after over a trillion dollars' worth of American support. There is no sugarcoating it: Asking the Taliban if it would pretty-please permit Americans to get to the airport so they could escape is miserable in substance and miserable optically. The images of Afghans who risked their lives placing their trust in the United States, only to have to plead not to be abandoned, are likewise miserable, all but gutting the new administration's efforts to revive American credibility after a four-year clown show. And we are in for more, including the mass brutalization of Afghan women and the likely resurgence of the Islamic State group, al-Qaida or some witches' brew of jihadi spinoffs.

The finger-pointing is predictable and useless. The importance to our national security of an America that projects strength, credibility and, yes, power, is real. It's time for the adults remaining in the room to focus on putting those pieces back together, and quickly.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

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