Among these horrors, a more indirect upshot of these past days has understandably been overlooked: America’s abject failure in Afghanistan also serves as an indictment of a theory that stands at the heart of Joe Biden’s foreign policy.

Worried about the popularity of Donald Trump’s attacks on America’s foreign commitments—including its presence in Afghanistan—key players in Washington have, over the past few years, embraced the idea of a “foreign policy for the middle class.” To win public support for America’s role as a guarantor of the liberal international order, and to stop authoritarian populists like Donald Trump from winning elections, those who backed this approach argued, the country would need to abandon unpopular missions such as that in Afghanistan and focus on actions that directly boost the pocketbooks of ordinary Americans.

But the first important test of this policy has now shown that it is likely to fail. Far from making a Trump comeback less likely, the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan has perilously reinforced the impression that the country’s traditional elites are too weak and incompetent to be trusted with power. If the Biden administration is to avert similar disasters in the years to come, it must abandon the framework through which it now views American foreign policy.