Any story of nemesis has its roots in hubris, and there’s much hubris to go around in the 20 years of American engagement with Afghanistan.

But as a lesson in the tragic cost of vanity, not much can top the spectacle we have witnessed in the past few weeks: an administration so steeped in self-belief, so driven by self-confidence, so disastrously misled by the vain order it imagined it could impose on the world; a hubris now paid for not in a high-level resignation or even an expression of contrition, but in the lives of American troops, lions again sacrificed to save the faces of the donkeys who lead them.

Biden hubris is a perfect example of the genre: the team of strategic geniuses, lauded by their fellow so-called experts, by allies and above all by themselves, as the smartest guys in the room, the “grown-ups” back to clear up the mess left by those terrible naïfs who preceded them.