In politics, sometimes it’s riskier to keep a promise than break one

In both Biden’s Afghanistan pullout and the court majority’s Roe reversal, sympathetic insiders tried to dissuade the decision-makers. Biden’s military advisers proposed a residual U.S. and NATO force; Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. urged his fellow conservatives to limit Roe, not overrule it.

As temporizers often do, these argued that their approach would buy stability: Biden’s generals said even a few Western boots on the ground would help the Kabul government survive; Roberts told colleagues his approach would avoid “a serious jolt to the legal system.”

In each case, the response was, in effect, “Let’s get on with it.” “There was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces,” Biden said. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the court majority that Roberts’s “quest for a middle way would only put off the day when we would be forced to confront the question we now decide.”