In his 2014 autobiography, Robert Gates, who spent three decades at the CIA and served as secretary of defense in the Bush II and Obama administrations, wrote that Vice President Joe Biden had “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Failure falling upward, Biden was president in 2021 when Gates added Biden’s “naive” cut-and-run retreat from Afghanistan to misjudgments such as opposing “every one of Ronald Reagan’s military programs to contest the Soviet Union,” not forgetting the 1990 Gulf War, the 2007 “surge” in Iraq, and the 2009 surge in Afghanistan.