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“At a certain point of time, the White House may not even remember about its supporters in Kyiv,” said Nikolai Patrushev, Vladimir Putin’s top national security advisor, in an interview. He added that Ukrainians shouldn’t rely on Americans because one day they would abandon it just as they did Afghanistan.  

The Global Times, which often asks as a mouthpiece for China’s leadership, played up the notion of U.S. unreliability in a Monday editorial: “Once a war breaks out in the Taiwan Straits, the island’s defense will collapse in hours, and the US military won’t come to help.” 

Wrote the Chinese state news agency Xinhua: “Following the blows of the global financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, the decay of the American hegemony has become an undisputed reality. Its failure in Afghanistan is another turning point in that spiral fall.”

It is unsurprising that Russia and China would make the most out of Afghanistan in their psychological operations and propaganda. More concerning, though, are the doubts among America’s staunchest allies. Many of them had been deeply relieved by Biden’s election. Now they complain that their countries, some of whom had troops in Afghanistan dependent on U.S. partnership, weren’t consulted ahead of Biden’s April announcement of troop withdrawal.

As disturbing as Trump’s rhetoric toward allies was, his administration’s actions were often reassuring. The opposite is true in the case of the Biden administration, where the rhetoric has been reassuring but the unilateral actions unsettling, said one European ambassador.

Lord George Robertson, who was NATO secretary general when the alliance on September 12, 2001, invoked Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty for the first time, declaring that the terrorist attack a day earlier on the United States would be seen as an attack on all 19 countries in the alliance.

“There was a moment of unique solidarity,” he said at the Atlantic Council on Friday. “I felt proud of the organization I had the privilege of leading at the time. My sentiment this week is the opposite. I don’t feel proud. I feel ashamed, because that solidarity seems to have gone. The principle of we all go in (to Afghanistan) together and we all come out together seems to have been completely lost.”

He spoke of how everything accomplished over the past two decades was at risk – the elimination of the terrorist threat, the education of women and girls and advances toward, if not a Western democracy, a more civilized and tolerant Afghanistan normality.

The alliance solidarity of that time, Lord Robertson said, “has been crushed by the unilateralism of the United States president, and I regret that because I’ve known Joe Biden for many, many years, and a man of wisdom and talent he is. But this act of recklessness has prejudiced and weakened NATO in ways from which we’re going to find it difficult to recover.”

In December, shortly after Biden’s election as president, I argued, “Joe Biden has that rarest of opportunities that history provides: the chance to be a transformative foreign-policy president.

That was true because of Covid and its global economic threat. It was true because of the need to better manage relations with China. Most of all it was true because U.S. allies were eager to turn the page on the Trump administration and restore common cause among leading democracies.

It never struck me at the time that Afghanistan could emerge as the biggest obstacle to Biden’s ability to play that historic role. But that’s where we find ourselves today.

Biden must bring competence and humanity to Afghan evacuation efforts. He’s got to manage the aftermath of Taliban takeover and potential terrorist threat, all while facing the generational challenge from China and authoritarian resurgence.

He should start by making it clear through actions, not just rhetoric, that he intends to work closely on all matters of common concern – whether it’s framing China policy or Taliban engagement — with the allies he neglected on his way out of Afghanistan.   

Frederick Kempe is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Atlantic Council.