My Views On Joe And The Dunning-Kruger Effect Are Vindicated!

The New York Post has a story about a new book, The Last Politician by Franklin Foer, due out Sept. 5, which is excerpted at The Atlantic behind a paywall. The title of the Atlantic excerpt is "The Final Days", which is clearly meant to echo the title of a 1976 book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that covered the end of Nixon's time in the White House. We'll have to see how that goes, but it's intriguing to say the least that the publishers would choose to hitchhike on that story.

Foer's book actually covers the decisionmaking process by which Joe Biden overrode his military and diplomatic advisers and ordered the precipitous withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan as of August 30-31, 2021. As deescibed in the Post story,

President Biden overestimated his own competence in foreign affairs ahead of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, making unhelpful and impractical suggestions while displaying a “swaggering faith in himself” that left his administration unprepared for the devastating chaos of the evacuation of Kabul, according to a forthcoming book.

In “The Last Politician,” due out Sept. 5, and excerpted by The Atlantic Tuesday, magazine staff writer Franklin Foer says the 80-year-old commander-in-chief “exhibited determination, even stubbornness, despite furious criticism from the establishment figures whose approval he usually craved” over his decision to end the US presence in Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, after two decades.

As far as I can tell, neither the book nor the Post's story about it mentions the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. I've been arguing for some time that this is a good explanation for Biden's approach to life, and the depictions in the Post's story illustrate how well the theory fits Joe's behavior:

“One aide recalled that he would say, ‘You foreign policy guys, you think this is all pretty complicated. But it’s just like family dynamics,'” Foer wrote of Biden, adding that in the president’s assessment: “Foreign affairs was sometimes painful, often futile, but really it was emotional intelligence applied to people with names that were difficult to pronounce.”

“Diplomacy, in Biden’s view, was akin to persuading a pain-in-the-ass uncle to stop drinking so much,” Foer added.

Biden’s commitment to his wisdom continued through the hectic evacuation mission, as he reportedly “would pepper [then-Ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass] with ideas for squeezing more evacuees through the gates” of the airport, most of which were all but impossible given the circumstances on the ground.

. . . “Bass would kick around Biden’s proposed solutions with colleagues to determine their plausibility, which was usually low.”

Consider, though, that Biden's attempts to control his own family dynamics had already proved comically futile, as on several occasions immediately prior to his presidential run, he'd had to send members of his former vice presidential secret service detail out to clean up after the escapades of his pain-in-the-ass crackhead son.

In fact, Joe's insistence on the ill-conceived withdrawal probably influenced Putin's decision to invade Ukraine seven months later, calculating that Biden would either be unwilling to offer any resistance, direct or indirect, or too inept to direct any that he might decide to put up. Biden's reported offer to Zelensky of a flight out of Kyiv after the invasion would confirm this attitude, if true, but the full circumstances of what happened are murky.

Nevertheless, according to the Post,

“When it came to foreign policy,” Foer added, “Joe Biden possessed a swaggering faith in himself.”

So strong was that faith that Biden, once described by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates as having been “wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades,” viewed experienced diplomats and pundits as “risk adverse, beholden to institutions [and] lazy in their thinking,” according to the book.

The impression I have is that in recent weeks, in his vacations in Delaware and Lake Tahoe, Joe has withdrawn even from his White House circle of advisers and is relying incresingly on Hunter. The difficulty is that Hunter is addicted to cocaine, whose effect is to produce temporary feelings of omnipotence and grandeur, which is just the sort of thing Joe shouldn't be exposed to.

This confirms my view that Joe's shortcomings arise not from a medical condiction but from his character, which is driven by a long-held belief that he's the smartest guy in the room. I don't see a good prognosis here.