But it’s coming true with Biden.

And historians will never stop wondering what could have induced the 46th president of the United States to commit such a grievous error.

Is it the naïveté of a politician lacking any sense of history or tragedy, the one who took the Taliban at their word when they assured us of their peaceful intentions in Doha in February 2020?

Is it the cynicism of a president already looking ahead to his re-election and pandering to those in swing-states who are said to be fed up with “endless wars”?

Is it an effect of a swing of the pendulum between the four major poles of American diplomacy laid out by Walter Russell Mead: Wilsonianism and its democratic messianism; Jeffersonianism and its hard and fast isolationism; Jacksonianism and its reflex to give tit for tat, but only when US interests appear directly targeted; and Hamiltonianism and the formulation, so dear to France’s Montesquieu, that America’s only truly vital interests were those of peaceful commerce?

Or is this a new pole altogether? One pioneered by Barack Obama in August 2013, when he declined to enforce the red line that he had said would be irretrievably crossed if the Syrian leader resorted to the use of chemical weapons against his own citizens? The one at work when, without warning or any shred of moral or strategic interest, Donald Trump abandoned his country’s Kurdish allies, first in Iraq when he allowed the pro-Iranian militias to invade Kirkuk, then in Syria when he allowed Erdogan’s murderous proxies to enter Rojava? The one brought to its culmination in the present Afghan rout, this abject display of open desertion being broadcast live to the world and punctuated, as I write, by scenes of panic and chaos at Kabul airport that could easily be mistaken for those in Saigon in 1975?

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Is it, in other words, the consolidation of a trend that I first sensed almost twenty years ago, when writing American Vertigo and later developed in The Empire and the Five Kings? Gone the great power, which has jettisoned its dreams of exceptionalism, its ambition to be a shining city upon a hill! Broken, the gracious Virgilian thread that made the invention of America a new Aeneid whose mission was no longer to rebuild Troy in Rome or Rome on a grand scale in Europe, but to reinvent Europe with improvements! Onward toward a new pre-Columbian order in which the old empire, in retreat, no longer counts and makes way for the latter-day reincarnations of the Ottoman Empire, Greater Persia, Great Russia, Imperial China, and, as here, the new Ummah made possible by a radical misreading of the Koran!

It is too early to know for certain.

And each of these explanations is at least partially true.

But the time has come for a review of accounts.

And that review shows that what the most pessimistic of us feared must be booked not just as a loss but as an abomination in three parts:

1. The wolves are through the gate

They are hunting down the supporters of republican government and institutions, as well as my journalist friends from Tolo News.

They are sending women back to their fabric prisons after many thousands of them had tasted dignity and become accustomed to gender equality and the freedom to show their faces.

Sharia is the law of the land.

Lists of suspects, banned and “wanted” people are being posted at the entrances to neighbourhoods, sounding an ominous clarion call.

Islamic tribunals will soon be operating at full speed, with their absurd crimes and atrocious punishments.

And the scenes of stoning that have been filmed over the past few months in remote villages will be reenacted live in Herat, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, sites of high civilisation where the descendants of horsemen and poets had begun to embrace the democratic dream.

A people are in agony.

The triumph of a strain of barbarism that, twenty years ago, the great democracies and their Afghan allies easily defeated and whose legions of rabble on motorbikes are no more formidable today than they were back then.

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And of naïveté, when the American administration, speaking through national security adviser Jake Sullivan, adds credulity to dishonour by accepting the Taliban’s word that it is ready to “protect” civilians seeking to be evacuated from the country while offering dubious evidence of good intentions.

Worse than a crime, this is a mistake.

And, worse than a mistake, it is a stain.

A stain on the term of Joe Biden, whose first dramatic error this is.

But also, in a greater sense, this stain dishonours the modern conscience. It will take a long time for that conscience to forget this failure, this shame.

2. And what of the United States?

Already devalued by the sacrifice of the Kurds on the altar of appeasement, first toward Iran (the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq) and then toward Turkey (the Kurds in Syria), the word of the United States is suddenly worth nothing.

Imagine you are a Ukrainian in Donbass battling, in the trenches of Luhansk or Donetsk, pro-Russian separatists and mercenaries in the pay of the Kremlin.

An Armenian in Nagorno-Karabakh who has learned that the resentment of those pining for a return of the Ottoman Empire and denying the genocide of their ancestors knows no bounds or limitations.

Or a Taiwanese, South Korean or even a Japanese sensing the nearby presence of the iron jaw of Chinese totalitarianism just waiting to bite.

To say nothing of the Balts, the Poles, the Czechs — of Europeans, in other words — who had been living, like the generation of the founders of Europe, in the belief that venerable old treaties protected them and ensured their security.

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What do they all think of this self-inflicted Saigon? This geopolitical suicide? How can they avoid ruminating on the betrayal and massacre of Carthage’s Punic allies, as recounted by Gustave Flaubert in his novel Salammbô, when confronted with this spectacle, this disarray in a diplomatic system that has made the inexplicable choice, just weeks before the anniversary of September 11, of returning Afghanistan to the terrorists on a silver platter and allowing them to build a nest for the vipers of the new Al-Qaeda and their ilk? When confronted, yes, with the direct, deliberate and slow-motion abandonment of a people who, like the Kurds, were our rampart against radical Islam and protected the world from terrorism? Under the circumstances, how is it possible not to conclude that if Putin, Erdogan or Xi got it in his head to fill part of the void created by the American retreat there would be no one to oppose him?

Dizzying.

An Afghan Anschluss.

Munich on all fronts.

And even if one must be wary of comparing the incomparable, this is truly terrible.

3. But then, there is Panjshir

There remains, living in his homeland of Panjshir, one young man, Ahmad Massoud, son of the legendary Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who, in his day, embodied the struggle against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and who was assassinated two days before September 11.

A few days ago, just a few hours after the fall of Kabul, the young Ahmad Massoud was able to elude the hired killers sent to track him down.

Knowing that if they captured him, he might suffer the same fate as his illustrious father, he did exactly what his father had done, a little less than twenty-five years ago, after the first fall of Kabul, when he managed to get hold of one of the last old helicopters that the Taliban had not yet taken over and took refuge in his bastion in Panjshir, above the Shomali Plain, to organise the Afghan resistance.

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He wrote to me from his native village on Monday (16 August), several hours after rejoining his commanders.

“We find ourselves,” he wrote, “in the situation of Europe in 1940.”

The debacle is complete, he continued.

The spirit of collaboration is all around us.

Subjugation is closing in with sound and fury.

As Kabul groans, as the villages of the north and south are put in chains, vengeance is unfurling over our wounded land.

But despite reversal and even catastrophe, all is not lost, he told me.

With my Mujahideen, I intend to resume the struggle.

I call on all free women and men in the world, friends of Afghanistan old and young, to join us in spirit.

I call on all free fighters from all over the country, whatever their origin or ethnicity, to come to our valleys.

Already, he continued, groups of brave citizens are moving to the front with their creed, their bravery, and their antique rifles and grenade launchers.

I welcome them!

They will be — we will be — the living faces of the Resistance, and, soon enough, of the counteroffensive.

Free Afghanistan has lost Kabul, but it has not lost the war.

Massoud’s words were the words of the Spanish republicans in 1936.

Of Czech president Beneš in 1939 and of Alija Izetbegović, in 1992, at the height of the siege of Sarajevo, when he gave me a dramatic message to pass on to French president François Mitterrand.

Almost word for word, they are the words of General de Gaulle’s radio address to his defeated countrymen in June 1940, broadcast from London, in which he urged them not to submit but to continue to fight.

Except that the Afghans were betrayed, the young Massoud pointed out. Betrayed but not defeated. And they were not defeated because their leadership, their generals, did not even take them into battle.

* * *

I know this young man, just as I knew his father.

I have done numerous video interviews in the mountains of Panjshir, where, for a year, Massoud has been quietly preparing for the worst and stockpiling arms, equipment and supplies, as his father had done.

I trust him.

I believe him when he says he inherited from his father the taste for freedom and the instinct of fighting to defend it.

I believe him when he insists that he has no choice and that the fight is now ineluctably his, body and soul.

I believe that when he issues a call for all free Afghans who love their country and reject servitude, whether living in Afghanistan or abroad, to join him, he is not only sincere but credible.

At my initiative, France’s President Macron received him at the Elysée Palace on April 5, 2021.

I was present at that meeting, where the best of France appeared to have a rendezvous with an heir to the noblest anti-totalitarian and anti-fascist struggles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

And I am convinced that, in the new Great Game that lies ahead, it is this young man whom France, Britain and the rest of Europe will have to support.

In this area of the world, he is the embodiment of the future and of hope.

Like so many French politicians of his generation, he had been a resistance fighter and then a highly decorated army officer. He had participated in the liberation of Paris, so his intimate funeral mass in the country church at Authon — albeit one presided over by the Bishop of Blois — felt like the end of an era in French history.

But it was the secular obsequies a week earlier in Paris for another famous figure, Daniel Cordier, that captured the world’s imagination. Cordier, who died aged 100, had been the secretary to Jean Moulin, the First President of the National Council of the Resistance who suffered death by torture at the hands of Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyon”, in 1943. Cordier had a fierce patriotism that evolved from a youthful interest in reactionary royalist politics into disgust with Pétain’s surrender in 1940. Three days after the capitulation, Cordier left France to join up with other Free Frenchmen to continue the fight against fascism. By 1942 he was parachuting into Montluçon as an intelligence operative of the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action.

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Cordier was afforded a full state funeral in Paris with both Presidents Macron and Hollande in attendance. The location for the ceremony was amid the austere grandeur of the cour d’honneur in Les Invalides, the setting for great moments in French history from the revolutions of 1789, to the unjust degradation (and subsequent rehabilitation) of Alfred Dreyfus, and the full state honours for that selfless officer of gendarmes, Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Beltrame.

Under an unsmiling bronze statue of Napoleon (itself made from Russian and Austrian guns captured at Austerlitz), a grand republican liturgy was conducted with Macron as the chief celebrant. To the slow beat of the black-clad-drums of the Garde Republicaine, Cordier’s tricoleur-draped coffin was borne into the square by ten officer cadets of the St Cyr Military Academy, whose vivid Second Empire uniforms and pantalon rouge recalled the glories of the army of Napoleon III, from the Malakoff to Solferino, and the countless fallen of Guise, and the Marne in 1914, when officers “thought it chic to die in white gloves”.

In fact, the whole spectacle — and the nearby tombs of Turenne, Bugeaud, Foch and Leclerc — is a rebuke to the tedious Anglocentric view that French military history is merely a litany of defeats. The deeds of Cordier and his confrères in redeeming the ignominy of 1940 are a refutation of that calumny alone. As was the record of those who fought under the Cross of Lorraine, from Bir Hakeim and Monte Cassino to the French First Army that crossed the both the Rhine (capturing Karlsruhe and Stuttgart) and then the Danube in 1945.

So too was the presence among Cordier’s mourners of the Chief of the French General Staff, François Lecointre — the man who led the French Army’s last bayonet charge when his unit cleared a bridge of Bosnian Serbs in 1995 — a reminder of the depth of the Gallic martial tradition, and France’s enduring role as a formidable military power.

Emmanuel Macron is clearly a frustrated thespian (he even married his former drama teacher), but he was born for moments like this. In a touching eulogy — in which he seemed to implicitly link the death of an anti-fascist like Cordier with what he has described as the need to defend the Enlightenment in a ‘struggle against barbarity and obscurantism’ — he remarked that Cordier was a man “with a taste for action and impetuous bravery”, whose life was “an adventure novel”, who nonetheless “always acted out of love: the love of freedom which justifies taking all risks; the love of beauty which led him to revere so many artists; the love of truth that made him write history”.

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But the most moving part of the ceremony came next when Macron, usually so loquacious, stood in dignified silence by the coffin as the French Army choir sang the “Chant des Partisans”, the great anthem of the Resistance.

Much like the startlingly homicidal verses of the Marseillaise itself — with all those references to blood-stained flags, cutting throats and watering the fields with (yet more) impure blood — the Partisans’ hymn is similarly sanguinary, including a call to “kill swiftly” with bullet and knife, and picturing “black blood drying on the roads under the sun”. And yet the moving line in the last verse ami, si tu tombes, un ami sort de l’ombre à ta place (“mate, if you go down, another one from the shadows takes your place”) speaks to the enduring power of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

As affecting as these lyrics are, there was something too about the unmistakably French faces of the choir, their beautifully precise diction, and the resonance of their voices amid those timeless surroundings that made their performance so emotionally powerful; a force multiplied still further as the camera kept cutting to an old man in a Foreign Legion green beret, sat in a wheelchair, seemingly lost in contemplation. He was the 100-year-old Hubert Germain — Cordier’s comrade and the last of the Companions of the Resistance.

All of this captures something unmistakenly, and touchingly, Gallic. When the British War correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas was attached to the French First Army in 1944 their advance became bogged down on the edge of the famous wine country of Burgundy. Wondering what was wrong, Vaughan-Thomas hastened to the army headquarters to find anxious staff officers pouring over maps, clearly worried that their advance would destroy some of the greatest wineries in the world.

“At that moment a young sous-lieutenant arrived and said, ‘Courage, my generals — I’ve found the weak spots of the German defences: every one is in a vineyard of inferior quality.’ The general made up his mind at once: ‘j’attaque!'”

Like Charles de Gaulle, it is common to hold “a certain idea of France”. Such ideas might be idealistic and romantic, and yet despite our historical rivalry, so many British people are still beguiled by these stories of French culture and French courage. After watching the poignant funeral of Daniel Cordier, many of us might be moved to agree with Thomas Jefferson that “pour tout homme, le premier pays est sa patrie et le second c’est la France”.