The chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House, Michael McCaul, is vowing that he “will not allow” President Biden to normalize relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Good luck, we say. The administration, our Benny Avni reports, claims the Taliban is fulfilling its agreements to fight terrorists in Afghanistan. That’s got to be one of the least credible statements ever to emerge from an American administration.

It happens that the evening before Mr. Avni’s column, a group of Sun staffers gathered for a showing of Rory Kennedy’s magnificent documentary called “Last Days in Vietnam.” It’s about the desperate struggle during the several days leading up to the Communist conquest of Free Vietnam to help as many as possible of the Vietnamese who had worked with us during the war to escape before the communists swept into the capital city of Saigon.

As the countdown neared, in April 1975, there was a last-ditch effort by President Ford and Secretary Kissinger to get Congress to appropriate $722 million dollars to rescue both Americans and Vietnamese. It turns out that in the Senate three Democrats voted against appropriating more funds even to rescue Americans. Right there among them, in his first term in the Senate, was none other than Joseph Robinette Biden.

We’d marked this in our editorial “Joe Biden in Vietnam.” It offered some context to Mr. Biden’s current efforts to woo the Vietnamese Communists against Red China. Mr. Biden washed his hands of our expedition in Iraq, too. Americans got a glimpse of that in the 2008 vice presidential debate. As Mr. Biden jabbed the lectern with his forefinger and said, “We will end this war,” the GOP nominee, Sarah Palin, chirped “Your plan is a white flag of surrender.”

Fool me once, it’s said, shame on you. Fool me twice, the saying adds, shame on me. In respect of Afghanistan, Mr. Biden is trying to fool his countrymen three times. His instinct for abandonment, appeasement, and surrender can be traced in a long line from Vietnam through Iraq to Afghanistan. With Russia, Communist China, and Iran menacing Ukraine, Israel, and Free China, among other allies, this will be an issue in the 2024 election.

At last week’s hearing in Mr. McCaul’s committee, Mr. Avni reports, administration officials argued that Taliban-ruled Afghanistan should be exempt from any authority to use military force we give to the president. Why should we be curbing that authority to act in Afghanistan or anywhere else? America is not the cause of the trouble. It’s dishonest for the administration to argue that the Taliban is meeting its obligations in respect of counterterrorism. 

We get that the Taliban regime now in control of Afghanistan is “working to defeat ISIS-K.” Mr. Avni notes that the Khorasan province’s offshoot of the Islamic State operates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and is considered a rival of other Sunni Islamist militants. As such, the Taliban may be fighting that one terrorist group. Mr. McCaul’s point is that they’re doing so on behalf of other terrorists. 

“The Taliban is working with their allies Al Qaeda to defeat their shared enemy, ISIS-K, as part of an internal struggle for power that has been going on since 2014,” Mr. McCaul is quoted by Mr. Avni as saying. Yet, the congressman notes, “the Taliban have never cut ties with Al Qaeda.” That’s who attacked us on 9/11.  “If the Taliban were truly upholding their counterterrorism obligations,” Mr. McCaul adds, “they would work to defeat Al Qaeda.”

It is important to reckon with all this as we go into next year’s election. And to comprehend Mr. Biden’s long campaign of appeasement. He didn’t want, in respect of Vietnam, to fund even the rescue of our own countrymen trapped there. In the crucial days in Iraq, he waved the white flag of surrender. Now he wants to cut off the authority for our forces to respond to the Taliban. What can those countries betting on us make of Mr. Biden?