When a military alliance that was started with your country as the enemy starts encroaching on your borders, surrounding you from every side with bases, and refuses to let you join even when you ask multiple times, all while talking about stationing missiles and anti-ICBM batteries in those neighboring countries to eliminate the nuclear deterrent, you can see how a nation would get nervous and lash out, irrespective of any "great power politics". It's just common sense. That may be why nearly every single foreign policy specialist from people like George Kennan and Henry Kissinger to Bob Gates warned not to expand NATO into Ukraine because it was a red line that would trigger a very visceral and violent Russian response. Kennan even railed against the first NATO expansion, saying that the US was undoing everything he tried to do in the Cold War.
On Kosovo, the entire world was lied to. The "Racak massacre" that triggered Western intervention was not a massacre. The independent UN investigation into the "massacre" found that all the dead (of whom some were teens) had fired weapons and all were killed from a distance, indicating they were armed guerrillas and not innocent civilians. Serbia was fighting a counterinsurgency against drug gangs funded by the West that wanted to force Serbia to play by the Western European rules. The Serbs, of course, reacted as they did in Bosnia because of Operation Storm, when US special forces helped the Croatian army to ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Krajina, a region of Croatia where they had lived for decades or longer, and no one publicized it or cared. Every side had its fair share of atrocities in Bosnia, but only the Serbian ones were publicized because they were the "bad guys", thanks to shills from places like CNN. There was never any justification for NATO to mercilessly bomb an entire nation, to the cheers of assholes like John McCain.
On Afghanistan, Trump was going to continue providing air support. It was when the Biden Administration failed to follow through on that promise that the Afghan army collapsed as rapidly as it did. With air support, they would have certainly lasted long enough to conduct an orderly withdrawal, ensure that citizens and Afghan allies were able to leave and potentially even see the Taliban fail to fully win the country at least through 2023.
On illegal immigration, they can all go back. There's nothing stopping any country from deporting people to Afghanistan, Syria or Somalia. It's their own country. There are very few people who have legitimate political asylum claims. The rest can very easily be deported if any country has the will to do it. As I learned in the protests over Gaza in the US, Allah is apparently non-binary, Queers for Palestine have nothing to fear in the Middle East and America is the only country that does anything bad. Let's take them at their word when deporting people.
But your timeline with its many dates in five different presidencies with presidents from both parties still makes it pretty clear that singling out the Biden administration for it makes no sense. And based on our previous discussions, I think we're always going to get stuck on our different priorities. I care about the lives, wellbeing and civil rights of citizens of any country or territory including Russia, Eastern Ukraine, Serbia and the various contested territories, but I don't really give a damn about 19th century-style Great Power spheres of influence, I think the people of any nation or people deserve the same rights of self-determination whether it's big or not, and I think if Putin actually gave a fuck about Russia or improving the lives of his subjects, there's a very long list of things that all his military spending would be better spent on.
The most half-assed, retarded and embarrassing thing since president Ford's withdrawal from Vietnam and the fall of Saigon, perhaps? Though I don't want to single out the US there, there's a long list of embarrassing and catastrophic withdrawals from Western armies or colonial administrations from countries they occupied.
Disengaging from a hopeless foreign occupation that's never going to yield the results you want, while still somehow maintaining perfect order and protecting all the locals who supported you during the occupation, is basically impossible.
Now I'm not saying the Biden administration necessarily did everything perfectly and there's no doubt it looked embarrassing to the rest of the world - but that was always going to happen. If Trump had somehow gained a second term instead, so that the withdrawal agreement his administration negotiated with the Taliban was actually carried out during his second term, in what ways would it have gone differently? Would he have brought far larger numbers of Afghan supporters of the American occupation to safety in the US, for instance? Would the brass at the Pentagon and Dept of State who had to do the real work, somehow have been substantially more effective? Would the Afghan government of President Ghani somehow have lasted longer against the Taliban?
There is one very big difference between Europe and the US when it comes to illegal immigration: the ones that come here generally can't and don't go back. You mention 10 million illegal immigrants to be deported - but that number was just the same way back under the GW Bush presidency, because while the US keeps attracting loads of illegal immigrants, many of those return sooner or later on their own volition because they don't actually want to stay permanently.
It's true that the numbers of people apprehended at the border reached record levels under the Biden administration, but the number of illegals that are actually inside the US, i.e. managed to make it past the border controls or actually more often just outstayed their legal visa, not so much. So, 'just opened the border' - well, clearly not.
And as I mentioned in my previous post, the Biden administration maintained policies similar to those of the Trump administration far more than you suggest - keeping Covid-era regulations that made things drastically harder for asylum seekers for far longer than the virus itself really justified, for instance. Given the unprecedented numbers seeking to cross the border, it was probably unavoidable that they'd be harsher than many Democrats would have expected or wanted them to be.
It probably won't surprise you given the above that I care more about this one than the others and am more conflicted about NATO's actions there. But after what the Serbians and their local allies had already done in Bosnia some years earlier, with what they were doing in Kosovo at that time, military intervention of some kind did become a must. I don't know enough about the conflict to judge very well to what extent NATO may perhaps have gone too far in the process, though.
That one I don't believe I knew about until now.
I think the relations between the two Koreas depend far more on what position South Korea is taking at that particular moment, in this case the reconciliatory efforts of former president Moon in those years, than on who is president of the US. But either way, whatever improvement in relations existed in 2017-2018 had disappeared again by 2020. And with regards to North Korea's nukes, an issue that concerns far more people, they just made a bunch more of them during the Trump presidency. So no, I don't see any lasting achievements with regards to North Korea. And along the way he certainly made himself look ridiculous and like a less reliable partner for America's democratic allies, in Asia and beyond.
ἡ δὲ κἀκ τριῶν τρυπημάτων ἐργαζομένη ἐνεκάλει τῇ φύσει, δυσφορουμένη, ὅτι δὴ μὴ καὶ τοὺς τιτθοὺς αὐτῇ εὐρύτερον ἢ νῦν εἰσι τρυπώη, ὅπως καὶ ἄλλην ἐνταῦθα μίξιν ἐπιτεχνᾶσθαι δυνατὴ εἴη. – Procopius
Ummaka qinnassa nīk!
*MySmiley*
