The Fall of Saigon and the Afghanistan Moment

Eric Medlin
4 min readAug 18, 2021

The end of South Vietnam did not destroy the Ford presidency. Political observers of Afghanistan today should take note.

Biden discussing Afghanistan’s fall. Source: CNN

When the Biden administration decided to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, its greatest fear was that the Afghan state that Americans had propped up for two decades would collapse. The administration knew that the state it left behind would be tenuous. This weakness…

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Eric Medlin

I’m a writer interested in the intersections of history, ideas, and politics. I publish every week. www.twitter.com/medlinwrites