Time after time, President Joe Biden has been caught short by consequences of his policies that should have been obvious.
Biden should have been able to foresee, for instance, that he would face a crisis at the border in his first year in office. There were already stark humanitarian problems in recent years.
Yet, five months and many lawsuits later, the Biden administration is still trying to figure out how to straighten out the mess.
Biden should have been able to foresee that pulling American troops out of a politically unstable climate in Afghanistan would give purchase to violent Taliban forces. That has happened too, with attacks escalating, locals cowering, vaccines delayed, corruption spreading and, this week, China swooping in as a voice of stability, of all things.
Biden should have been able to foresee that massive government spending and easy-money fiscal policy would lead to inflation. That is starting to happen.
In all of these cases, negative outcomes were predictable and Biden's policies failed to anticipate them. Certainly, those policies aren't the only causes here, but they clearly either contributed to these issues or failed to address the problems that would predictably result.
Biden and his team are smart people. In each of these cases, they have known the risks associated with these moves. But in each case they have pushed forward anyway believing, or simply hoping, that the common sense outcomes wouldn't come to pass. This administration can and should do better. If it doesn't, the most common word Americans will use to describe it might be "Myopic."