Visitors have finally resumed flocking to Vatican City, at 108 acres, the world's smallest city-state. After the Vatican's 14-month pandemic induced closure, the longest in its modern history, Pope Francis has been receiving a bevy of prominent guests – Germany's President Walter Steinmeier and outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and this Friday, before heading to a pair of international summits, President Biden.

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President Joe Biden and his top military officials seem to inhabit separate universes.

In testimony Tuesday before the Senator Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command, contradicted several of their commander in chief's assertions about his controversial decision to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan.

In an interview on Aug. 19, four days after Kabul fell, Biden denied that his top generals had urged him to keep at least 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. "No. No one said that to me," he said, adding a politician's classic wiggle words, "that I can recall."

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The Biden administration's unforced errors in foreign affairs keep on mounting.

First was the deadly, botched exit from Afghanistan and ensuing humanitarian disaster. Then came the Pentagon's belated disclosure that its Aug. 29 drone strike in Kabul killing 10 civilians, seven of them children, which the Defense Department mischaracterized for weeks, was, in fact, a mistake, or as a Pentagon spokesman put it, a "horrible tragedy of war."

Now, there's the double crossing of France, America's oldest ally.

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There is a slow moving 9/11 developing here in Ukraine, a threat that if mishandled could produce death and destruction equal to or greater than what the United States endured, and the world witnessed in horrified shock and disbelief twenty years ago.

So concluded many participants at a gathering of former heads of state, current political leaders, historians, and journalists at a conference here in Kiev organized by Victor Pinchuk and the Yalta European Strategy (YES) group he founded 17 years ago.

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On the twentieth anniversary of September 11, 2001, as New Yorkers commemorate those who died in the nation's most devastating terrorist attack, they can also take quiet pride in what hasn't happened since then, or, as President Bill Clinton once put it, the dog that didn't bark. Despite relentless attempts of varying levels of sophistication and competence, neither militant Islamists nor other hate-filled ideological or religious extremists have managed to stage a comparable attack on the city.

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