The Left’s Language of Contempt

By Christine Rosen

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

 

On Monday afternoon, the Sunrise movement, a progressive environmental group, staged a protest outside the White House, ostensibly about climate change. One of the featured speakers was progressive Congressman Jamaal Bowman, who said, “They occupy our streets. They mass incarcerate us, but they leave us food insecure, in transportation deserts, and our buildings and schools falling apart. F*** that!”

 

It’s not clear whom he meant by “they,” but the crowd loved Bowman’s contemptuous tone. It’s a tone common among performative activists on the left these days. On Saturday, during the Olympic trials in Oregon, American athlete Gwen Berry turned her back on the American flag and proclaimed herself “pissed” that the National Anthem was played during a ceremony in which she was awarded a bronze medal in hammer-throwing. Berry held up a shirt that read “Activist Athlete” and told reporters “it was real disrespectful” that she had to stand and listen to the anthem. “My purpose and my mission is bigger than sports,” Berry said. “I’m here to represent those … who died due to systemic racism. That’s the important part. That’s why I’m going.”

 

In fact, the “important part” of Olympic trials is determining which athletes should represent our country in the foremost international athletic competition. Berry just barely qualified for the team (her throw was only two inches better than the fourth-place finisher and a full seven feet behind the first-place finisher, DeAnna Price, who broke two records at the event). Instead of proclaiming herself “bigger than sports,” maybe Berry should work harder at improving her performance in the one in which she’s chosen to compete.

 

If the nation for which Berry competes is as systematically oppressive as she claims, how did it allow her to rise to the level of Olympic competition? Like Bowman’s, Berry’s ridiculous stunt and its accompanying generic expressions of contempt are representative of a growing nihilism on the progressive left.

 

Asked by reporters about Berry’s expressions of contempt for the flag and the national anthem, Biden administration Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave a weasel-worded non-answer. Joe Biden “has great respect for the anthem,” Psaki insisted (that wasn’t the question). And yet, “part of that pride in our country means recognizing there are moments where we as a country haven’t lived up to our highest ideals,” Psaki continued. Thus, the Biden administration backhandedly endorsed of Berry’s disrespect for the flag.

 

Protesting the flag and the national anthem is everyone’s right—the First Amendment guarantees that. But there’s a thin line between acts of protest against what Psaki described as America’s discrete moral and political failings and general expressions of contempt for one’s country. The activist left is increasingly comfortable with the latter, even as it spent the Trump years excoriating the right for engaging in similar behavior.

 

Consider a recent report by the National Archives’ “racial task force” (which was created in the wake of George Floyd’s death). That organization declared the Rotunda of the Archives, which houses the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, an emblem of “structural racism” that “lauds wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and other People of Color], women, and other communities.”

 

The report also called for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” to be placed in the Archives’ exhibits and complained that Thomas Jefferson was too flatteringly described on the National Archives website, among other questionable conclusions. The “racial task force” prescribed “reimagining” the Rotunda to include “dance or performance art in the space that invites dialogue about the ways that the United States has mythologized the founding era.”

 

Far from mythologizing the founding, the Rotunda has long been a site for democratic engagement with it. It is open for free to the public, year-round. And for years, the Archives has hosted a sleepover that raises money for the institution. My children and I were lucky to attend one of these events when they were younger. After the Archives closes to the public, a small group of parents and kids get to stay behind and spend the night in the Rotunda, spreading out sleeping bags on the floor directly in front of the nation’s founding documents while archivists discuss the nation’s history. It’s a wonderful experience.

 

Our slumber party group was a racially and ethnically diverse lot from the D.C. area. All the kids were clearly excited to be so close to a tangible part of their historical inheritance. The experience provided them with respect for the past that is difficult to convey through a mere textbook. The participants left the next morning feeling more appreciative and protective of their country’s founding documents. It made the founding and our country’s history more concrete, not more “mythologized.” And it hasn’t prevented them from understanding that, like all of us, our Founders were also flawed human beings.

 

The progressive left would see such forms of engagement destroyed by government-empowered “racial task forces”—klatches that blithely brand paying homage to our country’s Founders just another form of structural racism, not a healthy expression of national pride. Self-styled “activist athletes” like Berry, who have earned the privilege of participating in an elite competition as a representative of their nation, don’t want to encourage thoughtful debate about American ideals. They want to posture about their “mission” while expressing contempt for their country that makes it possible.

 

That is their right, of course—a right that exists thanks to the genius of the Founders, whose ideals they hold in such low esteem. But as we approach the annual celebration of our nation’s independence, it’s worth considering that, while criticism and debate have always been crucial to a healthy and thriving democracy, the performative activism and censorious wokeness of so much of the progressive left undermines rather than encourages debate and discussion. They resent nuance, and so they, therefore, reject the depth that leads to a fuller understanding of any subject. Expressions of contempt, both about our country’s founding principles and about our fellow Americans with whom we disagree, might feel revolutionary. But they are ultimately corrosive.

Biological Geocentrism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

 

An angle I meant to include in this morning’s “Tuesday” newsletter: The modern pro-abortion view is to biology what geocentrism was to cosmology.

 

If all you had to go on was the evidence of your own eyes, of course you’d think that the earth is at the center of the universe and that the sun and stars revolve around it — you can watch the sun go across the sky every day. You can’t feel the earth’s daily rotation, and you don’t experience any sensation of movement in its annual orbit. You need some math and science to work that out.

 

The old superstition of “ensoulment” and “quickening,” which informs so much pro-abortion thinking in our time, is based in the same error: overestimating the evidence of one’s own necessarily limited perception, which is necessarily constrained by point of view. The greatest achievements in science have been, in effect, changes in our point of view, giving us the astronomical point of view, the quantum point of view, the evolutionary point of view, etc. It was natural for our ancestors to believe that something fundamental had changed in a pregnancy when they could feel the baby moving, just as it was natural for them to believe that the apparent motion of the sun, in the evidence of their own eyes, was actual motion. But we have tools that have expanded out point of view: not only the instruments of observation that show us heartbeats and other motion very, very early in the pregnancy, but also, probably more important, the genetic point of view that answers for us many questions that were matters of metaphysical speculation only a few generations ago.

 

We also know a great deal more about the natural development of human organisms than did, say, Aristotle. But our superstitions persist: For years, including into my own school years, many U.S. biology textbooks were illustrated with fraudulent drawings illustrating embryonic “recapitulation,” an old and discredited theory that the development of the embryo retraces the evolutionary development of the human species. This may have been a plausible theory in the 19th century, and the 21st century variations on it are political pretexts put forward by people who want to pretend that there is no meaningful difference between a tadpole and a human being at the earliest stages of development.

 

I don’t think the actual facts of the case are entirely inconsistent with a position in support of abortion rights. You can make a pretty straightforwardly libertarian case for the pro-abortion position. What you cannot do is pretend that what happens in an abortion is something other than the intentional termination of the life of an individual human being at an early stage of his or (more often) her natural development.

 

At the least, that puts abortion into a category of morally serious things including war, the death penalty, and euthanasia. This is not true of contraception, which prevents the formation of a new human individual rather than destroying a new human individual that already has been created. Abortion is, then, something that is morally more like capital punishment and exterminating the unhealthy than it is like using a condom or practicing abstinence.

 

You can’t magic away the facts of the case by pretending that you do not see them or by pretending that what you can and feel see supersedes the facts of the case simply because you see and feel it.

 

The world, as it turns out, does not revolve around you.

Modern Ecoterrorism: From Bougie LARPers to the Biden Administration

By Andrew Follett

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

 

Afew days ago, in North Arlington, one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the D.C. suburbs out in northern Virginia, people awoke to an unexpected scene of destruction. The tires of several SUVs had been slashed, and in the window of each affected vehicle was plastered an identical note. The manifesto read, in part:

 

We have deflated one or several tyres of your SUV. Don’t take it personally. […]

 

Scientists are entirely sure that we are very close to pushing climate change over a threshold, into a phase where it will be totally out of control and cause irreversible damage. […]

 

This does not have to happen if we impose a radical cut on carbon emissions. Now. Not tomorrow. That’s why we have disarmed your SUV by deflating the tires. Since you live in a city with a functioning and accessible public transportation system you will have no problem going where you want without your SUV.

 

—Climate Liberation Front

 

@FrontClimate on Twitter

 

The Twitter account that the wannabe ecoterrorist group created has as its tagline: “We must rise up to fight the impending climate disaster that capitalism has brought upon us.” So far, the account has just a single tweet, which warns, “This is only the beginning.” The tweet was sent by an iPhone.

 

The irony of iPhone-wielding anti-capitalists LARPing a green revolution is palpable, but their actions are representative of a broader trend. Many environmentalists have abandoned promoting meaningful environmental stewardship in favor of a willingness to destroy property, to punish “climate sinners,” and to control the lives of others, rather than promoting meaningful environmental stewardship. But the only real effect of the Climate Liberation Front will be the slight increase in CO2 emissions of buying replacement tires.

 

Legally, any “acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State” that attempt to change government policy can be considered terrorism. So slashing the tires of an SUV could certainly qualify.

 

But outright ecoterrorism isn’t just limited to iPhone activists slashing tires.

 

An especially topical example of crime-in-the-name-of-saving-the-planet comes from Tracy Stone-Manning, President Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), who participated in ecoterrorism. If confirmed as Biden’s BLM director, Stone-Manning would oversee 12 percent of the U.S. landmass, or 245 million acres of public lands.

 

Stone-Manning admitted to a local news outlet in 1993 that she would have faced conspiracy charges had she not struck an immunity deal with a federal prosecutor in return for her testimony, according to an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

 

Stone-Manning testified in federal court in 1993 that she sent a threatening letter to the Forest Service warning that a local forest had been sabotaged with potentially deadly tree spikes to prevent logging. In other words, Stone-Manning aided ecoterrorists hiding metal spikes in trees intended to shatter loggers’ chain saws on impact.

 

Tree-spiking causes serious injuries for loggers, with one 23-year-old mill worker in California having his jaw cut in half when his saw exploded upon striking a concealed tree spike, according to the Washington Post.

 

Perhaps the farthest-reaching example of violence perpetrated in the name of the environment is the Chinese Communist Party’s failed experiment in coercive population control. For decades, China limited couples to one child in the name of resource conservation, later raising the cap to two and then three children. (The CCP is now considering removing all limits by 2025.) Those limits have led to incalculable suffering, including over 100 million sterilizations and over 300 million abortions, many of them forced.

 

Stone-Manning is guilty of embracing the exact same anti-human strain of environmentalism, advocating for population control in her 1992 graduate thesis that called babies an “environmental hazard.”

 

Stone-Manning is hardly alone in that view. Former president Barack Obama’s science czar John Holdren once stated that he wants to see a “decline in fertility to well below replacement” in the United States, because “280 million [Americans] in 2040 is likely to be much too many.” As of 2021, there are more than 331 million Americans; census projections estimate there will be 373.5 million Americans by 2040. Naturally, Holdren doesn’t mention what he thinks should happen to the 93 million “excess” Americans.

 

Biden himself even expressed acceptance of China’s regime of coerced sterilizations and forced abortions. He told a Chinese audience during his tenure as vice president, when the one-child policy was still in full swing, “Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.” (He later claimed to believe the policy was repugnant — but not enough, apparently, to want to condemn it in the presence of the people who were responsible for it.)

 

The human-rights abuses that have resulted from China’s family-size limits could be classified as state-sponsored ecoterrorism. Most ecoterrorism occurs on a much smaller scale than that totalitarian nightmare, of course, and is limited to property damage. Protesters affiliated with Greenpeace previously destroyed trials of genetically modified wheat operated by Australia’s national science agency.

 

“For an organization that claims to be dedicated to the protection of the environment, this is an unconscionable act,” Suzanne Cory, president of the Australian Academy of Sciences, told the science magazine Nature at the time. The wheat had been engineered to increase its nutritional value and to improve the health of those consuming it.

 

In 2013, Greenpeace protesters destroyed a genetically modified crop of Golden Rice in the Philippines because of alleged health concerns. The rice is modified to prevent Vitamin A deficiency, which causes blindness and malnutrition, and was to be given to impoverished children. Vitamin A deficiency kills 1.15 million children each year, according to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. A study by Cambridge University estimates that Greenpeace’s delaying of Golden Rice has cost 1,424,000 life-years since 2002 in India alone.

 

Other Greenpeace activists irreparably damaged the Nazca Lines, a 1,500-year-old World Heritage Site in Peru, for a publicity stunt in 2014. The Peruvian government filed criminal charges against the activists.

 

“It’s a true slap in the face at everything Peruvians consider sacred,” said Peru’s deputy culture minister Luis Jaime Castillo.

 

Environmental stewardship may be a laudable goal. But when extremists try to use it to justify terrorism, destruction, and a blatant disregard for human welfare, a line has been crossed. And the people crossing that line are sadly not just attention-seeking petty criminals like the tire-slashing Climate Liberation Front. Such radical views have found a home in prominent environmental organizations — and they may even find one in the Biden White House.

When New York Times Fake News Replaces American History

By Tom Cotton & Ken Buck

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

 

Parents across the country are revolting against activist school boards and teachers who are introducing critical race theory and propagandistic accounts of American history into classrooms.

 

One such history is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which is already being taught in at least 4,000 classrooms in all 50 states.

 

The 1619 Project is an alternate history of the American founding that claims our nation’s true birthday was not 1776 but 1619, the year 20 slaves arrived in the British colony of Virginia. According to the 1619 Project, America was founded on racism and slavery — never mind the text of the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that all men are created equal, or the words and deeds of our Founding Fathers, many of whom deplored slavery and tried to place it on the path to ultimate extinction.

 

The 1619 Project avoids discussing how slavery clashed with the ideals expressed in our Declaration of Independence. Instead, it portrays our Founding Fathers as liars and frauds who did not believe the stirring words they wrote — and in fact wrote them to uphold the evils of human bondage and white supremacy.

 

Unsurprisingly, Democrats and liberals have lavished praise on this revisionist account of our history. The 1619 Project’s lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize and quickly hit the lecture circuit. Then-Senator Kamala Harris quickly expressed her support, writing that “the #1619Project is a powerful and necessary reckoning of our history. We cannot understand and address the problems of today without speaking truth about how we got here.”

 

The response from actual historians, even many on the left, has been less favorable. The project is “so wrong in so many ways,” according to Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon Wood. James McPherson, the dean of Civil War historians and a Pulitzer Prize winner himself, remarked that the project presents an “unbalanced, one-sided account” that “left most of the history out.” A history curriculum that leaves the history out? No wonder parents are upset.

 

Young Americans are in desperate need of history and civic education, as surveys often find that they do not know basic details about our history and system of government. The 1619 Project will not help Americans achieve greater historical literacy or a deeper appreciation of our nation’s Founding, which truly is the greatest political experiment in human history. Instead, students who are exposed to the 1619 Project will learn to despise their country and their fellow citizens. That is a recipe for division and disaster.

 

In response to parents’ concerns about the 1619 Project and critical race theory, we have introduced a bill to prevent federal funding from being used to teach the 1619 Project in K–12 schools. This bill, titled the Saving American History Act, would not prevent any local school from making decisions about what curriculum they wish to teach — but it would state firmly that federal taxpayer dollars cannot be used to teach a malicious lie that threatens to divide the country on the basis of race.

 

America’s students deserve to know the true story of our nation’s Founding, and to be able to grapple with, and debate, the difficult questions in our history. That story includes many great and noble chapters, from the abolition of slavery and Civil Rights Movement to the moon landing and the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny. It also includes many dark chapters where our nation has failed to live up to our own noble principles. Teachers ought to present this history in its full glory and tragedy, making clear how our Founding principles have inspired generations of patriots and reformers.

 

Truthful discussions never begin with lies. The 1619 Project is founded on a lie. It has no place in our nation’s schools.

At Yale, Democracy Stops at Phelps Gate

By Garry Kasparov & Uriel Epshtein

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

 

The trustees of Yale University have made it clear that they love democracy — as long as they don’t have to abide by it themselves. Democracy for thee; unaccountable governance for me. In the last couple weeks, the Yale Corporation has purged even the slightest hints of accountability from their “election system.”

 

One of us, Garry, is a lifelong dissident from the USSR and Russia. The other, Uriel, is a proud alumnus of Yale University — admittedly less proud today than he was a month ago. Uriel attended Yale, loved Yale, and even founded an organization there — the Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative — to help contribute to campus life and learning. But we all have an obligation to speak out against anti-democratic actions, especially when they happen at home. Now as the chairman and the executive director, respectively, of the Renew Democracy Initiative, we must respond to threats to democratic norms regardless of where they originate.

 

Elections to the Yale Corporation are a byzantine, opaque process. Most candidates apply through the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee. These applicants are not allowed to campaign, reveal their policy positions, or even talk about what they would do if elected. The committee then reveals its endorsed candidates just 24 to 48 hours before voting begins — an election in name only.

 

However, in order to lay claim to some element of democracy, Yale allowed outside candidates to run by petition if they received at least 4,500 alumni signatures (3 percent of all living alumni). This past year, two petition candidates managed to clear that hurdle: Maggie Thomas, a progressive Democrat, and Victor Ashe, a conservative Republican. Both ran on increasing accountability for the Yale Corporation. Thomas, a climate-policy expert, campaigned to divest from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, Ashe questioned the Yale Corporation’s current policy of sealing all minutes for at least 50 years and called for a repeal to Yale’s “gag rule.” Thomas later dropped out and Ashe lost.

 

But it seems that, despite his electoral loss, Ashe’s calls for a minimal amount of transparency spooked the trustees of Yale. So, on May 24, 2021, they announced that new rules would prohibit any candidates in future elections from running on petitions not approved by the university. The three petition campaigns already announced for next year are now a moot point. Sorry, kids, no glasnost or perestroika for you!

 

In a statement explaining their decision, the trustees attacked the very concept of democracy. In particular, they criticized “issues-based candidacies,” an interesting argument for a group purporting to support the democratic process. If we don’t vote on “issues,” what criteria should we use — best hairdo? The letter described, in horror, “a new normal in which every election saw vying groups with organized support competing to focus Yale on their chosen goals.” Please insert your own gasps. This sentence would not feel out of place if it had been uttered by Viktor Orbán or Andrzej Duda.

 

The Yale Corporation’s hypocrisy in this statement is particularly galling. The Ivy League scions who make up this committee regularly lecture the rest of America about the importance of democracy from the comfort of their C-suite offices.

 

Yet for all their ostensible outrage, when thousands of alumni exercised the democratic rights enshrined in Yale’s regulations, the trustees were so worried about the outcome that they decided to quietly kill the democratic process itself. Either Yale’s trustees stand for democracy or they don’t. If they do, then they should hold genuinely free and fair elections, instead of offering a choice between Handpicked Candidate A and Handpicked Candidate B. They should repeal the “gag rule” and publish their minutes in a timely fashion, instead of 50 years later, once everyone at that meeting is dead and safely buried. And they need to prioritize democratic processes rather than a specific preferred outcome.

 

Democracy is a muscle. Without exercise, it will atrophy and die. Yale trustee elections might seem irrelevant to most Americans (and most Yale alumni), but we all know the importance of defending democracy. We cannot criticize authoritarian leaders abroad while forgoing democratic processes at home, and we cannot expect our national leaders to prioritize democracy if the educational institutions where they studied don’t offer them a chance to practice what they preach.

Can We Dispense with the Childish ‘Forever Wars’ Nonsense Now?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 28, 2021

 

So, here we are again. The fourth consecutive American president who campaigned on a pledge to withdraw the U.S. from conflicts abroad has been compelled by necessity to prosecute those conflicts.

 

Shortly after entering the race for the presidency, Joe Biden affirmed his intention to “end the forever wars” to which the United States is presumably party in the Middle East. In Afghanistan, he’s done his best to make good on that promise. Biden has had less luck in Iraq and Syria, where the administration announced early Monday morning that it had executed (another) series of airstrikes on Iran-backed militia groups “to disrupt and deter” the increasingly sophisticated drone strikes on U.S. positions. This language is both descriptive and useful if it helps to break the political class’s unhealthy addiction to the noxious idea that America’s commitments in this region constitute “forever wars.”

 

Disruption and deterrence have been central to the American mission in Iraq for several years, and it is vastly preferable to the alternative of all-out conflict. No sooner had the Islamic State retreated to the relative safety of Syria’s lawless east than Iran and its proxies began destabilizing the region. In 2019 alone, the Islamic Republic regularly seized and sabotaged commercial shipping vessels in the crucial Strait of Hormuz. It downed an unarmed U.S. surveillance drone over international waters and executed a brazen multi-drone strike on the world’s largest petroleum-processing facility in Saudi Arabia.

 

This forced the last president, who was himself a critic of American extroversion, to raise the stakes in the region by deploying defensive assets to the region. Iranian catspaws subsequently executed rocket attacks on U.S. positions—attacks to which the U.S. did not respond until one killed an American contractor and wounded three uniformed service-members. A proportionate response to that attack prompted Iran to respond by laying siege to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, to which America replied by neutralizing the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Qasem Soleimani. Only then did Iran respond with a calibrated reprisal conveying a willingness to deescalate, and the conflict subsequently deescalated.

 

Whatever you think of this adversarial cycle of testing and reaction, it is not an outgrowth of America’s presence in the region. If anything, America’s presence imposes sober circumspection on the theocrats in Tehran. Call this probing a war if you like, but that is a definition that could apply to potential flashpoints where the U.S. is supporting anti-insurgency campaigns or raising the costs of all-out conflict for would-be aggressors all around the globe.

 

The idea that America’s post-September 11th commitments are hot wars without end would have been defensible years ago when those conflicts involved American soldiers conducting combat operations to secure tactical and strategic objectives. Today, the phrase is explicable only as a childish syllogism: The Middle East is trapped in an unending cycle of instability and warfare, and American soldiers are deployed to this region in the defense of its interests and allies. Therefore, the United States is trapped in an endless cycle of instability and warfare in the Middle East. This expands the definition of “war” to a degree that renders the word a mere analogy.

 

These theaters are not producing American fatalities. The last American service-member killed in action in Iraq was March 11, 2020, when an Iran-backed militia’s rocket found its target in Iraq. The number of American service personnel lost to hostile action abroad totaled 8 souls for the entire year. Every death is tragic and serving in uniform is inherently hazardous. In 2020, Americans also died in deployments to places like Kosovo, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, the Arabian Sea, and Kuwait.

 

Of course, American soldiers are at risk wherever they serve, and any life lost is a tragedy. That sacrifice must be honored. But those soldiers are supporting American interests in unstable parts of the world, and sometimes those missions involve policing actions or supporting combat operations conducted by local forces. The qualitative distinction between America’s assistance to friendly governments in Kuwait City, Amman, and Pristina and its support for Baghdad’s sovereignty at the invitation of Iraq’s government is a narrow one. That is, unless the argument is against America’s overseas deployments full stop. That’s an argument that has been repudiated now by four American presidents from both major political parties.

 

If the price America pays in blood for the defense of the world order over which it presides as the globe’s sole hegemon isn’t that compelling, what about treasure? Americans are regularly confronted with the fact that $6 trillion of their tax dollars have gone to supporting U.S. military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. But the annual cost of these operations in 2019, when America’s footprint in these nations was substantially larger than it is today, was roughly $20 billion annually. That’s a small fraction of the Pentagon’s budget, a modest amount compared to the total cost of America’s deployments abroad and the hundreds of billions the Defense Department spends outsourcing the job of national defense to independent contractors. And the not-so-modest return on that investment has been 20 years without a sophisticated terrorist attack on U.S. soil directed by non-state actors operating with impunity in the region’s more anarchic enclaves.

 

The case that now tests the “forever wars” thesis is Afghanistan, where Joe Biden is executing a headlong rush to the exits entirely without respect to the security conditions on the ground. The unambiguous result of this experiment has been more war, not less.

 

The Taliban has filled the vacuum left by retreating NATO troops with astonishing violence. Perhaps contrary to the expectations of critics of U.S. deployments in the Middle East, the White House isn’t enjoying a victory lap as the public garlands Joe Biden with laurels. Instead, the administration is improvising its way through a disaster.

 

The Biden administration is agonizing over what will happen to American diplomatic staff when the Taliban reaches Kabul. It is publicly wrestling over whether it will commit to executing airstrikes on advancing Taliban positions in support of the government and frantically negotiating with Central Asian governments to ensure continuity in counterterrorism operations. And when they’re not plugging unanticipated holes in that dam, they’re mollifying critics who accuse the administration of abandoning the Afghans who spent the last two decades working with Americans. And when all this work is done, the United States will only have defeat to show for the effort once the group that allowed al-Qaeda to plan and execute 9/11 returns to power.

 

Critics of America’s commitment to Afghanistan will point to the Ashraf Ghani government’s apparent fragility as evidence of our failure in Central Asia. But the post-World War II history of America’s deployments abroad includes support for a number of fragile governments, with the only end game being the indefinite preservation of those governments in the pursuit of grander, permanent interests. Surrounded as it is by Iran, China, and Pakistan, our interests in Afghanistan will remain permanent whether we see to them or not.

 

The Biden administration seems to be betting that Americans are so fed up with Afghanistan that they would rather watch as a medieval terrorist outfit undoes decades of progress. Polling suggests the public is not nearly as anxious about the American presence in what has been for years a comparatively low-impact engagement for U.S. soldiers as critics of U.S. deployments abroad like to believe. But withdrawal and insurgency are once again upon us. That will look a lot more like a war than anything to which the United States had been party to in Afghanistan for the better part of a decade. Those who are invested in America’s unconditional retreat seem to be betting that the public won’t notice the distinction. That’s a risky bet.