By Rich Lowry
Friday, September 03, 2021
Our defeat there was a blow, but by every significant
measure, the United States still stands alone.
It’s hard to imagine more humiliating images than
what we’ve seen in Afghanistan in recent weeks, from the hasty evacuation of
the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to the chaotic scenes outside the airport.
Our surrender to a band of AK-47-bearing guerrillas after
20 years has, understandably, occasioned autumnal thoughts about American
power.
Even the Soviet Union, on the cusp of full collapse,
managed to get out of Afghanistan in good order and leave behind a government
that endured for several years.
What does it say that we couldn’t match that?
Writing in The New Yorker, Robin Wright says
the pullout may serve as “a bookend for the era of U.S. global power.” Allister
Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, argues that “the botched
exit is merely the latest sign that the American era is ending.” Francis
Fukuyama says the images in Kabul “have evoked a major juncture in world
history,” although he thinks “the end of the American era had come much
earlier.”
There is no sugarcoating our defeat in Afghanistan and
the abject position we put ourselves in during the final days. The withdrawal
is a blow to our counterterrorism capabilities, our prestige, and our
geopolitical position.
For all of that, though, no one in the world has the
formidable advantages of the United States, which still outstrips everyone
else, including China, on every material metric that matters.
Great powers don’t go away easily. The British could be
forgiven for thinking that it’d be all downhill after losing their American
colonies in a long war joined by their traditional rivals France and Spain.
Instead, British imperial power had not yet peaked.
Our exit from Saigon in 1975, to this point the
touchstone for modern American defeats, was followed by Communist advances all
over the map. Yet, within 20 years, we’d win the Cold War and ascend to
unprecedented global power.
We are still blessed with an extraordinarily favorable
geographical position, as a continental nation with friendly neighbors, access
to two oceans, enormous reserves of oil and gas, and vast amounts of arable
land.
We produce about a quarter of global GDP, a share that
has held up over the years.
We are responsible for an astonishing 40 percent of all
military spending in the world. It was ridiculous that Biden made a bragging
point of the evacuation, but it’s true that no one else would have been capable
of such an operation.
We dominate the list of top universities in the world.
There is no country people would rather come to. A
Taliban spokesperson interviewed on Iranian TV, when challenged why so many
people want to flee Afghanistan, rightly pointed out that if American planes
were taking people out of Iran, there’d be a rush for the exits there, too.
In his book Unrivaled, Michael Beckley of
Tufts University and the American Enterprise Institute rebuts the notion that
China is overtaking us.
American workers are more productive than workers
anywhere else. China’s labor productivity has improved, Beckley writes, “but
remains half that of Turkey, lower than Mexico’s, and roughly on par with
Brazil’s.”
We have demographic challenges, but other big powers,
especially China, will be aging faster. Over the course of the century, Beckley
notes, China will lose half of its workforce, or 470 million people.
Our alliance system is an enormous force-multiplier, a
network that, according to Beckley, “encompasses 25% of the Earth’s population
and accounts for 75% of world GDP and defense spending.” China’s formal ally,
in contrast, is North Korea.
None of this is to deny that the contemporary United
States is racked by self-doubt, poisonous politics, and institutional failure.
It is only to say that if we are determined to squander
our global position, it will take much more time and folly to do it. A further
downward slide, like the disastrous withdrawal from Kabul itself, will be a
choice, not an inevitability.
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