By Bret Stephens
Monday,
September 20, 2021
In May 2014, I embedded with Charley
Company of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines to write about their
“retrograde” from Afghanistan’s Sangin Valley—known to coalition forces as
“Sangingrad” for the fierceness of the battles they had waged there against the
Taliban. On our last night at FOB Nolay—a dusty and desolate forward operating
base that had neither electricity nor running water—I asked one hard-bitten
major why the military brass insisted on using the term “retrograde,” which
seemed more appropriate to astrology than it did to combat.
“I guess they didn’t want to call it a
retreat,” was his mordant reply.
Retrograde or retreat, it was an orderly
business. Shortly before dusk, the Marines took out the trash, bid farewell to
the nervous Afghan soldiers taking over the base, and drove off in their MRAPs
and mine rollers. It’s a moment I’ve thought about often this summer while
watching America’s shambolic final act in Afghanistan. It was obvious in 2014
that, barring unexpected leadership in Washington, we were on our way out and
that the result would be a strategic debacle for the United States and a
humanitarian catastrophe for Afghanistan.
Yet that knowledge did little to prepare
me for the emotional impact of our exit, when the humiliation of our surrender
to the Taliban was compounded by the shame of abandoning our Afghan friends to
a terrible fate. America wasn’t merely a country that would rather lose a war
outright than maintain a secure garrison at Bagram Air Base to provide Afghans
with the air power, surveillance, maintenance, and logistics they needed to
avert collapse. We were also a country that couldn’t quite manage to fast-track
the visas of a few thousand military interpreters and others who had helped us,
at grave risk to themselves, when we needed them most.
Our incompetence matched our fecklessness,
and our fecklessness matched our untrustworthiness. To say this is how great
powers fall would be an insult to the great powers of the past, which fell
under greater strain, for weightier reasons.
What comes next? That is the subject of
this essay. But first a word on what came before.
* * *
Nine years ago, I published an essay in Commentary called “The Coming Global
Disorder.” Barack Obama was running for re-election on the promise of ending
“more than a decade of war” in order to “focus on nation-building here at
home.” Much of the foreign-policy establishment was echoing the theme. American
troops were out of Iraq; the surge in Afghanistan was winding down, Osama bin
Laden was dead, and—as Obama snidely told Mitt Romney when his 2012 Republican
challenger named Russia as our principal geopolitical foe—“the 1980s are now
calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”
That new consensus had obvious political
appeal, and it helped win Obama a second term. But it was also dangerous, for
three principal reasons.
The first danger was strategic. “You may
not be interested in war,” goes a line usually attributed to Leon Trotsky, “but
war is interested in you.” As Obama was all but declaring victory
in the war on terror, Islamist terrorism was resurgent, largely on account of
the vacuum he had left in Iraq.1 As Obama was resisting calls
to stop the Assad regime’s depredations, Syrians were fleeing their country by
the millions, creating a refugee crisis that would ultimately overwhelm Europe
in 2015. As Obama was “resetting” relations with Russia, Vladimir Putin was
plotting his next adventure to expand Russian frontiers and undermine Western
democracies. As Obama was winding down NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, the
Taliban understood, as one refrain went, that “Americans had the watches, but
they had the time.” As Obama was trying to engage Tehran in nuclear diplomacy,
Iran was entrenching its influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen. As
Obama was slashing defense spending, China was bidding for naval dominance in
the western Pacific while building artificial islands in the South China Sea to
claim the waters as its own.
In short, what Obama called
“retrenchment”— another euphemism for retreat—was, to America’s adversaries, an
opportunity. They were not slow to seize it. Within little more than a year of
Obama’s second inauguration, ISIS controlled a caliphate the size of Great
Britain, Bashar al-Assad had gassed his own people without consequence to
himself, and Putin had seized Crimea and ignited a deadly war in eastern
Ukraine.
The second danger was conceptual. Obama’s
mantra of “nation-building here at home” had as its premise the notion that an
assertive foreign policy was something America did at the expense of domestic
policy, rather than as an essential complement to it.
This was a stark reversal of more than six
decades of American policy. It was also a reversal built on misleading data and
vacuous clichés. The policy, beginning with the 1947 Truman Doctrine, was based
on the understanding that American prosperity and safety rested heavily on the
prosperity and safety of allies from Seoul to Berlin. We could not let friendly
countries (even those that weren’t democracies) fend for themselves against
totalitarian enemies and pretend it had nothing to do with us. The misleading
data typically came in the form of eye-popping figures about the lifetime costs
of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, which ignored the fact that U.S. defense
expenditures have been a steadily shrinking fraction of gross domestic product
(from 5.6 percent in 1990 to 3.4 percent in 2019) while social expenditures
have been a steadily growing one (from 13.2 percent to 18.7 percent over the
same time period). And the vacuous clichés came in phrases such as “forever
wars,” which, as former British prime minister Tony Blair pointed out in
August, was “an imbecilic political slogan” based on the false notion that “our
engagement in 2021 was remotely comparable to our commitment 20 or even 10
years ago.”
The final danger was moral.
The United States did not embark on the
so-called War on Terror as a spurious foreign-policy adventure. Nor did it do
so on a partisan basis. On 9/11 we suffered the most devastating single-day
violent loss of life on American soil since the battle of Antietam. There was
no guarantee that we wouldn’t suffer more—or worse. We were attacked by a
global terrorist network that was an inspiration to hundreds of thousands if
not millions of radicalized Muslims worldwide. It was a network harbored by a
barbaric regime that shared its ideology and refused to surrender its leaders.
Once we were in Afghanistan, a war both
Obama and Biden claimed was a must-win for the United States when they ran for
office in 2008, the only way out was through. We made many mistakes during the
war. But we did stand up a government that, for all of its ineptitude and
corruption, did not threaten other states, did not terrorize its own people,
and did not fly the banners of jihad. It also did not have to collapse—if only
it could have been sustained by basic, but persistent, U.S. support.
Like shrapnel, the moral damage flew in
many directions. We sent hundreds of thousands of men and women to war, and
thousands to their grave, in the name of national security and democratic
idealism—only to throw away their victories for transparently political
reasons. We validated the belief, underscored by bin Laden in one of his
pre-9/11 fatwas, that Americans inevitably cut and run from fights against
determined foes. We betrayed local allies after they had taken immense risks to
stand with us, sending the fatal signal to future would-be allies that Uncle
Sam is a fickle and dangerous partner. And we made Americans cynical about the
United States as a beacon of steadfastness and hope in the face of the enemies
of freedom.
This was the trajectory that Obama set
America on when he came to the White House. It is one Donald Trump largely
adopted, albeit with less consistency and greater truculence, in the guise of
“America First.” And it culminated with Biden’s unnecessary surrender on August
31, perversely timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of al-Qaeda’s
greatest victory.
* * *
There are several counterarguments to my
critique, some smarter than others.
Among the less smart: that we should never
have gone into Afghanistan in the first place. That the invasion of Iraq made
us “take our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan. That we should have withdrawn
after Osama bin Laden was killed. That the swift collapse of the Afghan army
only proved that we had been building on sand from day one.
Not going into Afghanistan after 9/11 was
never a serious option—not politically (the 2001 vote to authorize military
force was 420–1 in the House and 98–0 in the Senate), and not militarily, since
the only quick way to have killed or apprehended bin Laden was to dislodge the
regime that was giving al-Qaeda sanctuary.2 The key problem
with our strategy in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban was neither
insufficient troop levels nor inadequate nation-building efforts. Rather, it
was the sanctuary that Pakistan gave to the Taliban leadership after we had
ousted them. That problem could only have been solved with a massive expansion
of the war into the territory of that nuclear-armed Islamic nation—a
strategically risky proposition that would have garnered a hysterical reaction
from the same people who accused the Bush administration of shortchanging the
Afghan war effort. The idea that we should have withdrawn after bin Laden’s
death ignores the fact that this is essentially what we did: Before leaving
office, Obama cut U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan by over 90 percent of their
surge-level highs. That withdrawal only hastened the sharp deterioration of
conditions in Afghanistan, which later became the explanation for why we should
never have been there in the first place.
As for the suggestion that the failure of
the Afghan army to hold off the Taliban proves the wisdom of Biden’s decision
to withdraw, one might equally ask how long Latvia, Norway, or Poland would
last against a long-running campaign of Russian subversion and aggression if
they were not defended by U.S. security guarantees and boots on the ground. Pax
Americana, like little Hans Brinker, has always been a matter of the United
States keeping its finger in the hole in the dike.
In the end, the war in Afghanistan, like
the war in Iraq, was lost not because it was “unwinnable.” We lost it because a
president made a deliberate choice to guarantee our own defeat.
The more sophisticated counterargument
runs as follows: Our involvement in the Middle East is a game that isn’t worth
the candle. According to this line of thinking, we have made an investment of
blood and treasure that cannot justify whatever conceivable strategic,
diplomatic, or economic returns it might yield. Thanks to fracking, we no
longer depend on Middle Eastern oil the way we once did (and, anyway,
oil-producing states, hostile or friendly, have no choice but to pump and sell
it to the global market). Terrorism is a worldwide, not Middle Eastern,
problem: To bomb jihadists in Mosul merely radicalizes their cousins in
Marseilles. The Muslim world appears to be incapable of democratic reform:
Nearly every time a free and fair election is held, whether in Egypt, Gaza, or
Turkey, Islamist parties with authoritarian tendencies win. So forget about
nation-building. If Beijing’s panjandra want this mess (and there are already
reports that the Chinese might want to lease Bagram Air Base), they are welcome
to it.
This isn’t to say, the counterargument
continues, that the U.S. can or should retreat from its global role. But we
urgently need to realign resources to priorities, even if it means cutting our
losses in ways that may feel humiliating now but that we’ll soon get over. Our
top priorities lie in shoring up long-standing alliances with competent
partners in Asia and Europe, so that we may jointly confront mounting threats
from China and Russia. Helping Australia build nuclear submarines is a good
example of the kind of steps we can take (even if those submarines won’t be operational
for at least another decade).
The template here is our recovery from
defeat in Vietnam, when we refocused our efforts on core rather than peripheral
geopolitical challenges; achieved substantial diplomatic victories at Helsinki,
Camp David, and Geneva; and discovered fresh sources of national power in
places such as Silicon Valley and Wall Street, which came from neither victory
nor defeat on distant battlefields.
This counterargument gets one central
point right—not that anyone seriously disputes it anymore. We are again living
in a world of great-power rivalry. China will be our most formidable
geopolitical adversary for decades to come by virtue of its size, wealth, rapid
arms buildup, reversion to Maoist-style rule, and increasingly brazen aggression.
Russia also poses unique dangers owing to its revanchist ambitions, its habits
of subversion, its grip on Europe’s energy markets, and its immense nuclear
arsenal. And despite their latent rivalry, Beijing and Moscow have a powerful
common interest in undermining Pax Americana—the complex network of military
alliances, trade agreements, common rules, and shared values among the U.S. and
our allies, which have undergirded the free world since the end of World War
II.
Yet the idea that we can conveniently
pivot from the Middle East to focus on more important areas is a conceit
wrapped in a delusion. Irrespective of energy, the region engages five vital
Western interests.
·
Terrorism. The experience of the past several decades teaches us that, while
domestic terrorism can be handled as a law-enforcement problem, the most
dangerous breeding grounds of terror are sovereign states or quasi-autonomous
areas that become magnets, training grounds, protectors, and ultimately
exporters of jihad. That was the lesson of Afghanistan before 9/11 and of the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria after 2013.
·
Proliferation. The gravest problem with an Iranian bomb is not that the world’s
leading state sponsor of terrorism would possess the most lethal means of
carrying out its designs. It’s that an Iranian bomb would swiftly lead to a
Saudi bomb, a Saudi bomb to a Turkish bomb, and so on. Nuclear
deterrence—difficult to conduct in the Cold War when the U.S. and the Soviet
Union possessed largely symmetrical capabilities—becomes all but impossible
when three or four nuclear states, in the world’s most combustible region, are
each at daggers drawn with the others.
·
Catastrophic state failure. The world can ill afford another state collapse in the broader
Middle East similar to what we’ve already witnessed in Yemen, Syria, Libya, and
now Lebanon. Nor can it afford a radical Islamist government capturing another
major capital, as nearly happened in Egypt after the fall of the Mubarak
regime.
·
Refugees. The West would be crippled by a refugee crisis on a par with the
one that swamped Europe in 2015. Among other effects, it would accelerate the
populist backlash that has strengthened quasi-fascist parties like France’s
National Front and Germany’s Alternative for Germany, while creating
opportunities for Russia to make further inroads at the (increasingly powerful)
fringes of European politics.
·
Israel. Assuring the safety and security of the Jewish state is not
merely a moral and historic responsibility for the Western world. It is also
deeply in the interest of the United States that its principal Middle Eastern
ally remain capable of taking decisive action—as it did against Saddam
Hussein’s nuclear program in 1981 and Bashar al-Assad’s in 2007—when Washington
lacked the stomach to curb regional threats.
The fall of Kabul has now gravely
jeopardized every one of these interests.
Afghanistan will likely again become a
terrorist sanctuary, though perhaps with less overt Taliban support. Iran will
look at the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan (as well as our pending withdrawal
from Iraq) as further evidence that we will do next to nothing serious to limit
its ambitions, regional or nuclear. Pakistan, which heedlessly supported and
cheered the Afghan Taliban, will now be more vulnerable to its own resurgent
Taliban insurgency. A fresh refugee crisis stemming from conflict and
repression in Afghanistan seems to be merely a matter of time. And Israel’s
security, in an era of American retreat, will depend more than ever on its own
limited resources.
The larger point is this: To believe that
the self-inflicted wound the U.S. just suffered in Afghanistan has no bearing
on our power, security, and reputation in the world is a fantasy.
* * *
As Kabul fell to the Taliban,
China’s Global Times, the English-language sister publication of
the People’s Daily, wasted no time in drawing some obvious, if
self-interested, conclusions. “The U.S. strategy of withdrawing from
Afghanistan, contracting its military presence in the Middle East and enhancing
geopolitical rivalry with China in Southeast Asia will soon prove useless,” it
boasted in an editorial.
The Taiwan
authorities have tied themselves tightly to the U.S., but the U.S. will not
offer unlimited support to the island at the cost of U.S. own interests…. When
faced with the Chinese mainland’s determination for a military showdown, the
U.S. is destined to retreat…. China and Russia should unite different forces to
humiliate the U.S. over the Lithuania issue and the Taiwan question, generating
a new, universally comprehensible “Afghan effect” in different forms.
Washington’s arms are way too long, so Beijing and Moscow should cut them short
in places where Washington shows its arrogance and parades its abilities.
The Global Times is a
mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, so bluster, propaganda, and bad
prose go with its territory. Nonetheless, what the editorial calls the
“universally comprehensible ‘Afghan effect’” is true, in two important senses.
First, our Afghan fiasco is forcing
traditional American allies to reassess the wisdom of their reliance on
Washington.
This is not just a matter of our tattered
credibility (more about which below). It’s also one of capability and
competence. It’s difficult to think of any aspect of the Afghan withdrawal,
beginning with Biden’s judgment, predictions, and execution, that might inspire
a geopolitical opponent to respect, much less fear, the American president as a
canny global statesman.
As for capability, though the U.S.
military remains by many metrics the most powerful in the world, it is a shadow
of what it was when it last was confronted with great-power competition. In
1990, at the end of the Cold War, the Air Force had some 4,000 fighters in its
hangars. The number is closer to 2,000 today. Our bomber force has lost nearly
two-thirds of its fleet, and now mostly relies on B-52s built in the 1960s. The
number of ships in the Navy has similarly declined by half despite concerted
recent efforts to increase their numbers. China’s navy is now larger ship for
ship, though not yet in capability or tonnage.
Beijing may still be the lesser power
compared with the U.S., globally speaking. But in the areas where we are most
likely to clash, it has all of the advantages of proximity, numbers, and
initiative. The People’s Liberation Army “has transformed its force to
specifically offset U.S. operational advantages in the Pacific theater,” noted
Lee Hsi-min, former chief of staff of the Taiwanese military, in July. “To this
end, the Chinese military has developed anti-ship ballistic missiles, attack
submarines and an array of air and naval platforms for conducting saturation
attacks to overwhelm enemies, all supported by space-based systems that make it
more integrated and lethal.”
Second, the fiasco is an invitation to our
adversaries to view the remainder of the Biden administration as neither a
nuisance nor a threat, but rather as a possibly unique three-year window of
strategic opportunity.
In March, Admiral Philip Davidson, head of
the Indo-Pacific Command, predicted that China would try to seize Taiwan within
six years. “We are accumulating risk,” he said delicately, “that may embolden
China to unilaterally change the status quo before our forces may be able to
deliver an effective response.” But why should China still wait six years?
After Afghanistan, the U.S. is thinking as never before about how better to
defend Taiwan, a process that would take several years to complete. The
opportunity, from Beijing’s standpoint, is sooner rather than later.
As for Russia, opinions vary as to where
Putin will strike next. It might be Ukraine, along whose border it again massed
troops earlier this year; or Belarus, already a client state, where persistent
unrest against a despised dictator risks inspiring Putin’s own domestic
opponents; or Montenegro, where in 2016 Russian agents very nearly carried off
a coup shortly before the country joined NATO; or, as I think, one of the
Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), in order to expose the
hollowness of American military guarantees while also breaking NATO’s spine.
Mikheil Saakashvilli, Georgia’s former
president, has proposed a more intriguing possibility: Finland or Sweden. “I do
not expect Russian tanks to roll into Helsinki or Stockholm, but it would be
relatively simple for Moscow to execute a land grab in a remote Arctic enclave
or a small island,” he speculated in 2019. “By attacking a non-NATO country,
Putin does not risk a proportional response in accordance with Article 5. But
by targeting a European country, he can expect to reap the rewards of public
approval at home.”
Implausible? Outlandish? Perhaps. But how
many of the same people who now think the Afghan retreat won’t matter all that
much ever thought Putin would seize Crimea and start a war in eastern Ukraine
at a cost of thousands of lives and with utter contempt for the West—until he
did exactly that?
There are other conceivable scenarios.
Ultimately, however, the specific targets of aggression don’t really matter.
For Russia as well China, the central goal of their next foreign adventure is
not to add another parcel to their already vast territories, while incurring
the predictable price in casualties, sanctions, trade penalties, or perhaps a
cancelled invitation to a diplomatic summit.
The real goal is to dislodge America,
firmly and for good, as the dominant power in global affairs. To do so would
also dislodge everything that dominance has come to represent: the power of the
liberal-democratic-capitalist model; the concern for human rights and political
dissidents; the willingness to use tools of economic and military power on
behalf of moral objectives. A world in which the United States becomes a
“normal” country—perhaps still faithful to its ideals but not all that
interested in exporting them; transactional and amoral in its foreign policies;
a big nation that can defend its own borders but not a superpower that can
impose its will—is a world in which people like Putin, Xi Jinping, Ali Khamenei,
and their ilk can truly thrive.
That’s a prize worth seizing while it’s
there to be had. And there’s no better way of doing it than by further humbling
an already humiliated America. Why give Biden and his administration the luxury
to lick their wounds, gather their wits, and recover their strength? In the
playbook of any bully or dictator, there’s never a better time to kick a man
than when he is down.
* * *
Things might be different, of course, if
the West’s unity of purpose under U.S. leadership could still be taken for
granted. Here again, there’s serious room for doubt.
Though Americans are apt to forget, more
than 1,000 troops from allied countries died fighting in Afghanistan. That
includes 456 British troops—a toll that, proportionate to the UK’s population,
is nearly equal to the scale of American sacrifice. They died because, after
9/11, NATO invoked Article 5 of its charter—that an attack on one NATO member
is an attack on all—to join the U.S. in its fight against the Taliban.
In the end, it was the United States that
left them scrambling to get their soldiers, diplomats, aid workers and citizens
out of the country before Biden’s arbitrary August 31 deadline for defeat.
Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the House of
Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee and a decorated veteran of the Afghan war,
called Joe Biden’s behavior “shameful” in a moving speech to Parliament. Ben
Wallace, the UK defense minister, went further, saying, “A superpower that is
also not prepared to stick at something isn’t probably a superpower…. It is
certainly not a global force, it’s just a big power.”
In Germany, Armin Laschet, leader of
Germany’s Christian Democratic Union Party and (as of this writing) potentially
Angela Merkel’s successor as chancellor, described the U.S. withdrawal as “the
biggest debacle that NATO has suffered since its founding, and we’re standing
before an epochal change.” In Brussels, Josep Borrell Fontelles,
foreign-affairs chief for the European Union, called the withdrawal “a
catastrophe for the Afghan people, for Western values and credibility, and for
the developing of international relations.”
There have been previous crises in
transatlantic relations, from the 1956 Suez debacle to the 2003 fight over the
Iraq war. This one is fundamentally different. It calls into question not
simply Washington’s judgment but its will.
If the U.S. will not maintain a garrison
in Afghanistan to avert the victory of a jihadist enemy that, to this day,
maintains ties with al-Qaeda, where else will America’s commitments be found
wanting? Just as a past generation of Europeans didn’t particularly want to
“die for Danzig,” as the notorious pre–World War II pacifist slogan had it, why
should a current generation of Americans want to die for Tallinn or Podgorica,
capitals of two small NATO member states that few Americans could even name or
find on a map?
One answer offered by President Biden is
that, unlike with Afghanistan, the U.S. has “sacred commitments” to its NATO
allies in the form of signed treaties. It’s an answer that illustrates why
French president Emmanuel Macron has complained publicly about the “brain
death” of NATO. Nations don’t go to war merely because they have treaty
obligations: They fight for the interests and values that treaties are supposed
to formalize. Absent those interests and values, the treaties are—or will soon
be—dead letters.
Another answer is that protecting
vulnerable European allies from Russian aggression is a basic, inarguable U.S.
interest that most Americans would readily understand and support. But is it?
If Russia were to try to seize territory in one or several Baltic states by
deploying the same forms of hybrid warfare that it used so successfully in
Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014—a combination of manufactured provocation,
political unrest from ethnic Russians, “little green men” wearing the uniform
of no country, and a clever campaign of dezinformatsiya—would the
U.S. and its allies be willing to risk a full-scale war with Russia, on terrain
heavily favorable to the Russian military, so that Latvia, Estonia, and
Lithuania could once again be whole and free?
I put the questions rhetorically because
the answers are self-evident. America would most likely fight to defend its
larger NATO allies—Britain, Germany, France, Italy; the core of the core—in the
utterly improbable event of foreign attack. Much the same goes for our oldest
alliances in Asia, such as with Australia and Japan. But there is almost no
plausible circumstance in which this president, to say nothing of his predecessor,
would go to war for smaller NATO members that are much likelier targets for
attack. In trying to distinguish between “core” U.S. interests and “peripheral”
ones, as advocates of the withdrawal from Afghanistan do, they have merely
shrunk the core and redefined what constitutes the periphery.
What’s true of the U.S. in relation to the
smaller NATO states is doubly so when it comes to the attitude of Europe’s
strongest states toward their more vulnerable neighbors.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the
case of Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2, an undersea pipeline running directly from
Russia to the German port of Greifswald on the Baltic coast. The pipeline—built
by a consortium whose chairman is none other than former German Chancellor and
Putin stooge Gerhard Schroeder—had been the target of U.S. sanctions and
pan-European opposition because it bypasses Ukraine and Poland as transit
corridors while making Germany even more heavily dependent on Russian gas. The
result, as Matthew Thomas at the Baltic Security Foundation points out, is that
it allows “Russia to directly coerce favorable outcomes in Western Europe,
while also allowing energy blackmail in the east to go unchecked by now
unaffected western countries.” Incredibly, the Biden administration, which came
to office with tough talk on Russia, lifted the most punitive sanctions,
allowing the project to be completed this month.
The purpose of NATO, Hastings Ismay, its
first secretary general, once said, was to keep the Americans in,
the Russians out, and the Germans down. Now it’s the
Germans who are keeping the Americans out, letting the Russians in, and pushing
their vulnerable eastern neighbors down.
There is, of course, much more to
transatlantic relations than Nord Stream or similar controversies, such as the
one over China’s Huawei telecom bids. But it’s emblematic of a broader decay.
The historic, cultural, linguistic, and emotional ties that once bonded
Americans to Europe have been waning for decades. So, too are the economic
ties: Europe’s overall share of the world economy has shrunk from 36 percent in
1960, to 22 percent in 2020, to a predicted 10 percent by the end of the
century. After the fall of Kabul, Europeans will never be able to trust the
strength of American security guarantees. Americans, for their part, have grown
disenchanted by European freeloading on those guarantees, typified by Germany’s
shrunken military budgets. This is a marital separation in the making,
initiated by mutual consent.
Inertia is a powerful force in
international affairs, and decay can go on for years. For now, NATO holds
together because few American leaders (other than Trump) are willing to call
the alliance into doubt, and because few European leaders (including Macron)
are willing to put their money where their mouths are by spending sufficiently
on their militaries to end their dependence on American arms. But reticence on
one side and parsimony on the other will do nothing to reverse the slide. And
the prospect of an outside shock to the alliance looms larger than it has in
decades.
* * *
Is there a way back?
In 2009, as the Obama administration was
laying the groundwork for America’s previous retrenchment, Charles Krauthammer
delivered a memorable speech to the Manhattan Institute on the subject of
national decline. “The question of whether America is in decline cannot be
answered yes or no,” Krauthammer said.
There is
no yes-or-no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there
exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable
external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For
America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice.
For many years I shared Krauthammer’s
sense that America could still choose to avoid decline. Today I am less
sanguine, for several reasons. Though Republicans are now in strenuous denial
about their role in the Afghan debacle, they still bear a heavy burden of blame
for what happened. Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s signature is on the
February 2020 agreement with the Taliban dictating our withdrawal; there’s a
picture of him standing next to Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar. So much
for not negotiating with terrorists. Trump very nearly had the Taliban over for
a photo-op peace agreement at Camp David.
Among the most destructive legacies of the
Trump presidency is that, at the level of ideology if not of practice, he
aligned the GOP with the same basic Retreat Doctrine that had animated Obama’s
presidency and now lives on in Biden’s. Regrets, conservatives may have a few.
But thanks to Trump, the new bipartisan foreign-policy consensus is no longer
that we should pay any price and bear any burden to defend freedom in the
world. It’s that America should generally mind its own business, spend more of
its resources on itself, and let other parts of the world fend and fight for
themselves. From the point of view of Xi or Putin, this is as close as it gets
to an ideal American view of itself.
Second, the American social compact is
being progressively rewritten—or, rather, rewritten by progressives—in a way
that, over time, will make it difficult for the U.S. to maintain defense
expenditures and foreign commitments adequate to a true superpower. In the 12
years since Krauthammer gave his speech, the U.S. has added a vast new
permanent entitlement in the form of Obamacare; done nothing to redirect the
trajectory toward insolvency that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are
currently on; added trillions in debt to the federal fisc; funded economic
growth in the form of cheap money that leads to asset price inflation; and may
yet create a broad new set of social entitlements that will only become
costlier over time. At some point, this level of spending may also call into
question the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency—even now, our most
valuable strategic asset against our adversaries.
One always has to be careful in making
economic predictions, and the U.S. economy has often shown the capacity to
surprise on the upside. But if the U.S. were to be hit by another financial
crisis or an extended period of stagflation, how much appetite would there be
for risky military confrontations at the new peripheries of Pax Americana?
Third, the idea of the United States as
the world’s exceptional and indispensable nation is fading from the American
conscience. Bold attempts at historical revisionism such as the 1619 Project
seek to recast the American story as one of original, relentless, and ongoing
racial supremacy, rather than as a country in which the forces of religious,
political, civic, and personal liberty unfurled their banners to defeat the
bigots.
Older, more historically literate Americans
may treat this new narrative with the skepticism it richly deserves. But a
younger generation already saturated with the new racialist ideology is likely
to be more credulous. A country that conceives of itself as foundationally
wicked and irredeemably sinful is going to have neither the moral
self-confidence nor the historical perspective that the free world needs in a
champion.
Finally, while Otto von Bismarck might
have been on to something when he wisecracked that “there is providence that
protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America,” even
the luckiest countries can, eventually, do themselves in. The forces unleashed
by “the Afghan effect” will, if left unchecked, develop an unbreakable and
accelerating momentum of their own. Retreat needn’t always lead to surrender;
but, as Napoleon is reputed to have said, “the logical outcome of retreat is surrender.”
As fate would have it, the fall of Kabul
coincided almost to the day with the 80th anniversary of the issuance of
the Atlantic Charter on August 14, 1941, following Franklin Roosevelt’s
historic meeting with Winston Churchill in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay. That
charter laid the basis not only for the military alliance that defeated the
Axis Powers. It also created an alliance of principle, power, courage, and
ideals that have sustained the free world against successive enemies from
Moscow to Beijing to Raqqa to Tehran.
There is still time to reclaim and revive
that inheritance. But as we learned in Kabul this summer, there is often far
less time than we expect. It’s a bitter but necessary lesson that we cannot
afford to be taught twice.
1 Apologists of the Obama administration sometimes claim
that maintaining a military presence in Iraq was never a possibility, thanks to
the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement that the Bush administration had
reached with the Iraqi government in 2008. This is false. As Leon Panetta,
Obama’s CIA director and later secretary of defense, recalled in his memoir,
the White House was “so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to
withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and
interests.”
2 In the event, bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in an
operation that could only have been mounted from Afghanistan. Had the U.S.
withdrawn its forces in 2009, as many opponents of the war urged at the time,
the U.S. would have been deprived even of this consoling victory.
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