Monsters Welcome

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

Here’s something to think about: While European countries are slapping sanctions on Israel, they’re ramping up engagement (including on trade) with the Taliban. After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, of course, the Taliban reimposed all sorts of horrors, including the legalization of violence against females and the vicious punishment of religious heretics. 

 

But Europe is too upset with the democratic State of Israel to care about any of that. 

 

I wrote about this very issue a year ago. Since then, Europe’s outreach to the Taliban has increased considerably. In June, Taliban officials met with EU leaders in Brussels for talks about sending Afghan asylum-seekers back home. This was the first time a formal EU delegation met with Afghanistan’s leaders since 2021. The Taliban came out of it boasting that normal consular relations with the EU are coming next. 

 

Officials from the UK and other individual Western countries now routinely fly to Qatar to meet with Taliban representatives. The Afghan Consulate General in Bonn, Germany, is under Taliban control. And an official appointed by the Taliban serves as the first secretary at the Afghan Embassy in Oslo.

 

The trend toward normalizing relations with the Taliban stretches well beyond Europe. India recently waived sanctions on the Taliban foreign minister so he could travel to New Delhi for talks, and the country is reassessing sanctions on Afghanistan altogether.

 

Less surprising, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others haven’t hesitated to engage with the brutal regime. It’s not at all uncharacteristic of Iran to have sent its foreign minister to Afghanistan last year. Nor is it shocking that Russia is the only country in the world to officially recognize the Taliban.

 

This is what the world looks like when America gives up on doing good beyond its borders. There came a point when the U.S. lost interest in pressuring authoritarian regimes as a matter of morality. And if America wasn’t going to hold the line, you could be sure that no other country would. Everyone is now free to wheel and deal with monsters should the opportunity arise.  

 

Today, easing up on the Taliban is a no-brainer for a West that’s lost its moral true north. Donald Trump’s favorite foreign leader, after all, is a former al-Qaeda soldier. And in the U.S., we’ve got an al-Qaeda-linked candidate running for Congress in New Jersey. 

 

The Taliban’s growing good fortune is also directly tied to the West’s growing accommodation with Israel’s jihadist enemies. Once Hamas terrorists earned the admiration of all those twisted Western minds, the die was cast.

 

You can’t, on the one hand, support a repressive terrorist regime that wages a bloody war on a democratic state and, on the other, condemn a different repressive terrorist regime that wages war within its own borders. You can’t grant Hamas an imaginary state while refusing to recognize the actual state ruled by the Taliban. When you choose barbarism over civilization, you’re not merely switching teams. You’re backing one historical force over another. More and more, European leaders are siding with those who want to rewind history altogether.