The End of the American Empire?

In follow up to this morning's post that looked at America's exodus from Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, a piece in The New Yorker follows up on the question of whether or not we are on the cusp of a significant change in America's foreign policy which will see continued strong alliances but an end of what some have called America's empire which has sought to impose regimes on other nations.  In this morning's post, I noted the end of the British Empire and this piece begins with a similar reference.  The answer, of course is that only time will tell even if in the short term there is a long overdue focus on investing at home as opposed to spending billions - or trillions - of dollars in remote places across the globe.  In Britian the suicidal drive for Brexit was powered by those with delusions of restoring the British Empire.  In contrast, the MAGA crowd might well welcome a more isolationist approach to the world at large.  Where political liberals and moderates fall will be likely determinative.  Here are article highlights:

How does an empire die? Often, it seems, there is a growing sense of decay, and then something happens, a single event that provides the tipping point. After the Second World War, Great Britain was all but bankrupt and its Empire was in shreds, but it soldiered on thanks to a U.S. government loan and the new Cold War exigencies that allowed it to maintain the outward appearance of a global player. It wasn’t until the 1956 Suez debacle, when Britain was pressured by the U.S., the Soviet Union, and the United Nations to withdraw its forces from Egypt—which it had invaded along with Israel and France following Gamal Abdel Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal—that it became clear that its imperial days were over. The floodgates to decolonization soon opened.

In February, 1989, when the Soviet Union withdrew its military from Afghanistan after a failed nine-year attempt to pacify the country, it did so in a carefully choreographed ceremony that telegraphed solemnity and dignity. An orderly procession of tanks moved north across the Friendship Bridge, which spans the Amu Darya river, between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan—then a Soviet republic. The Soviet commander, Lieutenant-General Boris Gromov, walked across with his teen-age son, carrying a bouquet of flowers and smiling for the cameras. Behind him, he declared, no Soviet soldiers remained in the country. “The day that millions of Soviet people have waited for has come,” he said at a military rally later that day. “In spite of our sacrifices and losses, we have totally fulfilled our internationalist duty.”

Gromov’s triumphal speech was not quite the equivalent of George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” following the 2003 Iraq invasion, but it came close, and the message that it was intended to relay, at least to people inside the Soviet Union, was a reassuring one: the Red Army was leaving Afghanistan because it wanted to, not because it had been defeated. . . . Meanwhile, the mujahideen guerrilla armies that had been subsidized and armed by the United States and its partners Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were in a celebratory mood.

For all the talk of internationalist duty, the Afghanistan that the Soviets left behind was a charnel ground. Out of its population of twelve million people, as many as two million civilians had been killed in the war, more than five million had fled the country, and another two million were internally displaced. Many of the country’s towns and cities lay in ruins, and half of Afghanistan’s rural villages and hamlets had been destroyed.

Officially, only fifteen thousand or so Soviet troops had been killed—although the real figure may be much higher—and fifty thousand more soldiers were wounded. But hundreds of aircraft, tanks, and artillery pieces were destroyed or lost, and countless billions of dollars diverted from the hard-pressed Soviet economy to pay for it all. However much the Kremlin tried to gloss it over, the average Soviet citizen understood that the Afghanistan intervention had been a costly fiasco.

[O]nly time will tell whether the old adage about Afghanistan’s being the graveyard of empires proves as true for the United States as it did for the Soviet Union. My colleague Robin Wright thinks so, writing, on August 15th, “America’s Great Retreat [from Afghanistan] is at least as humiliating as the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989, an event that contributed to the end of its empire and Communist rule. . . . Both of the big powers withdrew as losers, with their tails between their legs, leaving behind chaos.” When I asked James Clad, a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, for his thoughts on the matter, he e-mailed me, “It’s a damaging blow, but the ‘end’ of Empire? Not yet, and probably not for a long time. The egregious defeat has hammered American prestige, however, delivering the geopolitical equivalent of egg on our face. Is that a fatal blow? In the wider world, America still retains its offshore power-balancing function. And despite some overheated journalism, no irreversible advantage has passed to our primary geopolitical opponent—China.”

It is true that, for the time being, America retains its military prowess and its economic strength. But, for two decades now, it has seemed increasingly unable to effectively harness either of them to its advantage. Instead of enhancing its hegemony by deploying its strengths wisely, it has repeatedly squandered its efforts, diminishing both its aura of invincibility and its standing in the eyes of other nations. The vaunted global war on terror . . . has effectively caused terrorism to metastasize across the planet.

Does the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan represent the end of the American era? On the heels of what appears to have been a disastrous decision by Biden to adhere to a U.S. troop drawdown that was set in motion by his feckless predecessor, it can certainly be said that the international image of the United States has been damaged. It seems a valid question to ask whether the United States can claim much moral authority internationally after handing Afghanistan, and its millions of hapless citizens, back to the custody of the Taliban. But it remains unclear whether, as Stewart suggests, the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan represents part of a larger inward turn, or whether, as Clad believes, the U.S. may soon reassert itself somewhere else to show the world that it still has muscle. Right now, it feels as if the American era isn’t quite over, but it isn’t what it once was, either.

It is important to remember that it was the Bush/Cheney regime that launched America's debacles in both Iraq and Afghanistan based on lies and hubris. While Biden's exit from Afghanistan was messy - and will be so for a while as the press sensationalizes various stories - the disaster was created by his predecessors, including Trump who agreed to a quick exit which to a large extent tied Biden's hands unless he was willing to accept far more casualties and a redeployment of more troops.