Afghanistan, the decline of the West and the passage of history towards the East
Afghanistan: effects and geopolitical scenarios. The analysis of Mario Sechi, director of Agi
The illusions evaporated after just seven months in the Democratic-led White House. Joe Biden yesterday revealed his real goals: "America First". The speech of the President of the United States is a sharp break, it has the impact of a trauma. It is a sensational break with the distant and very recent past (yesterday) because Biden has delivered to the pages of history an isolationist discourse, which ignores Europe (never mentioned), the sacrifice on the ground of countries that adhere to NATO (never mentioned), a hard, icy intervention, bent on the exclusive American interest, with the clear denial of the principles of "nation building", the blatant contradiction of what has been affirmed in all the documents of the Atlantic Alliance. All.
For the writer, this democratic retreat is not a surprise, it was only a matter of time. "America First" was never exclusive to Donald Trump (George Washington in his famous farewell speech of 1796 explained what America's commitment to other nations must be: "The great rule of conduct towards foreign nations for us is to extend our commercial relations, to have the least possible political ties with them "), there was no reset button to press to go back to the time of an imaginary" Pax Universalis ", there are some consolidated facts in the geopolitics of the present: the “serve and volley” of nations in an accelerated and compressed scenario, with interdependent and highly competitive subjects; a growing divergence between liberal systems (increasingly weaker and held back by democratic procedures) and autocracies such as China, Russia and Turkey (faster and more efficient in decisions); the American energy autonomy which has already changed the perimeter of the national interest guarded by Washington; China which does not want to converge with the West at all, but seeks the way to replace it with a new order – it states it every day – which does not open the markets, but closes them with the tap of a silent autarchic economy, control of the strategic raw materials of the 2.0 economy, the squeeze on the hi-tech sector and the penetration abroad with the trojan horse of the Belt and Road; globalization which is never a "win-win" game, but a world of winners and losers, with growing imbalances even within the same nations that benefit from it (between 2000 and 2016 the United States lost five million placed in the manufactory); the war that has been digitized and largely moved to cyber-space where the supremacy of American satellites is contained and the connections make armaments more vulnerable (Nadia Schadlow, in an article in Foreign Affairs in the fall of 2020, recalled the phrase of a senior Air Force officer on the F-35 JSF fighter-bomber: "A computer that flies by chance"), the contradictions of the multinationals that move in a "no border" dimension, but in a historical period that returns to erect, walls, fortresses, borders. Above all this, the shock of the pandemic and the extreme force of climate change.
We are only at the beginning of a perfect storm. This partial list tells us everything: Afghanistan is no longer in the context of the urgency of the White House, the interest of the United States is in the East, it plunges into the Pacific, the problem is called China (and rebound its ally, Russia) and an increasingly “dysfunctional society named America” (Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, screenplay by Oliver Stone). Biden already has his sights set on the mid-term elections of 2022, he knows he can lose, he is caught between the "culture wars" of the liberals and the need not to lose global leadership. A strategic dilemma that can lead to the “Thucydides trap”, a war with China.
In this context, a domestic policy plan that catapults foreign policy choices, total withdrawal from Afghanistan is not a bolt from the blue, Biden did what Trump announced and Obama started. The twenty years of the "long war" were a burden, not a strategic goal. Biden's problem (which is all ours now) is how he did it and as of yesterday so is how he said it. Because the President spoke to the Americans, not to the world, because those words have an impact on the future of the European Union, as long as the leaders of the Old Continent want to take note and do not prefer to look elsewhere.
The images of Kabul are those of a failure, an honorless retreat that will weigh heavily on the White House. There were only two ways to accomplish the act of retreat: good and bad. There is no doubt how it went, badly. The desperate Afghans clinging to military planes in the Kabul airport, the crash of those souls on the ground (immediate call of the "Falling Man" of September 11, 2001), are the snapshot that will remain forever as a stain on America and the whole West.
Biden has also been careful not to take responsibility for the accelerated fall of Afghanistan, he has thrown everything on the shoulders of Afghan soldiers (trained by the Americans, but that's a detail), who should have gone to die while their political leaders ( supported by the Americans, but that's another detail) escaped abroad or obtained safe conduct by paving the way to Kabul for the Taliban. Not a word about the allies, about a retreat that weighs on everyone's conscience.
Biden has ordered the wrong retreat (in time and manner, in the height of the fighting season, when the snow melts and the transport routes for men and ammunition for the Taliban are opened) and on his shoulders the words that fall like boulders he said only five weeks ago, recalled by David E. Sanger in the New York Times: "There will be no circumstances where you will see people lifted from the roof of a US embassy in Afghanistan." And again: "The possibility that the Taliban will dominate everything and own the whole country is highly unlikely". We saw the helicopters on the roof of the US embassy in Kabul. We have seen the Taliban take over all of Afghanistan.
Washington is far from Kabul (it was not on 11 September 2001 and this is the great amnesia and illusion that leads to the error of these hours), but for Europe the consequences are enormous and this morning we woke up with a revelation: we didn't go to Afghanistan to help build new institutions. Strange, personally I have a different memory, exactly the opposite, the memory and the notes in my notebook, the words of the officers of the United States and NATO that I have met on several occasions in Brussels, Washington, Norfolk and Rome. What will our soldiers and diplomats who worked passionately to give the Afghan people a future think of America today, after twenty years of sacrifice and mourning? Sharia law has returned to Kabul.
Anthony Blinken, in a tour de force on American television, tried to remove the shadow of another Vietnam from the White House: “It's not Saigon”. He is right, it is not Saigon, it is Kabul after twenty years of American occupation, it is the "nation building" today repudiated by its President. It is not just a defeat, it is a defeat.
Historically, the US disengagement confronts Europe with something new and worrying. The European Union lacks an army (and therefore a common foreign policy), it lacks a vital tool which is the classic continuation of politics by other means (read Carl von Clausewitz). In Brussels at this point a profound reflection is required, European leaders must ask themselves the question: what to do? Because something needs to be done, it is no longer a postponable issue, there are important military missions authorized and in full deployment (the very articulated one in the Sahel that commits us directly, in the territory where ruthless jihadist militias swarm), others will be planned in the future. Furthermore, the open gate to the Taliban in Afghanistan will have an impact on security in the Middle East (an America fleeing Central Asia encourages action against Israel) and will make its weight felt on the migratory waves. Plans for security in the Near East (where a battle is raging for the control of energy resources) must be finalized, relations with Erdogan's Turkey (which at this point assumes an even more decisive role) clearly established, an instrument studied defense of the Mediterranean area, the mission and the budget of NATO redefined, even the negotiations on the Iranian nuclear power are bent by the shock wave of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. For the European Union, this is a challenge that definitively closes the era of the Yalta agreements and opens up a land without maps that must be explored immediately, before being attacked by a reality populated by monsters.
It is an existential theme, it concerns the near future and that of the “longue durée”, the space and time of our children. This is why a parliamentary debate is necessary and urgent and – in a Europe where in a few weeks there will no longer be the leadership of Angela Merkel – to understand what the government's orientations will be. It will be important above all to listen to the vision of Prime Minister Mario Draghi. The hopes for relaunching the construction of the European Union, in this scenario of iron and fire, today fall on his figure. In my notebook there is a sentence of his pinned: “There is no sovereignty in solitude”. True, we are waiting to know who we are with and in what way, because the fall of Kabul, the words of Biden, are a change of the videogame screen. Atlantism and Europeanism, Draghi always repeats. We agree, but the "how" has become urgent.
In the notebook there is a red thread that binds a series of events and leads us to this day: the fall of Saigon (1975), the invasion of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (1979-1989), the Khomeinist revolution in Iran ( 1978-1979), the attack on the Two Towers (11 September 2001), the invasion of Afghanistan (2001), the invasion of Iraq (2003). The link is that of a continuous passage of history towards the East that has carved the biographies of American presidents and a constant decline of the West, up to the rise of China as a new / old power.
(Extract from an article published on Agi : here the full version)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/europa-difesa-america-first-biden/ on Sun, 22 Aug 2021 06:13:58 +0000.