Drawing Lessons from Afghanistan
Hawkish credibility claims are annoying because they are both sweeping and extremely vague.
Bret Stephens is in full fearmongering mode:
Now, in the aftermath of Saigon redux, every enemy will draw the lesson that the United States is a feckless power, with no lasting appetite for defending the Pax Americana that is still the basis for world order. And every ally — Taiwan, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Israel, Japan — will draw the lesson that it is on its own in the face of its enemies. The Biden Doctrine means the burial of the Truman Doctrine.
Since everyone wants to make the comparison with Saigon and the fall of South Vietnam, it is instructive to look at what did and didn’t happen after 1975. Every other U.S. ally did not draw the lesson that it is on its own. Formal U.S. allies did not change their allegiances, nor did they assume that the U.S. wouldn’t fulfill its commitments to them. Just a few years after the fall of Saigon, the U.S. terminated its defense treaty with Taiwan, and once again nothing of the sort happened. It’s as if other governments don’t judge U.S. reliability as the hawks claim they do. Hawks are unable to see the world as these other states do, and so they project their reactions onto these governments to lend their complaints more weight. The trouble is that the allies and clients mostly don’t see things the way they do, and don’t draw sweeping conclusions about U.S. reliability everywhere from its decision to end involvement in one conflict. When you see hawks holding forth about the dangers of losing credibility, understand that they are promoting a propaganda message and not offering serious analysis.
Hawkish credibility claims are annoying because they are both sweeping and extremely vague. According to them, the entire alliance system is now in jeopardy because the U.S. ended its part in an unwinnable war. But they never spell out what that means in practice. Stephens says that allies and clients will “draw the lesson” that they are on their own, but what is the practical significance of that? What are these states going to do in the future that they aren’t doing now? If the hawks are right about this (they’re not), how would they prove it? If the other states were losing confidence in U.S. guarantees, we should expect to see fairly significant and sudden changes in the military spending and shifting alignments of many countries. If these states now fear that they are “on their own” (they don’t), they ought to be taking more responsibility for their own security. If past experience is any guide, that isn’t going to happen. Warning about lost credibility is a cheap and easy way to attack a president’s decision when you can’t really defend your own policy preferences.
Adversaries are not going to “draw the lesson” of American fecklessness. They will almost certainly take into account the fact that the U.S. is no longer going to be distracted by a pointless war in Central Asia. That may not affect their calculations much, but it will hardly make them conclude that the U.S. won’t fight. The Soviets were not impressed by U.S. persistence in Vietnam. They marveled at how senseless and irrational the U.S. commitment there was. As Jonathan Mercer noted eight years ago, “Soviet officials were surprised that Americans would sacrifice so much for something the Soviets viewed as tangential to U.S. interests.” Keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan even longer would have been similarly baffling—and welcome—to Russia and China. Hawks are weirdly the ones most committed to the idea that the U.S. is an unreliable ally, and they are the ones always looking for reasons to cast doubt on U.S. resolve if they think it will serve some short-term goal of starting a war or blocking a withdrawal.
The U.S. withdrew from Vietnam and lost the Vietnam War, and in the end it didn’t matter very much to the U.S. position in the world or how the Cold War ended. It turned out that the war was always a peripheral one and the U.S. could and should have avoided fighting it for all those years. Now the U.S. has withdrawn from Afghanistan and lost the war there, but the U.S. position will not be affected very much because the war was a peripheral one and not worth fighting. Hawks desperately need losing Afghanistan to have a global consequences, because they have spent so many years inflating the significance of the war for U.S. and global security.
It's all the more frustrating because the "credibility" they seem so enamored with seems to refer to American willingness to sacrifices its own sons and daughters for the interests of foreign states. Do Bret Stephens and the other swamp-creatures parroting the "credibility" line actually believe that China is going to annex Hawaii tomorrow because they now doubt our "credibility?"
Oh no, are Taiwan and Ukraine now having doubts about our "credibility?" Great! That means they're less likely to engage in reckless behavior due to the moral hazard created by blank-check security guarantees and that if they chose to engage in such behavior, it is they rather than us who will bear the cost of it. In other words, these governments are now less likely to engage in destructive behavior and we are less likely to pay for it. That's a wonderful deal for the United States.
In point of fact, the Blob monsters who are lamenting the American withdrawal are most just embarrassed that the United States was humiliated by a group of rabble with funny facial hair who dress funny. A hundred years ago, Bret Stephens would have simply said what he is thinking: we cannot let our Great Nation get beaten by savages! Well, Bret, it's their country, not yours. Hence, much like the Viet Cong before them, they were willing to fight for it due to a syncretic mix of nationalism and religious fervor. On top of that, they didn't much appreciate the presence of foreign troops in their country, and apparently the locals weren't willing to fight or die on behalf of a comedically corrupt regime that had virtually zero support outside of Kabul, where the American gravy train coincidentally had its epicenter. As I seem to recall, our own nation had an episode where a group of unwashed farmers beat the mightiest imperial military in the world. Happed some time around 1776 I think.
Afghanistan was a complete farce from the beginning. A corrupt military industrial complex milked the occupation for all it was worth. Generals who were only interested in their own careers consistently lied about how well the occupation was going. Their underlings fed the generals false information because it was what they wanted to hear. Afghan elites latched onto American largesse in order to advance their own status and positions; it was only they, and not ordinary Afghans living in small villages, that the pliant press used to represent the voice of the Afghans.
Beyond this, the fact that neither the generals, the politicians, or the American public knew anything about the modern history of Afghanistan at the beginning of the war is somewhat excusable. It was a quick-strike response to 9/11. The fact that nobody in a position of authority in Washington know anything about the country or its history 20 years later is an inexcusable farce. Everyone with a star on their collar in Washington should have known the broad strokes of Mullah Omar's biography within a year of the war beginning. But much like Iran or China, we fill in the gaps of a country whose history we do not understand with cultural stereotypes.
The imperial war machine deserved the humiliation of Afghanistan and so much more, and so do its supporters. Cry me a river over the fact that they will have to endure an embarrassing news cycle. This entire project has been an embarrassment from the beginning.
I have a different concern than that [expletive deleted] Brett Stephens:
When I was younger, I used to sometimes take meals with an older lady who had lived in a suburb of Warsaw during WWII and who liked cats. She mentioned that, as sadistic as the Nazis had been in 1939-42, they were far worse in 1943-44, when you could see the terror in their eyes, the eyes of a bully who had met up with a bigger meaner, nastier bully and who was afraid that he was losing his grip. The Germans were fleeing the Red Army as fast as they could, but they were still dangerous to Poles, Czechs and the like.
Every time I see Jen Psaki jawing fatuously on some press conference and sounding like nothing so much as Hirohito after Nagasaki ("the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage...") , what worries me is that, having just been publicly beclowned in front of the entire world, that the United States will start another war, just to avoid the accusations of "weakness" and something something Muh American Credibility.