When Antony Blinken was selected as Secretary of State, Foreign Policy magazine hailed it as a “return to normalcy for weary diplomats”. Finally, when President Biden was elected, the New York Times raved that it represented an end to “four tumultuous years under Trump”;  the Los Angeles Times’s editorial board welcomed his election as a victory “for the American people”.

Biden, Blinken and Sullivan — three men who, less than a year ago, were cheered on as the sensible, cool-headed triumvirate capable of saving the West. Today that promise has been sullied. Instead, they will be remembered as three of the key figures responsible for the tragedy now unfolding in Afghanistan.

Until the sudden and complete collapse of the Nato-backed government in Kabul, the Biden administration had enjoyed its very own “special relationship” with the American media. They were frequently thrown soft-ball questions. They were always allowed to point to the villainous Donald Trump whenever they needed a scapegoat. The media corps is always on their side — and who can blame them? You can’t ask tough questions while munching on cookies from the Press Secretary’s mother-in-law. That would be rude.

To listen to Biden’s media cheerleaders over the past seven months has been about as exciting as reading Pravda. “America is back. Trump was an aberration. We are going to bring Americans together and heal. We’re giving people hope and change. Build back better. Let’s get high on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).” And so on. God knows it was tedious. But Biden’s team was more than happy to stick to this hymn sheet. Nobody leaked.

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Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

You would have thought that the new administration would have been able to exploit for just a bit longer the narrative of an experienced, selfless, prudent President Biden — the steady hand after the wrecking ball. Where Donald Trump was off-putting, rash and rude, Joe Biden could so easily be presented as cool — those Aviators, man! — thoughtful and cooperative. In short, Biden was poised to become to the United States what Queen Elizabeth is to the United Kingdom: a rock of reliability and continuity, an embodiment of national pride and humility all at once.

Instead, seven months into the administration’s tenure, the Biden administration hunkered down and made a decision that would erase years of progress. It’s all too easy to picture the various individuals, all at the height of their professional careers, huddled together in the Situation Room. Some old and wise. Some fresh-faced and gung-ho. All fooled by the conviction that they can do no wrong.

While Team Biden already resorted to its standard fallback of pointing the finger at Trump — who, admittedly, initiated negotiations with the Taliban and made the original deal to exit Afghanistan — it is the current President who accelerated the plan for full military withdrawal before even attempting to repatriate all American citizens, evacuate our Afghan allies or secure any guarantees on human rights (particularly for Afghan women and girls). It was Blinken who told Senator Lindsey Graham during his confirmation hearing that any US agreement with the Taliban should “absolutely” be “conditions-based”. Where are those conditions now?

Just weeks ago, Biden assured us there would be no images of Americans climbing on roofs to evacuate in helicopters like in Saigon. Now, with the August 31^st deadline looming, it seems increasingly likely that some Americans might not make it out at all. Those who have applied for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) feel hopelessly abandoned. Our Nato allies look on with horror.

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America's spiteful foreign policy

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Speculation over what compelled Biden’s national security team to withdraw so suddenly without a proper contingency plan remains ongoing. Theories range from shrill claims about how “these men must be evil” to “experts” praising what they deem a calculated, realist approach to a never-ending war that was sapping attention and resources away from the bigger threats posed by China.

The more convincing argument, however, is more straightforward: The Biden administration screwed up because they had grown accustomed to uncritical support from the press. Instead of upholding their traditional role of checking and vetting individuals and decisions, for seven months the media has scarcely offered up a critical word of Biden. It was almost the exact opposite for Trump, who came in for relentless criticism — some of it fictitious.

Of course, nobody enjoys being hauled over the coals by the press corps. But it focuses the mind — unlike canine adulation. If enough people tell you that you’re going to be the most transformative president since Lyndon Johnson, it’s easy to forget how Johnson’s presidency ended.

That honeymoon period is over now. The situation in Kabul is now so dire that there is no option but to report on the failures of the administration. Even our new pedigree of activists journalists, for whom reporting is a form of proselytising, can no longer play defence for the President because the images coming out of Afghanistan are indefensible. When they learn that a toddler of one of our Afghan interpreters has been crushed to death in the vast and desperate scrum outside Kabul airport, Americans are rightly angry.

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And so Biden now cuts an altogether different figure. After his briefings, he scurries away, fearing an inquisition. Meanwhile, his press secretary is starting to look like all press secretaries: her jaw set, her eyes tired, her implausible talking points delivered almost defiantly.

For Afghanistan, the return of a critical press corps comes too late. But for Americans there is a lesson to be learned. Perhaps if the liberal media had done a better job during confirmation hearings and appointments, the situation in Afghanistan could have unfolded differently, with more effective leaders at the helm. Perhaps if earlier policy blunders had been subjected to closer scrutiny, this one might not have been so casually made.

“Democracy dies in darkness” was one of the many facile slogans adopted by the anti-Trump press in 2017, as if only their fearless reporting stood between America and a 1930s-style fascist dystopia. But as we are now witnessing, competent government instead dies when the lights are dimmed to flatter a new administration. When journalists and editors suspend their critical faculties, tragedy is bound to follow.

Really? It seems to me that the similarities between Vietnam in 1975 and Afghanistan in 2021 are unmistakable. Indeed, they were openly debated in the floor of the House of Commons, in yesterday’s debate. As Iain Duncan Smith put it: “the parallels [are] shocking, but also very true… this is a shame on all of us.”

In Vietnam, America found itself fighting in hostile terrain against a fanatical foe. Every strategy and tactic failed: counter-insurgency, troop surges, novel weaponry. Propping up a corrupt, unpopular government, the Americans came to realise that defeat was inevitable — and so they negotiated with the enemy and withdrew their troops. From that point, the fall of the capital was only a matter of time — though less time than anticipated. When the final collapse happened, it’s speed took the world by surprise.

Given this precedent, it is astonishing that the Americans didn’t see what might happen in Afghanistan — but they were blind to it. Back in July, Mystic Blinken made this prediction: “We are staying, the embassy is staying, our programs are staying. If there is a significant deterioration in security… I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.” He was exactly wrong — the Afghan government collapsed in one weekend.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

In Kabul, we didn’t just get helicopters lifting off from the embassy roof, but also troop transports taking off from the airport with people clinging desperately to the sides. Tragically, those who held on longest tumbled to their deaths. And thus 20 years after the the Falling Man of 9/11, we had the falling men of Kabul — the horrific bookends of a disastrous foreign policy. 

Except, the story doesn’t end there. The knock-on effects will be felt for years, not least by those left behind. As for America, one can foresee a contemporary version of the “Vietnam syndrome” —  a crippling loss of national confidence. Globally, the enemies of the West will be emboldened, just as they were in the 1970s. Now, as then, the sense of doom is palpable.

But before we succumb to despair, its worth remembering the most salient fact of the post-Saigon era — which is that we survived. To paraphrase a song of the era, the West did not crumble. America did not lay down and die. The 1970s may have been a decade of defeat — but we can also see the retreat from Vietnam as a prelude to the 1980s and victory in the Cold War. 

Believe it or not, there are positive lessons that can be learned from this period.

Let’s begin with what didn’t happen after the Fall of Saigon. According to the Cold War “domino theory“, allowing the loss of one country to the communists would mean that neighbouring countries would soon follow. But that didn’t happen in South East Asia. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — the components of what had been French Indo-China — were all lost in the same year. But that was as far as it went. 

The remaining dominoes — Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines — didn’t topple. Instead, the communist powers turned on one another — the Russian-Chinese split intensified, China invaded Vietnam and Vietnam invaded Cambodia. 

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Biden's most heartless betrayal

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Most of this was predicted by the CIA as early as 1967 — in a secret memo presented by its then director Richard Helms. As Mark Atwood Lawrence — a historian of the Vietnam War and director of the LBJ Presidential Library points out — it was clear both that Vietnam would fall to the communists and that the communist threat could be contained. 

We should have accepted the inevitable in Afghanistan too — because that’s also been obvious for years. We’ve known with absolute certainty that the former Afghan government was wholly dependent on the Americans — and wholly incapable of taking the lead against the Taliban. They should have been cut loose a decade ago. 

Of course, the argument against doing so was the same as it was in Vietnam — which is that abandoning allies, however unreliable, undermines confidence in Western resolve. But that only makes sense if one assumes that our resources are limitless. Quite clearly, they are not — and thus need to be deployed where they can make the biggest difference. 

Indeed, it is precisely because our resolve is so important that we should never test it where it can’t be sustained. Beyond the borders of the West that means fighting in support of local allies, but never in their place. We can help, but they must lead. A coalition of the willing is of no use unless it is also able. 

Yes, that’s not always obvious from the outset. Situations can deteriorate, especially when our allies lose credibility with their own people. Which is why we must be ready to withdraw and do so without hesitation. 

While we naturally associate retreat with defeat, many of the most successful leaders in history were those who mastered reverse gear. From the Russian evacuation of Moscow in 1812 to miracle of Dunkirk in 1940, going backwards is sometimes the only way forward. Or to quote General Oliver P Smith — who commanded the US 1st Marine Division during the Korean War — “we’re not retreating, we’re just advancing in a different direction”.

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Can the Taliban bring peace?

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The principle applies at a territorial scale too.

When great powers withdraw from unwinnable situations that doesn’t always mean the beginning of the end. Often it’s the opposite. Just think about our own history. Time and again the English (or British) have withdrawn from territories — for instance the Danelaw in the dark ages, Aquitaine in the Middle Ages and America in the 18th century, only to rise again stronger than before. 

Another example is the Roman Empire in the third century, which by 270 AD was on the brink of collapse. But then along came the Emperor Aurelian. Realising that the situation on the Danube frontier was hopeless he ordered the entire province of Dacia to be abandoned. A tough call, but in withdrawing the legions to defensible borders he saved the Empire and earned himself the title of “Restorer of the World”. 

I doubt that anyone will be calling Joe Biden Restitutor Orbis anytime soon, but if he wants to restore his reputation — and save the West — then he too must redeploy the resources at his command.

In today’s world, the boundaries of the West aren’t just defined by geographical territory, but by financial, technological and other networks that span the globe. And it is here that our defences need repairing. 

While we’ve spent twenty years and two trillion dollars fighting unwinnable wars far from home, we’ve opened our own gates to the influence of hostile foreign powers. We’ve sold out our workers to profit from cheap labour overseas. We’ve flogged off our land to foreign investors while our young people struggle to own homes. We’re building sensitive infrastructure, including nuclear power stations, with Chinese technology. And we’re building pipelines to increase our dependency on Russian fossil fuels. 

Writing for UnHerd this week, Paul Kingsnorth claimed that the West is suffering a civilisational crisis. Despite the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, he argues that we are not “short on ideas, arguments… or world-saving machines”, but that we are “very short on saints.” 

I agree about the saints, but not with the first part of his argument. If we can’t even build 5G networks without Chinese involvement then our civilisation is falling apart at the machine level too.

Doubtless this all stems from a deep spiritual malaise, but even the dead-souled technocrats who run our lives should be able to fix our broadband. This week the era of nation-building abroad came to an end. We would do well to replace it with an era of nation-building at home.

Not since Ronald “Morning in America” Reagan has a new administration come to office with so tenuous a grasp of the realities facing the United States — and so evident a determination to flinch from them. Look squarely across those oceans and you find diplomatic, political, and economic drift. An age of alliances? Not on Washington’s terms. As things stand, Joe Biden’s presidency is destined to mark an age of isolation.

Hardly two weeks after Biden’s November victory at the polls, 15 Pacific Rim nations signed what HSBC reckons is the largest trade accord in history, dwarfing anything the U.S. has sought to organise in recent years. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which come into effect by midyear, covers a third of the planet’s GDP ($26 trillion in 2019) and the same proportion of its population.

Who signed it? All 10 members of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as well as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan.

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And China. All of America’s bedrock allies and partners in East Asia just agreed an extensive trade pact that can also be taken broadly as a plan to get along with the mainland. This is, in effect, an Asia-for-Asians accord. Not to be missed, it is the first trade agreement that puts Japan and China on the same piece of paper.

In his Senate testimony, Blinken made it clear the Biden administration expects America’s traditional allies to stand with it as it faces up to China. “We have to start by approaching China from a position of strength, not weakness,” Blinken told his interlocutors, “a position of strength when we are working with, not denigrating, our allies.” This is the sort of bureaucratic diplo-speak, wanting in all specificity, that gets Washington in trouble in one instance after another.

The RCEP, however, is a subtly rendered but direct repudiation of this view. The accord, which sets down a variety of economic and investment rules from tariffs to intellectual property, is the Pacific Rim’s declaration that it does not recognise the ideological red lines the US insists on drawing across the region — “techno-democracies” as against “techno-autarchies,” in Blinken’s histrionic terms. These nations evince absolutely zero interest in any kind of Cold War 2.0 with the mainland.

Yet the United States seems incapable of retiring the 20^th century’s binaries into the past and addressing our diverse, multifarious new era. Certainly, its ties with Asia are more strained now than may meet the eye: the continued presence of American troops, to cite one example, has long been a politically contentious question among the Pentagon’s principal hosts — South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.

ASEAN’s desire to settle sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea at the negotiating table, as opposed to displays of power at sea, are another. Indeed, they are fully aware that Washington’s obsession with the South China Sea has nothing to do with security, as it claims: it has everything to do with supremacy.

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Europe needs to grow up and defend itself

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And so the Biden administration assumes office at a key moment in America’s trans–Pacific relations. It inherits alliances and partnerships of many decades’ standing, and no one at the far end of the Pacific, not even the Chinese, wants the US out of the region. But continue to get the China question so wrong and Biden’s national security people will severely damage Washington’s trans–Pacific ties, with the result that an incipient isolation will begin to assume a permanent character.

Something of the same obtains in Washington’s trans–Atlantic relationships, which now bear the character of irritated friends discovering they do not have as much in common as they once did. It is uncanny, indeed, how similarly Washington’s predicament unfolds in Europe. In the final days of 2020, China signed a bilateral investment treaty with the European Union that is at least as ambitious as the RCEP. In one interview, Valdis Dombrovkis, the EU trade commissioner, said it provided for “the most ambitious outcomes that China has ever agreed with a third country”. Are the E.U.’s 27 members really going to line up with Washington as it conjures a confrontation with China?

Critics immediately complained that the EU–China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment was poorly timed — a slap in the new American president’s face, a “kick in the teeth,” a “strategic mistake.” Implicit in this is the assumption Europe should continue playing follow-the-leader with Washington and has no business acting in what it judges to be its own interests. However, The CAI, as it is known, was seven years in the making and also bears broader interpretation. It, too, can be read as an indication that the Continent is no more interested than East Asians in Washington’s Sinophobic plans for some kind of decisive, king-of-the-hill reckoning.

It is Russia, however, as well as China, that has caused the Atlantic to grow wider in recent years. While the US has become increasingly hostile toward the Russian Federation, Emmanuel Macron has argued strenuously for some time that Europe must re-engage Russia as a key step toward a more independent foreign policy altogether. Angela Merkel has been less vocal on this point, but it will be interesting to see where her successor, Armin Laschet, lands on these questions.

Laschet is avowedly an Ostpolitik man, favouring friendly ties with Moscow and China alike. Should he take over as chancellor in September, among his early decisions will be whether to defy American objections and proceed with the highly contentious Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is to connect Russian gas fields with German ports and the European market. All signs are he will see through the project, which is now 95% completed.

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Charting the decline of the American Republic

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Of course, we should not forget that America’s relations with Europe and Asia were growing increasingly distant well before Biden won the White House  — and, let us not be mistaken, before Donald Trump’s singularly disruptive term, too. Why has the U.S. been so consistently in denial about this? The best I can do is suggest that Washington, after seven decades of primacy, suffers an institutional inertia that prevents it from registering the 21^st century’s defining currents.

Anyone familiar with Washington’s foreign policy cliques understands that they have simply not had to make any fundamental decisions since the 1945 victories, and must learn again how to respond to changing circumstances. The reality is that Washington’s policy cliques just don’t seem ready to accept the multipolar world we all find out our windows. The Nixon­–Kissinger opening to China in the early 1970s stands among the few exceptions to the rule. Yet today’s policy planners condemn that highly imaginative move as a mistake, preferring, in effect, to take cover in the anachronistic thought that America’s place as a global leader is just as it was during the post-war decades.

A year ago Biden published a much-remarked essay in Foreign Affairs under the headline: “Why America must lead again.” This is what the president and his national security people mean when they talk of alliances and partnerships: Let us all work together — we the commanding officers, other nations adjutants following our lead. Barack Obama and his administration — many of whom will now serve under Biden — made the same mistake.

Does this mean the United States will find itself isolated as our new century unfolds? Quite possibly, though it is not inevitable. Isolation, if it comes to be the case, will prove a choice, not a fate. The United States could accept — indeed, participate in — the transformations in motion in Asia and Europe were it willing to do so as an equal partner with others. But all signs indicate that Biden and his foreign policy people have no intention of squarely addressing the complexities of our time, and will insist on sustaining a primacy of a bygone era.

It is almost 70 years since Luigi Barzini published Americans Are Alone in the World. It was a work of admiration for a nation that stood unambiguously above others after World War Two. Now, the noted Italian journalist’s observation has been turned upside down. Unless the Biden administration alters course — an unlikely prospect by any sound reckoning — Americans stand to be alone because they are falling behind.