If you wanted to capture the geopolitical history of the 21st century so far in a single paragraph, you couldn’t do much better than that:
Twenty years ago, the United States launched a brief and successful military campaign to oust people who had allowed a terrorist organization to kill as many American citizens as had ever died at the hands of a foreign power in a single day. the history of the nation. A timid month two decades later, the United States advocated with the same power not to hurt its soldiers, its citizens, and its allies as they deployed to complete a chaotic and humiliating retreat left by that old enemy – and American adversaries everywhere — immeasurably stronger.
Any history of emesis has its roots in hubris, and there are plenty of hubris to go through in the 20 years of U.S. commitment to Afghanistan.
But, as a lesson in the tragic cost of vanity, little can surpass the spectacle we have witnessed in recent weeks: an administration so imbued with self-confidence, so driven by self-confidence, so disastrously deceived by order. vain that he imagined he could impose himself on the world; a hubris now paid not for a high-level resignation or even an expression of contrition, but in the lives of American troops, lions were again sacrificed to save the faces of the donkeys leading them.
Biden hubris is a perfect example of the genre: the team of strategic geniuses, praised by their peers called experts, by allies and especially by themselves, as the smartest guys in the room, the “big ones” make it clear again to the mess left by those terrible naïves who preceded them.