China, India, Iran, and Pakistan will be forced to begin a new game of multidimensional economic chess.
H.R. McMaster and other apologists for the failed policy in Afghanistan would like us to focus on anything but their complicity in it today.
But don’t expect a lot of pushback on settlements or a renewed push for two state solution. Right now this is about management.
There are too many careers and too much money tied to American power projection. So expect it to shift, not recede from the stage.
There will likely be a return to a much more historically normal state of global affairs in which multiple players are engaged.
The US or the EU may need to get involved as regional actors are stepping in to push their authoritarian agendas.
The world watches as the Afghan government tragically teeters on the brink and America reflects on its failed policies there.
Rejoining the JCPOA was a comparatively straightforward task which is taking too much time and effort to complete.
Cities are falling to the Taliban at a rapid pace, but the conditions for failure were set long before the US troop withdrawal this summer.
While he warned about the military industrial complex, he was less restrained when it came to covert interventions, some which reverberate today.
The lesson for would-be scholars: why bother trying to cultivate expertise in this area if it will only serve to disqualify you in the Blob?
Not only would this be the “Saigon moment” Biden is trying to avoid, it would signal a full-scale diplomatic abandonment of Afghanistan.
Add Turkey to the mix and see how this is building to become the next step in a strategic security axis against Iran.
It would seem the American people aren’t ready for a conflict with China over Taiwan. But are both sides ready to compromise?
A sudden shift in casualty information provided by AFRICOM after US attacks in Somalia should be cause for concern.
The secretary of state’s speech promoting Biden’s infrastructure plan could have been more internationalist given a grim new UN report on climate change.
The Biden administration must address this strategically or there will be nothing left of the ‘global order’ as we know it.
George W. Bush, the architect of our 9/11 wars, is trying to tell us how to think and feel about the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Major Emirati-funded DC policy organizations have said remarkably little about the country’s illicit influence.
The Afghanistan withdrawal should be just the first step in a wider push to draw down the US military presence in the greater Middle East.
He was a colleague and a principled truth-teller during an era of war, hubris, and Beltway banditry.