Why it’s wrong to blame Biden for the Afghanistan debacle
Washington elites are rightly horrified by the Taliban’s swift takeover, but more troops and more time wouldn’t have made a difference.
Rajan Menon holds the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in Political Science at the City College of New York/City University of New York and a Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. He has also taught at Vanderbilt, Lehigh, and Columbia.
Fellowships: Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Fellow at the New America Foundation, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Visiting Fellow at the Harriman Institute (Columbia University), Senior Advisor and Academic Fellow at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Director of Eurasia Policy Studies at the National Bureau of Asian Research NBR). He has received fellowships and grants from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Carnegie Corporation, the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Books: The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, (Oxford University Press 2016); The End of Alliances (Oxford University Press, 2007); Ukraine in Conflict: The Unwinding of the Cold War Order (MIT Press, 2015), coauthored with Eugene B. Rumer; and Soviet Power and the Third World (Yale University Press, 1986). His next book, to be co-authored with Eugene Rumer, is tentatively entitled Russia 2035.
Op-Eds: Over 100, in the NYT Book Review, LA Times, International Herald Tribune, Financial Times, Boston Globe, CNN, Newsweek, and other outlets.
Washington elites are rightly horrified by the Taliban’s swift takeover, but more troops and more time wouldn’t have made a difference.