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If there is something I hate it's people who try to avoid answering real questions by showing how it's possible to game the answer.
I don't care if you're clever enough to make untrue things appear true Protagoras, what I care about is if Western Elites can produce strategic results when genuinely challenged.
Then stop trying to make true things appear untrue by introducing weasel words or dismissing challenges as genuine, Antigoras.
In the answer you hate on grounds of avoiding answering a real question, you had a real answer in Ukraine- a country with no right to be able to resist what a few years ago was believed to be a top-3-in-the world army. This was a war which started in the context of a Russian attempt to push back NATO and deepen Germany energy dependence... which has seen NATO expand and close a previously competitive theater, seen the Europeans execute real and expensive energy transition, and maintain a multi-national coalition of backers by parties that half a decade ago were actively selling arms to the Russians.
Is this to be dismissed because the Americans or Europeans aren't directly involved? Because Russia is not a great power? Because, three years after a three day special military operation, there may be some less-than-maximally-desirable ceasefire conditions for a country that demonstrated the military advantage of American aid against far stronger parties?
Strategic challenges aren't necessarily military threats either, so tying one to the other is begging the conclusion. You may take it for granted that ISIS's caliphate was crushed / the Korean DMZ is boring / that Iran limits itself to asymmetric and proxy groups rather than direct expansion / that the South China Sea remains a place of coast guard disputes rather than gunboat diplomacy, but these are all strategic challenges well beyond the capacity of most states, and these are all places where the status quo is an example of strategic results being achieved. In some of our lives, Iran in living memory had a very real expansionist potential of directly annexing parts of Iraq on co-religionist grounds- and now it's 'just' competing with the US for influence over local politicians.
I don't know how you can complain about weasel words and deliver this whopper in the same post... Less than maximally desirable ceasefire conditions? Has the war situation developed not necessarily to Ukraine's advantage? I recall you saying things like 'oh the April '22 ceasefire talks were a dead end since the Ukrainians couldn't accept the demilitarization/no NATO terms'.
What kind of ceasefire terms are they looking at now, compared to then? How much more lost land are they looking at? How much of the country has left, never to return?
The military advantage of American aid is that you lose hundreds of thousands of men in a meatgrinder, get your whole country intensively bombed and depopulated and finally lose more land than you would've without it? And the biggest gamechanger, the most important weapon in Ukraine's arsenal is the DJI Mavic and other Chinese drones/electronic parts?
The sanctions on Russia have had no significant impact on military capacity or state stability. In fact Russia, Iran and North Korea have somehow managed to outproduce the West in munitions while China has both a qualitative and quantitative lead in drones. US ISR has been pretty effective but that's about it.
The US goal has been clear, to restore Ukraine's pre-2014 borders and prop up the old world order by bringing Ukraine into NATO. This clearly hasn't worked. Ukraine's borders and territorial control are looking pretty patchy. The mirage of NATO membership is as distant as ever. The war situation is not reassuring for not-quite-treaty allies of the US. Reframing the goal to 'at least things haven't yet gotten catastrophically worse' is not sufficient, especially since the disasters are nearly all self-inflicted.
The DMZ was fairly calm before the whole Axis of Evil/pre-emptive strike idea which was rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. Iran's influence was limited and there were opportunities to work with them before the US started hacking away at MENA, rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. Now there are a host of Iraqi militias fighting for Iran, they've achieved something close to Sun Tzu's ideal of perfection in turning a major enemy into an ally without fighting. We did that for them, at great expense.
How could ISIS have emerged if Saddam wasn't dethroned and Syria wasn't destabilized?
Russia's military threat was minimal before the 'all of Russia's neighbours should be brought into NATO' policy, rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. There was a moment where Russia was cooperating with us on anti-terrorism and energy but that was thrown away.
China would be vastly easier to deal with if it weren't for all the other crises and about 15 years where naval modernization was on the backburner compared to fooling around in MENA and now Europe. And it's still happening. China may well orchestrate some disaster in the Middle East before they move, knowing the US will pull carrier groups away to defend their highest priority, Israel.
China simply isn’t a civilizational foe of the United States. I don’t care about Taiwan and neither should you. Xi Jinping does not seek to invade and subjugate the Japanese (let alone the Americans), something even most extremely online Chinese ultranationalists don’t care for. China is a distraction, and the US has - if anything - a lot to learn from the successes of Chinese civilization.
All the Chinese want to do is control their own backyard, something they will always find difficult due to the vast majority of their neighbors hating them. Their economy is fragile, and their demographic trajectory / aging population is the stuff of nightmares. The Chinese have never sought a global empire, have rarely even sought to spread their ideology.
Russia is always going to be more of a civilizational threat to Europe and European civilization than China. Not that it has to be, of course, and not that that threat is great or immediate or terrifying (it isn’t). But China is even less of an issue.
Germany never sought a global empire until it did. America never sought a global empire until it did. China has global interests due to its size and power. Power and world hegemony is seductive for anyone.
China's backyard is extremely valuable real estate: South Korea and Taiwan are vital for chipmaking. Intel is a laughing stock, knocking out Taiwan would rip out the spinal cord of the US economy. There'd be an instantaneous economic crisis in the USA, China supplies America with enormous amounts of goods. Not just cheap plastic, everything from medical precursors, machinery for ports and microelectronics for missiles comes from China. Everyone keeps going on about the fragility of the Chinese economy, I think it's the complete inverse of reality. In manufacturing they produce about as much as the US, Germany and Japan combined. They have the biggest trade surplus in the world because their economy is productive, not because it is fragile and weak.
And it's the same with demographics. The second most births in the world behind India, more than double the US birth rate? A population as large or larger than all Western civilization combined? Absolute size is what's important, not proportions.
If China wins a convincing victory in Asia, they can brain-drain the remnants of TSMC, subordinate South Korean industry and secure first place in high technology. The world would be their oyster. I agree that we have much to learn from China but their competence is precisely why they are threatening.
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I appreciate your pre-emptive concession of your lack of ability, which was certainly well warranted by what followed.
I hope that made you feel better.
In the sense of avoiding a mess rather than stepping in it, I suppose.
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I don't like using ongoing conflicts to judge the competence of leaders because the consequences of actions can take a while to play out. And people always seem to blinders on about the present.
You could have held the same triumph for Afghanistan in the 00s for instance. Some did, and we all know how that ended.
The only question that matter strategically speaking is whether or not the West is in a better position than before this war. Your listings of tactical victories are irrelevant.
I find success difficult to argue in terms of stockpiles, economic stability, political stability and diplomatic standing. If I had to pick between the western alliance before or after this war to fight China over Taiwan, I pick before every time.
Well, yes. Willfully ignoring the effects of the western powers on the first non-western great power war of the last quarter century while making a lack of effecting great power wars in the last quarter century a basis of criticism would be blinders.
And we also all know that it didn't end due to the nature of the 01 invasion, but on two decades of nation-building failure after the military delivered initial effects, which are different types of issues that shouldn't be conflated (and do not disqualify 01 from meeting your requirements of strategic effect).
Unless you intend to argue that the nature of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan inevitably, inherently led to the 2021 withdrawal dynamic, and that the intervening 20-odd years had no opportunities / ability / responsibility to matter, appealing to 2021 would be an anachronistic way to dismissing 2001 regardless of whether 2001 was done well or wisely or not.
You think the US strategic position would be better if the Islamic State was still straddling the Syria-Iraq Border, the Korean Peninsula was either ablaze or rebuilding from a catastrophic war that leveled Seoul and saw the Chinese the only power able to invest in the reconstruction at scale, the Iranians annexing much of Iraq and gain significantly more control and leverage over Gulf oil flows, and the Chinese were attempting direct military coercion of one of the main economic thoroughfares of the world?
Okay. Truly only tactical effects.
That would be a very stupid pick, given there was no western alliance to fight China over Taiwan, that multiple European leading states including both France and Germany were not-subtly signaling their disinterested in supporting Taiwan over China, that the Europeans were even more militarily incapable of contributing useful military aid to Taiwan even if they wanted to, and that the European Union was far more vulnerable to Russia-PRC economic lobbies and coercion that would be pressuring them to neutrality vis-a-vis participation with the US.
But okay. You are the Protagoras here.
And that's for no reason other than because it's inconvenient to your argument.
You either haven't internalized that there is no meaningful difference between war and diplomacy, or you have and you're lying.
The Islamic State was literally created by specific decisions the Americans made in Gulf 2 and Syria. If they didn't have this silly belief that the middle east can be democratic and US aligned, none of this would have happened.
Korea had to be fought, but the US stalled as soon as China got involved.
This most of all is a complete failure of American diplomacy. They controlled Iraq militarily and we're kicked out of institutions they themselves created.
All in all, if there's strategic competence at play here, I don't see it.
As for the claim that Europe is a better ally now than before the war, it is the most ridiculous of all. The US had to shoot German industry in the kneecap to ensure its loyalty and France, Britain and Germany are experiencing levels of political instability unheard of since the 50s right now because of it. Not to mention they now have insignificant military capacity and would be unable to help even if they are utterly loyal to NATO.
Yes I believe either your eyes are closed or you're a sophist.
Or that your categorization scheme is structurally unsound and anachronistically selective.
Or you failed the lesson on spectrums. The expression that war is the extension of politics by other means is that they are related and interconnecting, not that they are the same thing with no meaningful differences in their conduct or in the decisions or decision makers that are involved in them.
Whether you believe there is no meaningful difference between war and diplomacy or not, there are very substantial differences in who leads the efforts organized under them and who is lead of who at any given time and what their intent for them is, and this is without circumstances changing in the passage of time.
'None of this matters because different people should have made different circumstances in a different decade' is an evasion, not an answer.
The Obama-era elites were not the elites who could choose Gulf 2, nor were they even the same nationality of elites who chose to make southeastern Syria an insurgency supply line. They weren't even the decisive elites for supporting anti-Assad rebels in Syria, which was practically a regional orgy of interventions.
And?
Setting aside that the Korea War did not have to be fought, you have yet to make the case that the US being stalled by China in Korea is a inferior strategic output than the choices and consequences that would have been required to push the Chinese military out of North Korea into China by an expeditionary military force of a power still recovering from WW2 over-extension and needing to prepare for a potential European conflict- a preference that can claim historical validation because the US demonstratably did not get so bogged down in an Asia conflict that it was unable to maintain deterence or its alliance networks in Europe.
Which goes back to categorically excluding successes. The US stalling as soon as China got involved is presented as a failure, rather than US policy makers making an appropriate decision in the face of a Chinese intervention on the appropriate scope of the war and war goals to pursue.
I was actually referring to the Iran-Iraq War, not the post-war, but I concede I forgot the time clarification and muddled the topic.
Sure- because you gerrymander categories to dismiss successes and then conflate decisions and consequences decades apart to disqualify decisions without regarding their own circumstances and purposes.
This is a particularly inept series of characterizations. The US did not shoot the German industry in the knee cap, the current dominant causes of European instability (migration, demographic age-out, post-financial crisis stagnation, Covid aftershocks, rise of the far right) well predate the war in Ukraine, as did their military insignificance in a China scenario.
Whatever makes you feel self-assured, I suppose.
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I'll bite.
When was the Afghanistan war lost? I stand to be corrected, but it seems to me that across twenty years and four presidents, there is no obvious answer better than 2001, when we committed ourselves to invading, occupying and democratizing the country. I do not think you can point to a time past that point when we stood a better chance of securing a better outcome, in terms of costs and benefits, than before the war began. Everything that followed really does seem to have flown downhill from that point, from the sort of people who were in charge, the ideological commitments that defined them, the nature of our country and our military, and the realities of the nation we chose to invade.
If I'm wrong, it seems to me that the way to demonstrate it would be to point to some inflection point post-invasion, a before and after where things took a turn for the worse. But from what I can see, there is no such inflection point. From the moment American boots hit Afghan soil till the moment they left, America had the ability to utterly dominate Afghanistan militarily, at a significant cost in blood and treasure and human misery, and for zero tangible benefit. I have never seen evidence that it was ever going to get better, or that it ever was going to end any other way but how it did. We were always going to pay far too much for far too little until we eventually decided to stop paying. The only way to improve that calculus would have been to stop paying sooner, or ideally not pay at all.
You seem to be arguing that the nation-building was poorly executed, with the implication that it could have been done successfully. That may be true in some theoretical sense, but I see no plausible scenario where America actually does a better job of occupying and nation-building than we saw in reality. I don't think Gore, Kerry, Romney, McCain, Hillary or indeed Trump would have done any better than their respective opponents actually did. I don't think shuffling pentagon or state department officials around would have changed anything. I don't think you can actually argue that better outcomes were at hand if only the right people were in charge. I'm pretty confident that, in fact, the "right people" don't exist, then or now.
The best possible outcome I can imagine would be to have conducted the war as a punitive raid, bombed our way in, shot anyone who looked at us funny while hunting Bin Laden, and then rolled back out again once it became clear he was gone. No nation-building, no occupation, no two decades of graft and incompetence and pointless bloodshed so that washington and pentagon apparatchiks could play social studies phd through heavily-armed proxies.
Am I wrong? What am I missing here?
That cause and effect exists?
I'm not sure what you expect to hear. The choice to commit to rebuilding Afghanistan as a democracy rather than the post-war consultation of the tribal elders to return the pre-soviet monarchy weak monarchy was a policy choice. The choice to specifically rebuild Afghanistan as a socially liberal democracy regardless of what the local felt, but then to also not take control of the education system for a generation, was a policy choice. The choice to rebuild Afghanistan as a singular state at all, rather than fracture it into substates that could be it's neighbors problems to influence and sort out, was a policy choice. The choice to withdraw western forces but expect to fly back in to Kabul was a policy choice. Deciding that the guarantee was to fly back in, but abandoning the main military airbase near the capital and limiting yourself to the civilian airport, was a policy choice. Deciding to time the withdrawal to the end of the fighting season, for maximum military and political momentum of the insurgency, for the sake of a symbollic ceremony date was a policy choice.
The way Afghanistan failed was the result of specific policy decisions. Even if you believe that some form of failure was inevitable, the type of failure / the optics of failure / the degree of badness of failure can differ.
Heck, even the strategic consequences of failure can differ. Had the US / western countries tried to double down and surge in support to the Kabul government in fall 2021, that in and of itself could have greatly shifted Western support and approaches to Ukraine, given not only the internal political considerations but other factors like how a re-surge would likely have required access across Russian airspace and provided an exposed vulnerability for Russia to apply coercion to.
I expect to hear how the choices you list weren't made when the war was sold to the public and initiated, and how they might have been made differently either at the point of initiation or at any subsequent point over the next twenty years.
You might reply "well, this guy pushes different keys at his keyboard and a different document comes out, which..." But cause and effect means that all the people plausibly in a position to be pushing the keys are going to push roughly the same keys!
...It seems to me that you are using the word "failure" to refer to the chaotic disaster of a pullout. I am using the word "failure" in reference to the stated goals of the invasion and occupation, the goals that were used to sell it to the American public, not least among them the soldiers who volunteered to serve there. I don't care about the events of the pullout at all, and do not consider it a failure, because unlike the entire rest of the war, it did what it was supposed to do: by the end of it, we were out. Sure it was a complete disaster from a tactical perspective, and sure the people who made it happen like that should probably be fired and jailed for criminal incompetence, though it seems to me that we might disagree over who those people actually were. Confining ourselves to the pullout specifically, maybe different people might have delivered different results! But the objective was in fact achieved, something that cannot be said for any other part of that two-decade disaster.
In any case, leaving the pullout aside, the specific policy decisions you note were the product of institutional culture. Given the institutional culture, not only was failure inevitable, but I am convinced that the specific form of failure that we got was inevitable. I don't think presidential or congressional elections flipping would have changed it. I don't see any plausible staffing decisions flipping that would have changed it either. The initial decisions were the sort of bad that our institutions reliably produce, and once locked in, those institutions are far too sclerotic to make significant course corrections even if someone in control had wanted to, which no one did.
In short, it seems to me that we committed ourselves to impractical objectives, and then spent twenty years pretending otherwise at great expense in terms of treasure and human misery.
Who would have seen that as a plausible benefit to an Afghanistan surge, rather than further confirmation that a pullout was the correct choice? And for what? How would such a surge have moved us closer to "victory" in any meaningful sense, as opposed to simply further delaying the admission of a failure present more or less from the start?
Sure, "things could happen differently". I could bet on black a hundred times in a row at roulette and end up a gajillionaire. But that's not actually going to happen, firstly because the laws of probability don't work that way, and secondly because I don't gamble. In the same way, it seems to me that the actions and outcomes we observe were overwhelmingly probable both because of the actions taken, and because the people taking action are inclined to these actions by training and temperment.
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