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The news of the American decline is greatly exaggerated

This article is published in number 37 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until September 14, 2021

In the face of the disastrous withdrawal of the American army (and other NATO countries) from Afghanistan where it was sent twenty years ago to eliminate the terrorists whoSeptember 11, 2001 had tragically violated the United States, some questions must be asked about America’s past and future in the world: has the force that led the Americans to lead the West really waned, first against the Nazis and Communists, then as a shield against Islamic terrorism? In addition to the clumsy withdrawal method, is President Biden really responsible for the failure of the Afghan adventure that involved some NATO countries, including Italy? What will US foreign policy look like after the controversial trials of the last four presidents, Republicans and Democrats, George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden?

A look back reminds us that the world has long no longer rested on the US-USSR bipolar balance as it had been until the collapse of communism in 1989., and that the subsequent illusion of an international peace founded on the victory of liberal democracy in the “end of history” (as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama called it) was nothing more than a mistake.

On September 11, 2001, it became clear that a new global actor with no state base, no uniformed army and no military rules had grown up: Islamist terrorism. Since that moment, the international system has lost the balance based on the hierarchy of some superpowers – two or three – capable of exercising continental leadership.

With the spread and miniaturization of the atomic weapon, the Bomb has become part of the armamentarium of some medium powers (Pakistan, North Korea and Israel) which are multiplying around the world. Even more destabilizing, in perspective, is the danger that states without democratic control could supply “dirty nuclear” to terrorist groups in order to exercise blackmail. A chaotic and multipolar world is taking shape with a growing role of regional powers (Turkey in the Mediterranean, Iran and Pakistan in the Middle East and Brazil in Latin America) which could tactically align with China thanks to its trade and financial policy.

The United States has been uncertain about how to exercise its economic and military leadership which, however, seems to be resisting in a world that has profoundly changed from the one it had taken over at the end of the Second World War. The Afghan affair is the most recent example. Until the presidency of Bush senior (1988-1992) and the Democrat Bill Clinton (1992-2000) international balances were still based on American hegemony exercised with arms, law and economics. With successive presidents, the insecurities in foreign policy have done nothing but weaken the image of the United States among the peoples of the world. The Republican George W. Bush he faced the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in an awkward manner, reacting erroneously with the logic of military expeditions to Afghanistan and Iraq, pushed by the neocons who believed, really or falsely, that it was possible to “export democracy” to the two countries in which they believed terrorism was nestled.

The Democrat Obama, after having tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, he thought that American hegemony could be entrusted to soft power and not to weapons, so he began the withdrawal of the military first of all from the Middle East and the Mediterranean, regions abandoned to Russian expansionism and turkish. The dialogue attempted at the University of Cairo with the so-called “moderate Muslims” did not follow, while the Kurdish fighters in Syria, allied to the West, were left at the mercy of their oppressors. The presidency of Donald Trump, beyond the folkloristic aspects of the character, had as its axis that America First which, in domestic politics, solicited the darker sides of populist nationalism and sovereignty and, in foreign policy, aimed at the substantial disinterest of the United States as a guide of Western world. With the somewhat singular idea that his exceptional intuitions would be enough to establish good relations with Russia, nuclear agreements with the dictator of North Korea and to pacify the Taliban, he created the conditions for the present disaster in Afghanistan.

The negotiations that led to the Doha agreement started with the unfounded assumption that the Taliban would peacefully make a deal with the US-backed official Afghan government., thus allowing an orderly withdrawal of the Marines. In the end, Joe Biden he found himself managing the flight from Afghanistan, planned and announced by his predecessors, perhaps induced by approximate scenarios of the upper military and intelligence spheres, thus betraying that commitment to restore multilateralism that he had declared he wanted to follow after the isolationist push by Trump.

It seems to me that America shifting the center of its foreign policy and military resources from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Europe to China, has not yet lost the scepter of the first power. It is one thing to note that Washington will no longer be for the West what it has been up to now, and that Europe will have to deal with its own problems of security and defense of liberal democracy against authoritarian populism, no longer entrusted to the American taxpayer. Another is to believe that the United States is definitely on its way to decline due to the fact that, after seventy years since the beginning of the Cold War, American citizens put their domestic rather than international problems first, rejecting the responsibilities of “Gendarme of the world” that we Europeans, from time to time, have invoked or deprecated, moved by an anti-Americanism in a karst style. For some time to come, the technological, military, economic and intellectual as well as democratic primacy of the United States with which the world will have to endure is likely to endure.
do the math.

Photo above: Steve McCurry, Pillars of blue light where the Twin Towers stood: 11 September 2002, the first anniversary of the attack on New York.

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