And, since the end of the cold war, we have thought that the core lesson of the European Union – that interdependence reduces conflict by turning enemies into friends – could be applied to the rest of the world. For decades, we have been used to looking at global problems through a Western prism, with the transatlantic alliance as the main unit of analysis for addressing these challenges. For hundreds of years, we have been at the centre of geopolitics – either as the motors of history or the world’s most important battleground. Yet it is Europeans who feel the change most dramatically. The contours of this world, and the new patterns of American engagement, have consequences in every region. President Joe Biden likes to say that “America is back.” Well, maybe – but, if it has re-emerged from the populism and quasi-isolationism of the Trump years, America is a very different country confronting a changed world. And, outside the West, other powers had grown not just in economic and military might, but also in their determination to chart an independent course rather than follow the Western playbook. The debacles that followed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 had severely dented America’s credibility as an international guarantor of economic and military security, while the Obama-Trump years had been defined by a desire to end ‘forever wars’ abroad and concentrate on domestic issues. Of course, the shift had been a long time coming. It was not simply Afghan civilians who were left behind, but also a certain dream of a liberal international order cemented by economic globalisation and the internet, and governed by liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. The heart-rending scene of desperate Afghan civilians falling off American evacuation planes at Kabul airport may become an image that marks the conclusion of that US-dominated era.
Its end came slowly and then all at once with the abrupt and chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
0 kommentar(er)
