In one of the more
arresting videos that circulated after the fall of Kabul, a journalist follows
a collection of Taliban fighters into a hangar containing abandoned, disabled
US helicopters. Except that the fighters don’t look like our idea of the
Taliban: In their gear and guns and helmets (presumably pilfered), they look
exactly like the American soldiers their long insurgency defeated.
اضافة اعلان
As someone swiftly
pointed out on Twitter, the hangar scene had a strong end-of-the-Roman Empire
vibe, with the Taliban fighters standing for the Visigoths or Vandals who
adopted bits and pieces of Roman culture even as they overthrew the empire. For
a moment, it offered a glimpse of what a world after the American imperium
might look like: Not the disappearance of all our pomp and works, any more than
Roman culture suddenly disappeared in 476 AD, but a world of people confusedly
playacting American-ness in the ruins of our major exports, the military base
and the shopping mall.
But the glimpse
provided in the video isn’t necessarily a foretaste of true imperial collapse.
In other ways, our failure in Afghanistan more closely resembles Roman failures
that took place far from Rome itself — the defeats that Roman generals suffered
in the Mesopotamian deserts or the German forests, when the empire’s reach
outstripped its grasp.
Or at least that’s how
I suspect it will be seen in the cold light of hindsight, when some future
Edward Gibbon sets out to tell the story of the American imperium in full.
That cold-eyed view,
taken from somewhere centuries hence, might describe three American empires,
not just one. First there is the inner empire, the continental USA with its
Pacific and Caribbean satellites.
Then there is the outer
empire, consisting of the regions that Americans occupied and rebuilt after
World War II and placed under our military umbrella: Basically Western Europe
and the Pacific Rim.
Finally, there is the
American world empire, which exists spiritually wherever our commercial and
cultural power reaches, and more practically in our patchwork of client states
and military installations. In a way, this third empire is our most remarkable
achievement. But its vastness inevitably resists a fuller integration, a more
direct kind of American control.
Seen from this perspective, the clearest
American defeats of our imperial era, first in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and
then in the Middle East and Central Asia after September 11, have followed from
the hubristic idea that we could make the world empire a simple extension of
the outer empire, making NATO-style arrangements universal and applying the
model of post-World War II Japan and Germany to South Vietnam or Iraq or the
Hindu Kush.
We have experienced
similar failures, with less bloodshed but more significant strategic consequences,
in our recent efforts to Americanize potential rivals. Our disastrous
development efforts in Russia in the 1990s led to a Putinist reaction, not the
German or Japanese style relationship we had imagined.
The unwise “Chimerican”
special relationship of the past two decades seems to have only smoothed
China’s path to becoming a true rival, not a junior partner in a peaceful world
order.
Both kinds of failures
and their consequences — Russian revanchism and growing Chinese power combined
with quagmire in Iraq and defeat in Afghanistan — have meaningfully weakened
the American world empire and extinguished our post-September 11 fantasy of
truly dominating the globe.
But so long as we have
the other two empires to fall back on, from our cold-eyed Gibbonian perspective
the situation still looks more like a scenario where Rome lost frontier wars to
Parthia and Germanic tribes simultaneously — a bad but recoverable situation —
than like outright imperial collapse.
That said, defeats on
distant frontiers can also have consequences closer to the imperial core. The
American imperium can’t be toppled by the Taliban. But in our outer empire, in
Western Europe and East Asia, perceived US weakness could accelerate
developments that genuinely do threaten the American system as it has existed
since 1945 — from German-Russian entente to Japanese rearmament to a Chinese
invasion of Taiwan.
Inevitably those
developments would affect the inner empire, too, where a sense of accelerating
imperial decline would bleed into all our domestic arguments, widen our already
yawning ideological divides, encourage the feeling of crackup and looming civil
war.
Which is why you can
think, as I do, that it’s a good thing that we finally ended our futile
engagement in Afghanistan and still fear some of the possible consequences of
the weakness and incompetence exposed in that retreat.
And applied to the
American empire as a whole, this fear points to a hard truth: You might think
that our country would be better off without an imperium entirely, but there
are very few paths back from empire, back to just being an ordinary nation,
that don’t involve a truly wrenching fall.
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