by AntonGiulio de’Robertis
The Fall of Kabul and Biden's Speech
The rapidity of the advance of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the immediate fall of Kabul surprised not only Western observers and commentators lulled into the widespread belief, which became mainstream in the Western information system, that the Afghan regular army would be able to maintain control of the country even after the retreat of the American and Western forces that had trained and supported it for over a decade.
This belief also prevented Western programmers from preparing adequate evacuation plans and effectively extended exit from the country to all those who in various capacities had collaborated with Western forces and NGOs present in Afghanistan. Biden wanted to respond with his speech on August 16 to the criticism and bewilderment of the international public in the face of the "hasty" evacuation of American forces and Western organizations from Afghanistan. The evacuation led them to barricade themselves in the compound of the Kabul airport waiting for exfiltration flights, assaulted even by ordinary Afghan citizens terrified by the prospect of persecution that the Taliban could carry out.
But the Biden speech was an ode to the American national interest placed above any spirit of solidarity and even less than adequate gratitude to those who had worked for decades alongside the American forces and organizations committed to creating conditions for birth of a democratic system in Afghanistan. This concerns not only contractual collaborators who worked with Western structures, but also all those who had adopted a way of life consistent with Western values and who are now exposed to persecution by the new masters of the country, as for example women employed in banks.
However, in my opinion, we can find a positive aspect in what Biden said, namely that it seems the United States are finally abandoning the policy of exporting democracy with arms. Until the arrival of Trump, this policy was endorsed by all American administrations of the post-cold war period and also supported by his own advisers. This is evident from the article published in winter of 2019 in Foreign Affairs by Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser. The article defends the “good intentions” of the “liberal interventionist” policy in the face of the heavy criticisms by Harvard University professor Stephen Walt exposed in his book with the extremely explicit title "The hell of the good intentions".
A positive effect of all this could be the abandonment of that conception of liberalism (which I defined in another essay as ‘turboliberalism’) that established itself in the third post-war period (after the cold war) which made little of the principles of second post-war liberalism which through the successive steps in the East-West negotiations, most recently the Bush-Gorbachev talks in Helsinki in September 1990, had created the conditions for a world without strategic antagonisms and geopolitical tensions.
The crisis of the West and its origin
It has been correctly observed that the reality of an Afghanistan left to the Taliban renders the idea of the crisis of the West and its loss of democratic leadership almost as the crowning of a "long season of failure”. In a strange sense, this crisis of the West came about in the aftermath of the happy conclusion of the cold war, which many wanted to see as a victory for the West rather than to try to understand the future dynamics of the international system shaped by Gorbachev and George Bush.
Perhaps it was precisely this triumphalism that led successive American presidencies to promote a liberalism different from the one that had operated throughout the post-war period up to the end of the cold war. A liberalism concerned with stability and respectful of the principle of the sovereign equality of all countries enshrined in the United Nations charter.
With Jimmy Carter, the United States adopted a rampant liberalism (turbo-liberalism), which aimed to impose the values of the liberals of the American East Coast through interference in internal political dynamics wherever in the world a threat, relevant for these interests or sensitivities of some American circles, was seen. The success of the Taliban today is the end result of the experiments of these sorcerer's apprentices who have continued to evoke and strengthen forces usable in the short term, but uncontrollable in the long term. The case in point is Syria where we have recently witnessed the consolidation in ISIS of forces initially supported by the (Western) Friends of Syria.
Perhaps a return to post-World War II (classical?) Liberalism (1945-1990) would allow the West to regain its credibility and to open up to a competition, not necessarily made up of hostile opposition, on a global level.
Photo by Andre Klimke on Unsplash
Prof. Dr. AntonGiulio de’Robertis is full professor of History of Treaties and International Politics at the University of Bari and coordinator of the Balkan Eusine Danubian Observatory of the same university. He is Vice President of the Italian Atlantic Committee and of the International Institute for Peace in Vienna. He was founding secretary general of the De Gasperi Foundation and member of the Scientific Council of the Institute of International Legal Studies of the CNR. de'Robertis was part of the Fulbright Commission for cultural relations between Italy and the United States. He has held and holds lectures and seminars at La Sapienza University of Rome, the Catholic University and ISPI of Milan, Georgetown University, and the State Universities of Moscow and St. Petersburg.