"Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go." So spoke Pericles, the Athenian strongman, early in the Peloponnesian War, which Thucydides (to whom we owe both our image of that war and his account of the speeches of its participants) called "the greatest war of all." Of course, history has progressed a lot since Thucydides, and so we have had many more, even greater wars. Still, few have analyzed the dynamics of imperial war as memorably as Thucydides, who famously described his method of recounting the speeches of the perennially talkative Greeks as presenting the speakers saying what "was called for by each situation."
The lasting power of Thucydides' account is reflected in those speeches, which seem regularly to reappear, repurposed in contemporary cultural attire. Thus, the argument that, once there, once having committed American prestige, once having sacrificed so much, the U.S. needed to remain in Afghanistan (as, decades back, in Vietnam) is essentially Pericles' case that an empire once acquired must be maintained.
There is, obviously, something to that argument. Whatever the existing balance of power or correlation of forces, in order to maintain the world in its existing order it is usually necessary for the dominant power (or powers) to keep doing what they have been doing. It is incumbent upon imperial power forever to preserve its imperial power in order to maintain the stability of the world. Until, of course, things change.
Thus, the old imperial order that had successfully maintained peace and security in Europe for a century - and had produced unprecedented progress and increasing prosperity in the process - suddenly blew itself up (somewhat inadvertently) in 1914. When the dust finally settled in 1945, the U.S. found itself the dominant imperial power, with the Soviet Union its one seriously restive rival. Between them, the Athens and Sparta of the 20th century competed against one another and, like ancient Athens and Sparta, forced everyone else to take sides and gain or lose in a conflict that was only incidentally theirs. Until suddenly (in a reverse of what happened in the Peloponnesian war) it was Athens, not Sparta, that won, with the U.S. again emerging at the end of the Cold War as not only the dominant imperial power but briefly at least the only power.
For all the apocalyptic hand-wringing in some quarters, the defeat in Afghanistan does not signal the end of American power in the world, although it ought to invite some rethinking of our assumptions and some reimagining how we might best use and project American power. This is, of course, a challenge, something that is hard for any nation to do, which is usually why it is so necessary.
To go back to Thucydides' Athens and Sparta, the latter was warned at the outset of the war that what made them reluctant to listen to others was "the great trust and confidence" they had in their "constitution and way of life," which was deemed "responsible for a kind of ignorance when dealing with foreign affairs." What Thucydides ascribed to Sparta actually applied to Athens as well and has also applied to the United States at least since it attained Superpower status.
Like ancient Athens, America's inner life has been damaged in the process, and a disconnect developed between American society's slow but steady course of political division and social self-destruction at home and its ever increasing imperial posture abroad, which turned limited, targeted military missions into permanent occupations rationalized by an obsessive preoccupation with political and cultural transformation - as if, by the force of American will, Afghans would be transformed into Californians!
So maybe this setback is a timely reminder of what ought to be obvious by now, that all is far from well in our "constitution and way of life," and that "the great trust and confidence" we maintain in our ability to continue the way we have been going requires rethinking, reexamining, and revision. The end of the American war in Afghanistan is telling us this, but so (even closer) are our crowded covid hospital wards, our hurricane submerged and electrically powerless cities, and our uncontrollably burning western landscape.
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