Sometimes, the world order will undergo subtle changes. It takes years and is difficult to find. Other times, it will happen with dizzying flashes. The big bang that forced an immediate paradigm shift.
Afghanistan This week looks like the latter.This U.S. Air Force C-17 transport aircraft takes off The Afghan desperately clung to its fuselage. This is a painful picture that the world will remember for decades. America, cut and run. Flying from the world stage to American priority and isolationism, leaving destruction and chaos in its regression.
One of its remaining is the United Kingdom, its 20-year partner in Afghanistan. America’s closest military ally, it doesn’t even bother to consult.
Yesterday, in the House of Commons, Boris Johnson tried to explain what happened, and rows of Congressmen were boiling over the country’s humiliation and the betrayal of the Afghans. He is an absolute fatalist. “Without American logistics, American air power and American power, the West cannot continue this American-led mission,” the prime minister insisted.
He believes that once the United States makes a decision, the collapse of Afghanistan will be inevitable.
But this is not the case. Tory the Great got up and told Johnson.Why don’t he and the foreign minister Dominic Rab Ian Duncan Smith asked to work harder to persuade the Biden administration to stay. Why let Secretary of Defense Ben Wallace try-but failed-to establish a new alliance of more patient NATO members to replace the United States, Tom Tugendhat Asked. The speed of events is his answer. “The rate of collapse is faster than I thought or even the Taliban predicted.”
Then rise Theresa May Who smashed Johnson’s weak defense measures under her little heel. “Is our IQ really that bad?” the former prime minister asked. “Or do we just think we have to follow the United States, on a wing and prayer, will be okay at night?”
Suddenly, Johnson was naked. The fact is that the collapse of Afghanistan was not one of those big bang paradigm shifts. It was a slowly moving glacier, decorated with huge road signs. The United States did not withdraw from the world one morning in Kabul in August. This article has been written on the wall for ten years.
It started in 2012 when Barack Obama withdrew from Afghanistan prematurely. He refused to participate in Syrian affairs and was supported by Joe Biden the following year. Obama handed the baton of isolation to Donald Trump in 2016, who returned it to Biden in January of this year. A continuum that the British government will take years to ease.
Johnson’s misfortune was that the music stopped on his watch, and he did not prepare other songs to play it instead. This is why yesterday was a key test for the British Prime Minister, as the United States has left the stadium to clarify Britain’s new position in the world. Come forward and provide clues to our other allies who are now drifting in the crisis of self-doubt in the West.
There must be someone, and as the second largest contributor to NATO, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and current Chairman of the Group of Seven, Johnson’s moral responsibility now falls on the United Kingdom.
But this was a failed test for the British Prime Minister, and it made his own MPs angry. “He is nothing. No substance, no understanding,” said a disappointed senior Conservative party in the chamber yesterday.
For Afghanistan, it is too late. That ship has set sail, and anyone who cares about that country like me and spends time there must now accept it in pain.
But for Johnson, it is not too late. In an increasingly unstable world, the next international disaster is not far away. It will appear in Somalia, Mozambique or Nigeria, all of which are increasingly threatened by Islamist takeover. Or in Taiwan where Xi Jinping’s China is paying attention. Or in one of the Baltic countries, these countries are afraid of a Russian invasion like Ukraine. Or takeover with Iran and hardliners.
Johnson needs to learn how to lead on the international stage, and it’s fast. Before the next outbreak in Afghanistan reveals that Britain has no foreign policy at all.
Tom Newton Dunn is the host and chief political commentator of Time Radio
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