[Skybird]

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung comments with this opinion piece:


Has America's prime behind it? The question has not been asked for the first time, but it has been more urgent than ever since the defeat by the Taliban, who were considered to be backwoods, in Afghanistan. For China's state propaganda it is clear that the US is a country in decline; In Europe, doubts are growing as to whether one can still rely on the ally on the other side of the Atlantic. Anyone who expected that the Trump era would go down in history as a brief erroneous path is mistaken. The government of the Democrat Joe Biden is trying hard to convey the image of competence and energy to the outside world. Hundreds of management positions are still vacant, and there are no specific strategies for entire regions of the world.

There is also a blatant domestic weakness. In a few months, Biden gambled away the sympathies of many. In the polls, he crashed to a booth typical of his unloved predecessor. For the rest of the world, this raises the question of whether what is currently being designed in the Oval Office is only fragmentary. On his current "trajectory", Biden will lose his double majority in Congress next year and then come under increasing pressure to place the fate of the party in younger hands. Trump, on the other hand, just chased out of the White House, is already back at the gates as the undisputed standard-bearer of the Republicans.

Around the globe there is reason enough to see America as a troubled, emaciated country, a mere shadow of the former leading power. But restraint is advisable. The warnings of the inevitable decline of the United States are almost as old as the country itself. Obituaries of America's leading role were also written during the double crisis of the lost Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal in the mid-1970s; As is well known, things turned out differently.

The most common mistake made by the theorists of decline is to scrutinize America's weaknesses while ignoring those of other powers. Europe in particular is prone to such distorted images. After the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2007, people turned up their noses here at the capitalist excesses in America; the crisis hit the old continent much more severely. Since then, the USA has shown unbroken innovative strength, which one could already realize with a cursory glance at the entrepreneurial spirit in Silicon Valley or at the smartphone in one's own pocket. America's economy grew almost four times as fast as that of the EU in the twelve years to 2020.

When the French finance minister Bruno Le Maire now claims that Europe must be recognized as the “third superpower of the 21st century” alongside the USA and China, this shows a misjudgment of the real situation. The EU weighs a lot, but it still doesn't know what it wants to be. Their lack of unity prevents them from becoming a central geopolitical actor.

China's regime, on the other hand, makes no secret of its contempt for the democratic-liberal path, is bursting with self-confidence under Xi Jinping's rule and demands a global leadership role for itself. But the country's further rise is no historical certainty. The imbalance of the real estate company Evergrande reminds us that parts of the Chinese economic miracle consist of shaky debt pyramids. The aging of society means a mortgage for the future.

Politically, too, there are increasingly clear signs of weakness. The empire of Beijing suffers from a lack of «soft power» - or in other words: it may be feared, but it lacks the ability to act as a role model and to attract potential allies. Under the impression of the Covid-19 pandemic, the origins of which China continues to cover up, the crackdown on the democracy movement in Hong Kong and its aggressive behavior towards other countries, its image has suffered in large parts of the world.

To see a sign of America's decline in the withdrawal from Afghanistan is therefore all too simple. There is no reason to gloss over the Hindu Kush debacle. The troop withdrawal, forced without necessity, carelessly planned and accompanied by lies, will be remembered as an eyesore of the Biden presidency. But the claim that this would permanently weaken America is inadequate.

In horror at the chaos at Kabul airport, the events were immediately equated with the shame of Saigon in 1975 - the collapse of pro-western South Vietnam under the onslaught of the communist North Vietnamese. For once, even the American Republicans agreed with the Beijing propaganda in this assessment. Both wanted to express that they were dealing with a low point in American history. But such an assessment, guided by emotional images, falls short.

There is indeed an important parallel between “Saigon” and “Kabul” - but one that is not that devastating. Both events sealed a bitter defeat, but in both cases it was not a result of military necessity, but arose from cool political considerations: The previous deployment was no longer worthwhile because the world had changed and the original fears of the Americans had disappeared.

In the case of Vietnam, it was domino theory, the conviction that communism should be stopped everywhere and at all costs, because nothing else could stop it. This theory had lost its horror in the mid-1970s. With the surprising rapprochement with the People's Republic of China, Washington shifted the geopolitical field of force in 1971 and deepened the cracks in the communist camp. A plausible interpretation today is that the US back then "lost Vietnam, but gained China". At least they had the certainty that they had a partner in Beijing who would not play dominoes.

In the case of Afghanistan, too, the defeat is offset by a much greater gain: The USA can today feel that it is the winner in the 2001 “war on terrorism”. Islamist acts of terrorism will not go away completely in the foreseeable future, but from an American point of view, their threat has decreased significantly. The last major attack in the US with a double-digit death toll was more than five years ago. Al-Qaeda and the terrorist militia IS remain a scourge of the Islamic world, but they no longer seem capable of carrying out spectacular attacks in the West. This assessment can change again, but it will shape politics for the foreseeable future. The argument that it is imperative to stabilize Afghanistan in order to prevent a second “9/11” is not suddenly completely wrong. But it has lost its validity.

What the world is currently observing is therefore not the disappearance of the great power USA, but, as in 1975, a brutal reorientation of priorities. While at that time a million boat refugees were on the losing side trying to escape the communist regime of terror in Vietnam, today the extent of the suffering under the whip of the Taliban can only be guessed at. Presumably Biden underestimated this tragedy, but he can be credited with clearly focusing his foreign policy on the central challenge of the present: China. It can rely on a broad consensus in both parties.

Biden's radical line at the Hindu Kush is also a signal to the cumbersome American security apparatus, which is usually slow to adapt to new threats. It is hardly a coincidence that the CIA, for example, has only now founded a China “Mission Center” - counter-terrorism had priority for years. If Biden's predecessor Barack Obama's famous “turn to Asia” was primarily empty rhetoric, things are now actually in motion. The establishment of the Pacific Alliance Aukus, the first summit meeting of the Quad group of four, and the redistribution of Pentagon funds are further examples.

A coherent China strategy is far from emerging from this. It remains completely open, for example, how much Washington wants to contain the Middle Kingdom and how it can interact with the other states of the Pacific region. But America at least betrays the will to oppose China's aggressive policies, while in Europe many governments prefer to bury their heads in the sand.



https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/usa-china-afghanistan-schonungslose-neuordnung-der-prioritaeten-ld.1650373