Twenty years ago, the worst terrorist attack in American history claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people. The consequences of that attack are still being felt. It is difficult to think of the chaotic withdrawal of the last American troops from Afghanistan without recalling the devastation of that day. Those troops never would have been in that country had the attack never happened, and now the extremist group that those troops expunged from power has reached new heights of control over Afghanistan. Foreign policy is almost never an important issue to American voters, but fatigue at the extended occupation in the Middle East likely contributed to the isolationism that is now resurgent. ‘Pax Americana’ is in decline and American hegemony is in doubt for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The greatest casualty of the past 20 years may be a cohesive American vision of itself. We no longer see ourselves as the ‘shining city on a hill,’ but, depending on your point of view, a perpetrator of great avaricious atrocities on other nations (like a widespread belief of oil as a motivation for invasions) and our own citizens (mostly race-based) or a once-great country in ruins because of declining social standards that do not meet conservative ideals of what life should be. We have forgotten the motivations we had for taking action those years ago and we are pointing fingers in every which direction. We made a classic error: we forgot about the randomness involved in reality. Sometimes you use a good decision-making process, but the outcome is still bad. Mistakes were made, but they were made when we stopped thinking about our principles and started justifying means with ends.
The withdrawal of our last troops from Afghan soil is the perfect analogy for the decline in American foreign policy. In an effort to fulfill a promise that was politically expedient, President Biden made the decision to leave tens of billions of dollars of American military equipment in the hands of an extremist group. We left over 200,000 eligible supporters behind because, instead of putting our ears to the ground, our leaders put their fingers to the political winds. If we had taken a principled approach, we would have kept the major airbases under our control and patrolled the skies from there until we had finished doing right by our allies. No desperate people would be clinging to the outside of cargo planes and falling to their deaths on videos all over the news. Doing the right thing improves our image for future negotiations and a constant practice of following a guiding light gives us a sense of national fulfillment.
There are steps we can take to sew the tattered flag that flies over our divided nation. The scars will remain from hard wear, but we can once again feel the swell of pride we once did at the sight of the stars and stripes lifted high. We must re-engage with the world with the goal of making the world a better place. Trump’s bullying of allies for payment as if our military was a mercenary squad discounts its value and reduces our influence. Acting out of principle and having an overarching goal for foreign policy brings allies to your side. Allies, after all, are the reason we stood head and shoulders above the Soviets even at the peak of their military might. Domestically, it means fostering a communal American spirit. Defining an overarching goal will require a level of communal American spirit that has not been seen in over a decade, but the effort would foster what we have been missing.