Where in the World: Split Rock, and Afghan Minerals

Speculation over Afghanistan’s potential mineral wealth is just that–speculation. What we do know about the hard reality of the country’s geography, infrastructure and development profile readily explains why we’re still talking about Afghan mineral wealth in the realm of potential trillions–it might certainly be there, but no one’s done the hard, serious work to find out for sure. 

And China is certainly not going to be the one to do it. Chinese involvement in Afghanistan isn’t going to be fueled by a desire to do serious survey and exploration work, building out roads and rail lines, developing a meaningful power grid, and then getting into the serious work of mining. In a land-locked country. Is China then going to truck ores and minerals into Pakistan and/or Iran for shipment? Or up and over the Hindu Kush to its sparsely-inhabited Western frontier? While battling militants and tribal war lords all along the way? Very likely not.

America did not leave behind a golden goose in the mountains of Afghanistan for the Chinese–or anyone–to come along and scoop up. Instead, China’s interests in Afghanistan lie in the same bucket of all of the neighboring states’: security, limiting cross-border militancy, and working toward some hope of containing refugee and militant flows. 

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Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

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The Way Out – and Forward

The seven-day moving average for new COVID deaths in the United States is back up above 1,000 – a figure the Americans have not suffered since before COVID vaccines became widely available back in April. To that end, a series of new government and private sector policies addressing COVID have popped up in the past few days. Collectively, they suggest the United States finally can see an end to the COVID tunnel.
 
From least important to most:
 
First, Biden has directed OSHA to force all firms employing at least 100 people to get their entire staff fully vaccinated. This is on top of his pre-existing orders for all federal workers, all military personnel, and all federal contractors. In all, it potentially impacts two-thirds of the American work force.
 
The law is firmly on the government’s side here. A 1905 Supreme Court ruling – which has been reaffirmed multiple times in the decades since – makes it exceedingly clear that any U.S. legal jurisdiction can force mass vaccinations. The precedent has already been cited by multiple federal judges in flatly denying petitions filed by those challenging COVID vaccine mandates. Chief Justice John Roberts actually has a portrait of the judge who penned the 1905 decision on his office wall. None other than Trump Supreme Court appointee Amy Coney Barrett has brushed off similar challenges from even reaching her bench. Legally, challenging this (successfully) is a dead letter.
 
But this is OSHA and OSHA isn’t quick. Between the standard rule-making process, the fact that this is not an act of Congress, and the inevitable legal challenges, this will take months. The biggest impact for the remainder of the year is that firms who were afraid of their own vaccine holdouts now have all the political and legal cover that they could want to implement their own mandates. This does move the needle. This is going to impact millions of workers. But not the 100ish million workers the headlines would suggest.
 
Second, the new Biden announcement forces the staff of any firm which who provides any services that use any funding from Medicare or Medicaid to get vaccinated. This covers all employees of any relevant medical facility from the surgeons to the janitors.
 
This directly impacts several million health care and support workers, and is far from small, but the real impact isn’t direct. What’s truly at stake is the health insurance industry now has the full federal cover they need to cut the cord connecting them to 2020’s emergency measures. The collective decision made last year – both in health care and government – was that COVID was not a “preventable disease” and so sufferers should not be responsible for COVID-related medical bills. Not simply the big tickets themselves, but even “normal” things like health insurance deductibles.
 
This norm has been loosening since June, when it became obvious there was going to be a substantial vaccine hold-out population. With Biden’s Medicare decision, the cord will now be cut. Private insurance will now consider COVID a “preventable disease” which means unless there’s a mitigating factor, unvaccinated COVID patients will largely be responsible for their own medical expenses. The average COVID-related hospital stay runs $17,000 – that goes up to $50,000 if you end up needing ventilator time.
 
Delta Airlines has proven that such financial disincentives work. Less than a month ago Delta told its employees that if they could not prove they were vaccinated, they would have to pay insurance premium surcharges of $200 a month. Just one paycheck later, some one-fifth of the holdouts had already joined the ranks of the vaccinated.
 
Third and most importantly, this week the Los Angeles school board adopted plans to force all students eligible for the vaccine – that’s everyone 12 and over – to get vaccinated if they are to remain in school in-person for the spring 2022 semester. The rationale isn’t difficult to justify. Children are now the single largest block of unvaccinated, and while young COVID sufferers tend to have less severe symptoms than adults, the Delta variant hits them far harder than the initial China strain. Fully one-quarter of all cases are now in children.

The chief reason why the United States is not a disease-infested dystopia is that all children under 18 are subject to a rolling series of vaccinations as a precondition for attending school. Think tetanus, chicken pox, and mumps. This system not only vaccinates a large chunk of the population directly, but establishes lasting immunity to a host of diseases that regularly plague less advanced countries.
 
With COVID, this standard process has not been an option. Initial vaccine trials focus on healthy adults, and only over time move into younger population cohorts. In addition, we’ve been vaccinating the population in reverse, starting with populations with the highest mortality rates (the elderly) and working our way backwards. This was done to prevent deaths, but it also means the normal bulwark against long-term disease spread hasn’t been built. Hasn’t even begun to be built.
 
There will be legal challenges to the LA board’s decision. (Honestly, I’m sure that in the time it took me to write this, the first ones have already been filed.) All of consequence will fail. Not only because the legal precedent is with the board, but because all the board did was add one more vaccination to the existing list – a list that the board has full legal authority to expand as it sees fit. Others will follow LA and its six hundred thousand students.
 
To be direct, this sort of mandate is how the United States beats COVID.
 
Why do I care? Why am I considering a health issue to be part of my geopolitical bailiwick?
 
Two reasons:
 
First, demographics. The healthier the population, the more economically productive a population, the less dependent upon foreign factors a country is. COVID has already resulted in the single-greatest reversal in the average American’s lifespan since the country’s last major health crisis: the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919.
 
Second, the world is in the midst of the greatest geopolitical transition of our lives, and arguably the largest one since the onset of the deepwater navigation era in the late 15th century. Globalization is in a state of collapse. Ten years from now, the countries that have proven able to secure their means of production, their manufacturing supply chains, their internal consumption, and their labor force from the vicissitudes of global disorder will be the ones who rule the future. America’s unvaccinated population is now the single biggest threat to each and every step of that process.
 
Mass vaccinations are how the United States retains its population and its position and its potential and its freedom for action – for decades to come.
 
So get the damn shot already.

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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

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Ida Know Much about Energy

Hurricane Ida made landfall in southern Louisiana as a Category 4 storm on August 29. In its wake it left a trail of damage that Americans living on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts have found depressingly familiar. Total recovery costs will not be known for weeks, but $80 billion is being floated by some insurance firms as a likely figure.

For those not living along Ida’s path, there are still impacts. Ida was the first major tropical storm system to hit the Gulf of Mexico energy space dead-on in quite some time. Oil and natural gas production throughout the entire Gulf have gone offline. Natural gas prices have already bumped up by some 15% to roughly $4.60 per 1000 cubic feet, the highest in years.

I’m not worried. Not even a little. If anything, this is great!

Some backstory about how the American energy complex has evolved in the past decade or so:

Out in the Gulf of Mexico, hurricane-driven waves regularly top 50 feet high. Storms force production shutdowns and staff evacuations. The result? Entire swathes of the Gulf go from being among the world’s most productive oil and natural production zones, to a flat zero.

And not just for the duration of the storm.

The bigger and broader the storm, the greater the chance that some little thing, somewhere, breaks. Once the storm passes, staff return. They began a never-ending list of safety checks to make sure things can be turned back on without causing leaks, spills or explosions. Repairs are necessary both above the water on the platforms, and down below on the seabed where the tangle of pipes interfaces with the actual well casings. The worse the storm, the longer this takes. Sometimes it is over a year before full production is restored. And the whole time Americans keep using oil and natural gas, so we get supply and demand mismatches that manifest as higher prices for months at a time.

Back in my Stratfor days it was my job to track every such storm to evaluate such impacts. I hated it. So very very much. (BTW if you want to bookmark the gold standard for hurricane tracking, that’d be Weather Underground).

And then suddenly, it all stopped.

Around 2004 the Americans cracked the code on how to extract natural gas from shale rock formations. Instead of drilling down vertically and tapping deposits of the stuff, we’d drill laterally, inject a mix of water and sand into the formation and crack it apart from the inside. Trillions of tiny pockets of natural gas would then have access to the pipe, and natural pressure would force the gas up to the surface for collection. By 2009, this American shale gas output exceeded all other sources of natural gas in the United States. Every speck of shale gas is produced on shore. Shale doesn’t give a wit what happens with hurricanes.

Take a look at this graphic from my previous book, The Absent Superpower. You can clearly see how pre-2009 U.S. natural gas prices fairly reasonably tracked prices in other markets. But in 2009, the United States diverged and never went back. The United States has been in chronic natural gas oversupply for years.

Hurricane Ida isn’t going to change that. Yes, prices are higher, but a few thoughts.
 
First, prices aren’t that much higher. In the pre-shale days we considered sub-$5 natural gas to be criminally cheap. The Europeans even went so far to sue the Russians for having prices in that range. (Russia at the time was the world’s largest natural gas exporter and so kept its domestic prices at rock bottom.) From time to time we even breached $10.
 
Second, American natural gas prices today are higher primarily not because of disruptions to supply, but instead because of structural changes to demand.
 
Prices in the U.S. have been so low for so long that our entire industrial space has been retooled to match. Natural gas is now the country’s primary electricity fuel, displacing coal throughout most of the country. When fed into combined-cycle power plants, natural gas use can be ramped up and down in minutes, making it the perfect complement to solar and wind power – fuel sources that are literally as erratic as the weather. We’ve also used natural gas components to replace oil throughout our petrochemical systems. We now use the stuff to make everything from lipstick to diapers to safety glass to insulation to pesticides to paint to gum to furniture to bowling balls. Higher demand means higher prices.
 
Third, there’s more to shale than just natural gas. Around 2008 the tech of shale started being applied en masse to oil, and in the years since America has figured out how to get not simply the vast majority of its natural gas from shale, but also the vast majority of its oil. Natural gas is often a byproduct of such shale oil plays. Oftentimes such byproduct drove natural gas prices below $3. Aside from the Gulf of Mexico and the giant Marcellus field in the Northeast, there just aren’t many places left in the United States where folks are drilling for natural gas on purpose. It simply isn’t cost effective.
 
Or it wasn’t until now.
 
While $5 natural gas is cheap by historical standards, its very high by shale-era standards. It has been roughly eight years since we’ve seen this sort of price environment where it makes sense to go after natural gas just for the gas. In those eight years, shale operators have learned a lot – they’ll now be applying new shale techs to the places where shale was first birthed, specifically in Texas’ Barnett, Arkansas’ Fayetteville, and the Texas-Louisiana-shared Haynesville.
 
I expect to see explosive growth in on-shore production, and I expect to see it soon. After all, unlike an off-shore Gulf of Mexico well that takes years to bring on-line, an on-shore shale well reaches full output in a mere six weeks.
 
This matters hugely. In the longer term, every speck of U.S. oil&gas production that moves into on-shore shale space is a speck that is more sustainable, at lower cost, cleaner and at lower risk than anything that’s international or offshore. (I broadly like solar and especially wind as well, but those are topics for another day.)
 
In the shorter term, the advantage isn’t simply that rising shale production suggests current prices are not long for this world. There’s a more immediate concern:
 
Between COVID-driven resourcings, industries moving out of China, increased integration with Mexico, and increasingly Trumpesque economic policies out of the Biden administration, the United States is in the midst of its biggest ever industrial build-out. That all takes a lot of natural gas, both to burn to generate electricity and as a feedstock to create physical products. Ida has provided the impetus to generate the necessary supply before a general shortage would have. We’ve all seen what similar shortages in labor markets have done to the economic recovery. It’s great to know we won’t need to worry about them in the world of energy.

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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

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Where in the World: Fagradalsfjall, and Breakthrough Tech

Some questions I’ve been asked about as of late have been on the topic of what technologies do I see that could move the needle on some of the more… dire forecasts that I’ve made.

Some of the most impactful are going to be in the field of agriculture. The industrial revolution sparked massive changes in how humans grow and distribute food. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, combines, storage, refrigeration, global transport—the things that give us tomatoes in winter (no matter the quality) are also what has allowed fewer people to feed a global population that has ballooned over the last century.

But what industrialization has brought, deglobalization can take away. Concentration of production of farm equipment, fertilizers, pesticides, and capital means that in the absence of the safe and secure transport modes of The Order most of the world’s current mega producers (Brazil, China, India) face precipitous declines in caloric output.

One answer to avoiding a catastrophic decline in food output? Technology. The same science behind increasingly powerful facial recognition has promising potential utility in conjunction with automated field equipment, more efficiently administering water, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to crops in the field. The attentiveness and nurturing care of pre-industrial gardening, but on a much more massive scale.

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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

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Where in the World: Grindavíkurbær, and Taiwan

The challenges of the United States’ Afghan withdrawal have caused many to question Washington’s commitments to its allies and others who have found themselves under the American security blanket. The issue of US commitment to Taiwan in particular is one I have been asked in recent weeks.

Putting aside the issue that disentangling from Afghanistan and the Middle East means that the US can focus even more on China, Taiwan itself is no slouch. Chinese ambitions must be evaluated against Chinese and Taiwanese and Japanese capabilities. In short, the idea that the US is the only power interested in a free and democratic Taiwan is laughable, as is the assumption that the Chinese would have an easy time in sailing a fleet across the strait absorbing Taiwan.

Even if China did manage to successfully invade Taiwan, there’s little reason to assume Beijing would be able to effectively take control and replicate Taipei’s success in managing the world’s most advanced chip manufacturing. Most of the design process for the chips happens outside Taiwan (such as in the US), and Taiwan’s workers are highly skilled individuals. Not the sort of people who perform at their best at the other end of a gun (or the type that stick around and wait to get captured). 

In short, of all the possible unintended consequences of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan is not very high on my list.

[And please forgive the wind; the side of a volcano is an exciting, albeit noisy, backdrop.]

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

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Where in the World: Drangajökull, and Horse Meds

I’ve been asked several times since my last dispatch whether or not I think FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine is going to move the needle for the anti-vax crowd. Unlikely. If you thought the COVID-19 vaccines were part of a government conspiracy, full government approval for them is unlikely to be the tipping point when it comes to changing your mind. 

What is likely to change behaviors, if not attitudes, is the swathe of vaccines mandates that are quickly rolling out across the country. Nearly 1,000 institutions of higher learning and a growing list of companies–including Goldman Sachs, Ford, Facebook, Delta Airlines, and Tyson Foods–are mandating their students and workforce get vaccinated. It will be a slower (and therefore, deadlier) path toward higher vaccination rates but unlike a direct government mandate or vaccine passports it will be an economic, rather than political, issue.

And never did I think I would have to say this explicitly but if you’re reading this: you are not a horse. Stop taking ivermectin. Please. 

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

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Where in the World: Drangsnes, and the Kabul Bombing

News arrives a little more slowly here in northern Iceland. But as the details of the horrific attack against US service members and Afghan nationals came in across my phone, so too did many arguments that these are exactly the same sorts of individuals the US should remain in Afghanistan to combat. 

Perhaps. 

And perhaps not. Groups like the Khorasan Province offshoot of ISIL are going to attack when and wherever they find that they have operational capacity. The real question is, do they pose a direct threat to the Americans’ homeland and core strategic interests or a bigger one to the Taliban and its regional neighbors? Expect the US to pursue retribution against any and all groups and individuals that target US citizens and strategic interests, but don’t expect these attacks to trigger a shift in US policy that will see Washington cleaning up a group that places the Taliban and Iran near the top of its most-hated list.

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

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Where in the World: Skútustaðahreppur, Pfizer

Greetings from Iceland! With the FDA giving Pfizer’s Comirnaty (the two-shot regimen formerly known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine), it’s important to note what this does and does not mean for the average American. 

Most important: it does not mean that the Pfizer vaccine is not an experimental drug. That ended largely a year ago following the largest human trials in human history. What we should expect is a rise in vaccine mandates across federal agencies, schools, and private businesses. 

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

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Video Dispatch: Economic Update

The United States is likely to experience economic growth even as the Delta variant of the coronavirus continues its spread through unvaccinated populations. We should not overlook that qualifier; the vast majority of serious illness, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 in the US are among unvaccinated populations. 

Expect the US Federal response to continue to focus on encouraging Americans to get vaccinated, while local governments and businesses work through an awkward and hotly contested series of local mask mandates, vaccine requirements and political posturing as the majority of US students get ready to head back to school.

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

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The Return of American Narcissism

On New Years Eve, just minutes before the dawn of 1992, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time.

Arguably the Cold War had been over for a few years already. Glasnost and perestroika had defanged the thorny grip of the KGB and made Soviet citizens less afraid of their own government. Summits – first with Ronald Reagan and later with George HW Bush – started both the Soviet Union and the United States down the path to massive nuclear disarmament. The Soviets started pulling troops out of Central Europe in 1989. In 1990 Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev blessed the American military effort to eject Soviet-backed Iraq from Kuwait. In 1991 constituent members of the USSR seceded – peacefully – from the Union.  

But flags matter. And the real date it was all over – truly over – was December 31, 1991.

In America the Cold War’s end was met with a bit of a jubilant shrug. We went on with our day.

From a long-view perspective, the inward turn was a return to the norm. Americans have always been a bit self-absorbed. Having the richest part of a rich continent, far removed from the hustle, bustle, war and pain of the Eastern Hemisphere, does that to you. We settled things with our only two neighbors – Canada and Mexico – well before our first centennial and immediately got down to the more serious business of arguing amongst ourselves. More Americans died in the Civil War than in all our military conflicts with all our adversaries throughout all our history, combined.  

With the Cold War relegated to the past, Americans quickly moved on. We started caring about things that during the Cold War were simply too minor and esoteric to blip on our collective radar while we were staring down the threat of nuclear Armageddon: Haiti, Palestine, Panama, Kosovo, Bill Clinton’s cigar habits. By the late-1990s the rest of the world was so out-of-mind that 60% of Americans couldn’t even locate the United States on a world map. American narcissism was again the norm…

…until the events of September 11, 2001, shocked us out of our naval-gazing and thrust us back into the world against a new foe.

America’s original goal in Afghanistan was to hunt down al Qaeda. America’s original goal in Iraq was to terrify Iraq’s neighbors – Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia – into hunting down al Qaeda affiliates for us in order to deter an American invasion of Damascus, Tehran and Riyadh. Both missions were successful, and wildly so. At first. But after al Qaeda was gone, the reality of the region set in. The concern – the reasonable concern – became will the local government we’re establishing survive an American exit? Can we prevent the entire region reverting to old habits? Can we establish institutions that will outlive the American presence? Can we make it look like Wisconsin?

The answer to all those questions ended up being “no, we cannot”.

In was only July 9 when Biden announced that the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan would end on August 31. Nearly immediately, U.S. forces stopped spearheading Afghan military efforts against the Taliban, and stopped carrying out airstrikes to support those U.S.-led missions. The Afghans didn’t launch their own. In nearly every case, when Afghan forces met the Taliban in battle, they did not crumple, they simply dissolved – in many cases handing over their American-made and -supplied weaponry directly to their adversaries.

In just two weeks, cities that had stood as independent bastions for not so much years, but centuries, fell to Taliban control: Kunduz, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Jalalabad.

Many have criticized the Biden administration for “losing” Afghanistan. To them I have four responses:

  1. If after twenty years of effort and literally trillions of dollars of assistance the Afghan military cannot hold its country together for two weeks, then another year, another decade, another 10,000 American combat deaths, will achieve nothing.
  2. The goal of the American presence was to prevent the return of hostile militant groups like al Qaeda, the radical Sunni terror group that carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks. Good. Fine. But al Qaeda has inspired more capable copy-cats in Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Niger, Nigeria, Mauritania, Mali, Somalia, the Philippines, Indonesia, France, Belgium, Russia, and I probably missed a few. So we are going to, what, occupy them all??
  3. Our greatest allies in the Afghan operations fell into two camps. The first are the Hazaras, an Afghan tribe in the central highlands. They’re badass. Love those guys. Wish we could bring them all to the United States for settlement. Unfortunately, they stayed in their central highlands and only fought the Taliban defensively. The other camp – the ones willing to take the fight to the Taliban in the lowlands which wrap around Hazara territory like a giant U – is comprised of a dark web of opium smugglers and serial child abusers. If that’s the best ally we could find, you’ve gotta wonder if it’s all worth it.
  4. It isn’t worth it. It was never worth it. When I look at Afghanistan, I think similar thoughts to when I think of Syria or China’s Belt-and-Road program: at the end of the day, what does the winner get? Afghanistan is landlocked and oil-free. It is among the poorest countries on the planet and has been for most of recorded history. It is on a path to nowhere. Getting in and out requires deals with either Pakistan (wildly untrustworthy), Iran (problematic to say the least), China (heh, no), or Russia (stupid stupid stupid STUPID).

This was never going to last. I even have a hard time criticizing the Biden administration for its bungling of the withdrawal. I’ve been saying for the better part of three years than whenever U.S. left Afghanistan, the Afghan government would fall, but I was thinking in terms of seven to twelve months. Not fifteen days. The evacuation authorities think they can have everyone associated with Western governments out of the capital of Kabul within another fifteen days. They will need to work faster. As of the time of this writing August 15, the Taliban already has entered Kabul from all points of the compass. The only thing preventing a bloodbath is the Taliban’s desire to capture Kabul, not raze it. With the Afghan president’s decision to send all government workers home, the rump Afghan government has already been functionally dissolved. The flag wasn’t so much lowered as the flagpole fell over.

Rivals of the United States – and no small number of critics within the United States – seem to be getting worked up at the prospect of the blow to American credibility. As the line of thinking goes, if the United States is abandoning its Afghan ally, then they are likely to abandon other allies as well.

People are worrying about the wrong thing.

First of all, Afghanistan was not an ally. It was an occupation. Anyone who is anyone in the field of international relations saw Afghanistan as a drain on American attention and resources – not a springboard to greater things. The Americans being out frees up the possibility of more action, not less. For rivals of America, that’s a problem. For allies of America, that’s an opportunity.

Second and far more importantly, fixating on Afghanistan and its aftereffects is focusing on absolutely the wrong thing. It isn’t so much that the United States is pulling completely out of Afghanistan, but instead it is pulling completely out of the world.

America’s rivals want the Americans to make the world safe for Iranian and Russian oil shipments and for Chinese merchandise trade, but for the Americans to not muck about in their neighborhoods. Sorry, but that’s not what full withdrawal looks like. The Americans are leaving everywhere which will free up the entire American military to do whatever the hell the Americans decide to do, whenever they decide to do it. In the meantime, say goodbye to the primary economic pillars which support all the countries that dislike America. So, yeah, America is leaving, and America’s rivals are about to get what they wanted. Good and hard. The idea that Iran and Russia and China can survive without American-guaranteed international trade is statistically hilarious.

As for the Americans, bereft of significant international threats and presences, they will do the same thing they did in the 1990s and turn back to their internecine arguments.

The internal American reality is a bit uglier compared to 1992. Social media has made us hate one another. The reliably destructive bile of absolute morons like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Cory Bush, Laura Ingraham and Rachel Maddow have become daily fare, poisoning our capacity to think rationally about anything. And the fact that we’re arguing over whether masks inhibit the spread of a respiratory disease suggests to me that perhaps we’ve gotten a head start on this particular chapter of the culture war.

As an American, this…thrills me. Not the cultural war part. That’s equal parts petty and embarrassing. But instead the fact that the world is shifting in a direction that doesn’t really involve the United States. A global system that is simultaneously distant, dissolving and consumed with local grievance is one in which the United States has the luxury of narcissism. It enables the United States to absorb the lessons of the Forever Wars, retool its national security agencies and military and start looking at the horizon again. Narcissism can be unsightly, but it also enables one to focus on different things more relevant to the population.

It won’t last forever. Narcissism ends two ways.

Option one is at some point a decade or three from now the Americans decide to once again venture out and (re)discover their world. They’ve done this before, with the period after Reconstruction probably being the best example.

Option two is some idiot decides to poke the Americans when they’re not paying attention: the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, September 11. In those examples the full power of the United States – unfettered by any meaningful international commitments – slams into said poker and removes it from history.

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