In Leaving Afghanistan, U.S. Reshuffles Global Power Relations
The American withdrawal creates new complications for China and Russia
By WSJ
Aug. 31, 2021 10:56 am ET
After Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government
collapsed on Aug. 15, Beijing couldn’t contain its glee at what it described as the humiliation of its main global rival—even though Washington said a big reason for withdrawal was its decision to focus more resources on China.
In a briefing, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying highlighted the death of Zaki Anwari, a 17-year-old Afghan soccer player who
fell from the landing gear of an American C-17 as it took off from Kabul airport. “American myth down,” she said. “More and more people are awakening.”
In Russia, too, state media overflowed with schadenfreude, albeit tempered by concern about the Afghan debacle’s spillover into its fragile Central Asian allies. “The moral of the story is: don’t help the Stars and Stripes,” tweeted Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of Russia’s RT broadcaster. “They’ll just hump you and dump you.”
But now that America’s 20-year Afghan war has
come to an end, the gloating is turning to a more sober view of how the war and the withdrawal will affect the global balance of power.
The stunning meltdown of the U.S.’s Afghan client state marked the limits of American hard power. The dramatic scenes of despair in Kabul have frustrated and angered many American allies, particularly in Europe, inflicting considerable reputational damage.
President Biden after speaking about the bombings at the Kabul airport on Thursday.
Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated Press
Yet despite their propaganda trumpeting the narrative of America’s weakness, it doesn’t appear to have escaped Beijing and Moscow that the U.S. isn’t the only one losing out.
In terms of raw military strength and economic resources, the U.S. remains dominant. Its pivot away from Afghanistan means Washington has more resources to put toward its strategic rivalry with China and Russia, two nations that want to redraw an international order that has benefited American interests and those of its allies for decades.
And unlike Russia and China, countries in Afghanistan’s immediate neighborhood, America is far more removed from the direct consequences of the Taliban takeover, from refugee flows to terrorism to the drug trade. Managing Afghanistan from now on is increasingly a problem for Moscow and Beijing, and their regional allies.
“The chaotic and sudden withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan is not good news for China,” said Ma Xiaolin, an international relations scholar at Zhejiang International Studies University in Hangzhou, China, noting that America is still stronger in technology, manufacturing and in military power. “China is not ready to replace the U.S. in the region.”
In a phone call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said the U.S. needed to remain involved in Afghanistan, including by helping the country to maintain stability and combat terrorism and violence, according to a statement on the Chinese foreign ministry’s website.
Moscow, too, urged the U.S. and allies not to turn away. Zamir Kabulov, President
Vladimir Putin’s special envoy for Afghanistan, said Western countries should reopen embassies in Kabul and engage in talks with the Taliban on rebuilding the country’s economy. “This applies first of all to those nations that remained there with their armies for 20 years and caused the havoc that we see now,” Mr. Kabulov told Russian TV.
Chinese scholars who advise the government expect the U.S. to refocus military resources on countering Beijing, especially in the Western Pacific, and to show greater resolve in an area whose strategic importance is now a rare point of bipartisan consensus.
President Biden, in his April speech announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan, after a war that cost hundreds of billions of dollars and took 2,465 American lives, justified the move by highlighting this imperative: “Rather than return to war with the Taliban, we have to focus on the challenges that are in front of us,” he said. “We have to shore up American competitiveness to meet the stiff competition we’re facing from an increasingly assertive China.”
Policy move
The U.S. could have enabled the Afghan republic to stave off the Taliban for years, if not decades, by continuing a relatively small U.S. military presence, focused on air support, intelligence and logistics rather than ground combat. Instead of a military defeat, like in 1970s Vietnam, the American withdrawal was a deliberate policy move, even if it caused unintended consequences.
“Serious people in Moscow understand that the American military machine and all the components of America’s global superiority are not going anywhere, and that the whole idea of no longer being involved in this ‘forever war’ was a correct one,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Yes, the execution was monstrous, but the desire to focus resources on priority areas, especially East Asia and China, is causing here a certain unease, a disquiet—and an understanding of the strategic logic.”
The main hope in Moscow, he added, is that the fallout from the Kabul withdrawal will lead to further political polarization inside the U.S., and to new strains in ties between America and its allies.
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