The views expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the official views of the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense.
I think I may not have actually emailed out my last substantive post on Girard and Clausewitz, which explains the change in format, and which can be found here. In addition to independent pieces such as that Girard piece, I also hope to write newsletters with brief write ups of articles I’ve found noteworthy, and which may serve as the basis of longer pieces in the future.
Now that the dust has settled to some degree on the ignominious American withdrawal from Afghanistan, I’d like to highlight what I believe to be two notable (and to some degree neglected) long form pieces on both the future of the American imperium, and how we might interpret the media frenzy surrounding the withdrawal itself.
David Rieff’s piece, while acknowledging the humanitarian costs of the US withdrawal, still makes the case that Biden made the right decision to pull the plug. He presents the withdrawal as a serious and profound break in US policy, and cites the ferocious criticism as a sign of the significance of that break.
A somewhat passing theme in Rieff’s piece is the importance of the US military establishment’s shift to a focus on the Indo-Pacific, which after its writing later reached a dramatic crescendo in the Australian nuclear submarine imbroglio involving France and the rise of AUKUS. This theme is taken up by great length in Adam Tooze’s perspicacious piece, which argues that American military ambition as expansive as ever.
In some sense, the rise of AUKUS seems to vindicate this argument—yet my own belief is that the Long War is not, in fact, actually over. I’d argue that the tweet thread below is in fact how US policy will evolve, the so-called Restrainers will find themselves in for a rude shock, and that so-called Great Power Competition in fact will coincide with “small wars” centered on terrorism, extremism, and migration. If I have time, I may write a longer piece to develop these ideas further: