Regardless of how the United States manages the presence or withdrawal of its remaining 2,500 troops from Afghanistan, it still lacks any coherent, discernible framework to manage the regional issues that have fueled conflict in that country over the past four decades.
Trita Parsi, a vice president at the foreign policy think tank Quincy Institute, said he suspected that Iranian politics “compelled the government to respond to all of these threats that the Trump administration has made in the last couple of weeks in a way that would allow them to claim they have pushed back, but not do it in a way that would provide Trump with a pretext to attack, which would have been the case if something had happened in Iraq.”
“The original point of U.S. global military primacy was to deal with a world where totalitarianism was running amok and where it was unfortunately necessary to hold it back with force,” said Stephen Wertheim, a scholar at the intervention-skeptic Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Stephen Wertheim, based at Columbia University and deputy director of the recently established Quincy Institute, suggested that the United States should massively reduce its military budget and commitments, increase social welfare spending, and focus on such issues as climate change and taming global corporate power and finance.
Annelle Sheline, in Responsible Statecraft, explains that although Western Sahara may look like barren desert, it actually “contains a significant reserve of the world’s phosphates, which are required to make fertilizer and are therefore crucial to the future of global food production.”
Wertheim delves into an important bit of history to try to pinpoint exactly when and why the United States embraced the global military supremacy that Americans have taken for granted for decades. The galvanizing event was not the attack on Pearl Harbor but the swift collapse of France in 1940, which made real the likelihood of a Europe wholly dominated by Nazi Germany.
