Welcome To Hegemonic Decline -- It Ain't Pretty:
Maybe this isn’t the Afghanistan-related content that my largely-American audience is most eager to consume, but having been in London for the past two weeks and followed the coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal here, I can’t help but be grimly fascinated by the steady stream of overwrought fury bellowing from UK political and media elites. It’s worth paying attention to as an American, even if you don’t have any particular reason to care about what goes on in the UK. Because what’s most grimly fascinating is that a furor which has dominated UK political debate for weeks arose not due to any decision taken by UK policy-makers, but rather due to a unilateral policy decision taken by Joe Biden. And yet, debate in the UK proceeds with hardly any acknowledgement of the willfully subservient military arrangement its elected officials have acceded to for decades. Instead, UK politicians and pundits lash out at Biden like he’s their own de facto chief executive or something; few seem aware of how fundamentally strange this is….
For a variety of reasons – including residual fantasies of Post-WWII glory, the exigencies of short-term party politics, among others – UK elected officials and pundits have studiously avoided any frontal acknowledgement of this submissive arrangement, and what it signifies about the limits of their own agency….
Why take any interest in this, as an American who otherwise ignores or is apathetic toward the UK? Perhaps because the shambolic uproar here is a preview of what’s to come “on this side of the Atlantic” (an annoyingly ubiquitous cliche). As US hegemony inevitably and ineluctably recedes, just like UK hegemony did in an earlier era, our own elites are unlikely to fare any better in the process of reconciling themselves to their newfound impotence.