Professor Zdzisław Krasnodębski spoke about the United States’s recent withdrawal from Afghanistan and what the situation means not only for the United States itself, but also the European Union.
The evacuation of American soldiers from Afghanistan ended on Tuesday, Aug. 31. On Tuesday morning, the Taliban announced Afghanistan’s full independence following the departure of the last US soldier after 20 years of presence in the country.
“The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a huge defeat for the United States. The attempt to build a stable government and democracy in that country was a failure. This is a crisis of the idea to export Western values and way of life to different continents and further proof of the USA’s weakness. This is not Washington’s first defeat either, one needs only remember Syria or Libya,” he said.
Krasnodębski pointed out that the withdrawal was a very inept continuation of Donald Trump’s policy and the fact that the Talbian took over Afghanistan so quickly was a shock to the world.
He noted that it was clear that the Taliban had strong support among the Afghani population and that the government in Kabul based itself solely on the US’s military power.
“Since the government fell so quickly, it means that it remained as a fake construct of the West. It turned out that the USA overestimated itself,” the professor said.
Krasnodębski warned that isolationist tendencies in the United States will continue to grow in the coming years.
Prof. Zdzisław Krasnodębski:
The traditional America based on values such as patriotism, religion, endurance, and readiness to fight for the country has been left in the past.
“This means that the great question of how the EU is meant to find itself in this new world order will be posed, especially since the void that will be left by the withdrawing US forces will be filled by China and Russia. This is a bad signal for Europe,” he stated.
Professor Krasnodębski explained that while America still possesses the most powerful army in the world, as is the case with any empire, it is struggling with an internal crisis. He says that “the traditional America based on values such as patriotism, religion, endurance, and readiness to fight for her country has been left in the past”.
“Today, American society is much more polarized, differentiated, atomized, and in huge cities, jaded. Even American elites are people with completely different approaches to life than 20 or 30 years ago, when traditional American values were still alive,” he said.
Title image: Taliban fighters stand guard inside the Hamid Karzai International Airport after the U.S. withdrawal in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021. (source: AP Images)
