Can Australians Trust the Americans after Kabul?

“As a result of this debacle, it now seems reasonable to question whether Washington is competent enough to assure Australia’s security.”

On July 8th, President Joe Biden declared in remarks at the White House that, “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” Six weeks later, the group’s leadership sat behind now-defunct President Ashraf Ghani’s desk in Kabul’s presidential palace. More than twice as many soldiers as were in Afghanistan before the withdrawal were sent back to facilitate the evacuation.

Happening alongside China’s emergence to great power status, the past decade has seen an uptick in literature on the deterioration of the American-led liberal international order. The main dispute is not whether this process is underway but at what point we are at in its evolution. The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan—paired with the United States’ humiliation at the hands of the Taliban—is perhaps the clearest foreign policy indication of this reality to date. Indeed, it may be evidence that the United States is further down the path than we had previously thought. For Australia, a country that relies on a strong and ready America to provide its fundamental security blanket, this development is significant.

However, the United States’ chaotic withdrawal may have a silver lining for Australia. Had it occurred under the Trump Administration, the dominant narrative advanced by much of the media would have been that the event was further evidence—rather, the smoking gun—proving President Donald Trump’s incompetence, buffoonery, and unfitness to be President of the United States. The Taliban’s hasty capture of Kabul; its harvest of billions of dollars worth of American-made Humvees, aircraft (including Black Hawk helicopters), and tens of thousands of automatic weapons; the footage of Taliban fighters taking joy-rides in captured American helicopters; the shocking images of Afghans tumbling from airborne American planes, and the reality of Afghanistan returning to Taliban rule just in time for the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks have put on display the extent of the failure. Again, had this been on President Trump’s watch, even his staunchest allies would have struggled to explain it away.