Editor’s note: CGTN’s First Voice provides instant commentary on breaking stories. The daily column clarifies emerging issues and better defines the news agenda, offering a Chinese perspective on the latest global events.
The world is losing confidence in the United States, and it is not hard to see why. Few things its leaders say end up being true, and it’s hard to know if U.S. presidents themselves can currently sort out reality from wishful thinking.
For example, President Joe Biden said in a speech to the nation on Monday about the U.S.’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, “We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency.”
This is obviously false. From abandoning Afghans who helped the U.S. military to the tragic mob scenes at the airport, the withdrawal from Afghanistan has been chaotic and poorly conceived on every level.
In July, Biden told the U.S. public, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.”
Yet that’s exactly what happened.
Biden also claimed in July that the Taliban did not have the same capacity as the North Vietnamese army to quickly take over Afghanistan. Yet this, again, is precisely what happened.
During his speech on Monday, Biden said the U.S.’ mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have involved nation-building.
Yet just like in Iraq and Syria, the U.S. invested much blood and treasure in hopes of building a government that would share U.S. values and comply with U.S. wishes.
This was always a fantasy. Yet somehow, on some level, U.S. policymakers continued to believe this would be possible, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Americans seem to take it as a matter of faith that all other nations universally want to be like the U.S. and share its values. Politicians should know better. But Biden’s inability to see this is not true was very apparent in his Afghanistan speech.
Biden said, “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
“We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future,” he said.
People are seen at a displaced person camp in Mazar-i-Sharif, capital of northern Balkh province, Afghanistan, July 22, 2021. /Xinhua
Biden’s statements ignore that Afghans did fight for their future. They resisted U.S. rule for 20 years, burning down schools the U.S. raised, destroying infrastructure the U.S. built and fighting U.S. troops at all levels, even on U.S. bases. U.S. troops had to be on guard at all times because the Afghan soldiers they were training consistently turned their guns on Americans.
Unlike what Biden said, Afghans did determine their own future – through daring battle against heavily armed, unwelcome foreign invaders.
Biden claimed Afghanistan’s political leaders “gave up and fled the country.”
This is not true. Former president Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council, have stayed in the country to negotiate the handover of power to the Taliban.
What Biden actually meant, whether he knows it or not, was that the Afghan political leaders they hoped would be willing to lead the country into a bloody civil war to follow the U.S. line fled the country.
Biden’s tendency to not only misread a situation but to publicly go on the record saying the opposite is alarming.
For years, the U.S. funded and encouraged unrest in Hong Kong, hoping to undermine China’s unity and slow its rise. However, the U.S. push failed, and Hong Kong is again stable and prosperous.
Nonetheless, earlier this month, Biden said, “The United States will not waver in our support of people in Hong Kong,” even as many of the agents the U.S. either duped or paid off face trial or imprisonment for harming China’s national security.
The U.S. has problems with its credibility, and its inability to get an accurate picture of world affairs predates Biden.
Former President Donald Trump famously said trade wars are easy to win. Trump entered into a trade war with China that the U.S. media has concluded Washington lost.
Trump also famously said on January 22, 2020, that the U.S. faced no risk from COVID-19. “We have it totally under control.” This was the first of many delusional statements about the pandemic from U.S. leaders.
The U.S. has lost its credibility. Despite a series of failures spanning decades, the U.S. has not learned that it cannot impose its values and development path on other countries.
However, the U.S. seems to still believe its own propaganda, making its leaders blind to the real situation on the ground, both at home and around the world.
We can only hope this strange self-imposed blindness does not cause the U.S. to make yet another catastrophic blunder in areas like the South China Sea or the Taiwan Straits.
