The United States has never seemed weaker, after decades of foreign-policy bungling and strategic defeats — and dictators around the world know it.
— The American Century is ending, with external adversaries outmaneuvering the United States in critical strategic contests worldwide, while internal extremists destroy American leadership.
“The breakdown of the U.S.-led global order is the underlying cause of what we are seeing,” says Ian Morris, a professor of history at Stanford and author ofadding that the trend since the end of the Second World War has been a narrowing of technological and economic disparities between “the West and the rest.”
On Jan. 28, three American soldiers were killed and dozens wounded in a drone attack on a military base called Tower 22, near the ancient Baghdad-Damascus highway, close to the Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian border. The U.S. Air Force is now hitting “the same strategic locations we were hitting back in my time,” says Col. Steve W. Davis, the retired commander of Marine Regimental Combat Team-2, who ran counterinsurgency operations in the Iraqi city of Al Qaim, across the border from Syria, from 2005 to 2006. The city was a Sunni insurgent redoubt, run by militants and smugglers with overlapping tribal allegiances, “but there was no Iranian influence that me or my team was aware of when we were in Al Qaim.
The result was a disaster: Sunni militants declared the Islamic State in 2013, and swept across Iraq and Syria. The U.S. and its allies openly sought to oust Assad — with Washington secretly backing“Safe back in the States, we watched with great disappointment how quickly took territory and caused Iraqi army formations to disperse,” says a Marine officer who served in Al Qaim. “What could we have done? Not withdrawn prematurely. Nobody wants ‘forever war’ — but this work takes years.
By September, Moscow sent a naval flotilla, thousands of soldiers and advisers, and dozens of bombers, attack aircraft, and helicopters to Hmeimim Air Base in Latakia, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. At its height, the Russian mission involved perhaps 6,000 military personnel — a surprisingly light footprint to save an ally.
Despite bungling its “regime change” strategy in Ukraine, two years after the invasion Russia holds much of the territory it seized. Moscow isMeanwhile, the coalition Washington rallied to Kyiv’s cause is fractious, unable to deliver promised guns and money amid internal bickering and lack of political will.
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