Irina Alksnis Beat Me To It.

When, two days ago, I was writing my post on obvious failure of the combined West in Afghanistan I stressed the point of this war having a serious religious, that is civilizational, aspect which people in D.C. and Europe are incapable of grasping. I also wrote a number of times about Noblesse Oblige between superpowers, which, in effect, should keep interactions, including a conflict, within superpowerdom elite "framework", because delegating own victories to proxies is a very bad business when Islam is involved. Well, Irina Alksnis expanded on this idea in today's piece in Ria. 

Безусловно, тут играет свою роль понимание того, кто приходит на место американцев, и страшных последствий, что связаны с этим. Несмотря на обещание талибов не проводить репрессии в отношении тех, кто служил прежним властям, и их заявление по смягчению позиции о месте женщин в обществе, без сомнения, впереди Афганистан ждут расправы и казни. А судьбе афганских женщин по-прежнему не позавидуешь.Архаика победила современную цивилизацию — и как бы ни относился к Западу, радоваться данному факту невозможно.Впрочем, дело не только в суровых и кровавых афганских реалиях и не в сочувствии к гражданам несчастной страны, возвращающейся в глухое средневековье.События воскресенья оказались столь ошеломляющими еще и потому, что они дали миру очень наглядное представление о том, каким может быть — и каким, скорее всего, будет — окончательный крах глобальной гегемонии США.

Translation: Of course, understanding who comes to the place of the Americans and the dire consequences that are associated with this plays a role here. Despite the promise of the Taliban not to repress those who served the previous government, and their statement to soften the position on the place of women in society, there is no doubt that Afghanistan will face reprisals and executions. And the fate of Afghan women is still not to be envied. The archaic defeated modern civilization - and no matter how you relate to the West, it is impossible to rejoice at this fact. However, the point is not only in the harsh and bloody Afghan realities and not in sympathy for the citizens of the unfortunate country returning to the remote Middle Ages. Sunday's events were also so overwhelming because they gave the world a very clear idea of ​​what the ultimate collapse of US global hegemony could be - and is likely to be.

As I stated not for once, the United States was to a large degree an accidental superpower. Superpower by default, which never understood a complex relation between domestic and foreign policies, nor, overwhelmingly, developed any coherent view on military power and its application. Today it all came to a head. I am not talking about the defeat of the combined West--that it was in a precipitous decline was clear since mid-2000s. I am talking about the West and its leader the United States being incapable to maintain a civilization as, in the words of late Huntington (he quotes also somebody else), "a culture writ large". While today's headlines are filled with this: 

The world took notice and the United States handed the victory to Islamic fanatics and thus emboldened them, the same way the United States fanned the flames of Political Islam in 1980s and helped to form the force which is radically anti-civilizational in its essence. This IS the main failure of the combined West and it will be, yet again, up to someone else to clean this fucking mess after the US, whose political and military "elites" not only did not learn shit from anything but are incapable of learning. In that, when combined with a myriad of other economic, scientific, cultural and moral failures, modern West, headed by the United States, declared itself a failure. Events in Kabul today demonstrate perfectly and are the epitome of the modern West. I write about this for many years, but I am not enjoying my "I told you so" moment. Neither does Irina Alksnis. 

 

Against this background of yet another America's lost war, this news should be taken into account:

The Tehran Times reported on Wednesday that Moscow has conveyed to Tehran that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) has reached a consensus on Iran’s admission as a full member of the grouping. The Secretary of Russia’s Security Council Nikolai Patrushev conveyed this momentous news in a call with his Iranian counterpart, Admiral Ali Shamkhani. Later, Shamkhani tweeted that he and Patrushev also discussed Afghanistan, Syria and the Persian Gulf. The SCO is finally decoupling Iran’s membership from the nuclear talks and the US sanctions. Significantly, Patrushev’s phone call also marks the first high-level strategic communication between Moscow and Tehran after Ebrahim Raisi was sworn in as Iran’s new president. Patrushev is a very senior figure in the Kremlin ‘Politburo’. The SCO consensus — quintessentially a Sino-Russian move — speeds up Iran’s admission, notwithstanding the uncertainties appearing on the Biden administration’s political will to press ahead with the nuclear deal in the face of robust ‘bipartisan’ opposition on the Hill and from other interest groups.

There are no uncertainties here, I may add, combined West failed as a civilization and is spiraling into the military and, by definition, geopolitical second league if not irrelevance with an astonishing speed. Unlike with post-Vietnam syndrome, however, US loss in Afghanistan is not to capable and supported by other superpower fairly advanced Vietnamese military and Vietnamese people, the United States lost to a primitive force driven by the most retrograde ideology which stands against everything most of the world recognizes as essential for its existence. Meanwhile American idiots, a euphemism for US "journos" and media still discuss percentages and a political psychobabble which in the US, for some reason, is called "strategy". 

Morons, in order to make a brothel profitable, try to change not beds, but whores. See what happens. But don't hold your breath, and those who feel like it--mark today's date as the official end of US self-proclaimed hegemony. We will discuss consequences of this clusterfuck later. I am not celebrating because I know what is coming.