For those of us who care about world affairs and are blessed with the  media means to keep up and offer our impressions, cannot help but find the seemingly countless commentaries about the on-going  American desertion of Afghanistan more than upsetting on many fronts –politically, culturally, economically; and especially morally and spiritually. There are others, many others, unfortunately,who at the same time can care less. As long as they and their loved ones are not directly impacted, as long as they can eat and drink and have money in the bank, they really don’t care.They will change the subject and change the channel when the word Afghanistan is mentioned. They prefer to navel gaze, just being concerned with me, myself, and I.

But no matter who we are or where we are  and no matter if we are attuned or not intentionally or not,Afghanistan impacts all of us. The callous public bad treatment of a rich historically White Supremacy nation in the internal affairs of a poor Non-White country, as a pawn against super power rivals feigning concerns for constructive nation building just to cash cow milk , reminds us once again of how the world of  White Supremacy wealthy classes really operate.Be it in their own country with their meager development programs for the racialized or otherwise  non-affluent or  otherwise vulnerable, stigmatized, or ignored,their fake nation building schemes as smoke screens to intrude in vulnerable countries, this  rich elite remains determined to stay on top no matter the grave human costs for those on the bottom. They are indifferent to the trillions of taxpayer dollars wasted, squandered, and pocketed which could easily have been used to provide higher quality of life for the poor, homeless, hungry, unemployed, sick, and uneducated. And they  are rather cold about lives sacrificed for their greedy motivations as long as the body counts remain under public concern radar.

This  is vile American elite behavior which has become too much of a routine immoral norm for too long… declaring phony wars and engineering coups  for the benefit of a few bent on winning losing battles against super power  rivals in Asia and in the Middle East  let alone Africa and Latin America. America has yet to win  such  imperialistic  ventures out right or at least significantly since the 1950s, indeed earlier, except for lining the pockets of those selling arms and oil and other vital natural resources while messing up the internal affairs of the nations in which they are intrusive. As a global publicity expose, the Afghanistan scandal confirms one more increasing time how much America and the West in general are  out of step with the rest of the world growing increasingly intolerant of White Supremacy arrogance  so detrimental to 21st century and beyond  sustainable justice and peace. No one who runs world systems from the seats of the West wants to admit that in mainstream media  all that much but it is happening and on world public display.

To so publicly let the world see the  American White Supremacy powerful has no clothes as a national elite  with global clout which used to have more pride, dignity, and moral modesty is a tragic indicator of national decay both within and globally. And it does impact all of us searching for national models of moral character to look up  to, be it our own country as American citizens or those in other lands who used to look up to us with dazed eyes.

 What do we tell our children and unborn grandchildren in America and around the world about the world wide public awareness of  what the embarrassingly shamelessly incompetent blundering elites did in Afghanistan?  Using an impoverished country in such desperate need as a political pawn  in super power rivalry ; as a milked dry cash cow in a region of the world we know so little about as a matter of intercultural irresponsibility only arrogant ignorance can rationalize?

And meanwhile as we get our children story book spin doctors spinning, how can we face the rest of a geopolitically  changing world which really does not need America  all that much any more except military resources , movies, and t-shirts perhaps since other nations have just as much if not more foreign assistance cash than we do and better consumer goods higher,higher education, medical facilities , and job opportunities than we Americans have to offer?

For good  sobering reasons as the media is reporting, Vice President Harris is returning from what is being called a lackluster visit to Asia; a symptom of a once morally respected super power having prestige time running out. Meanwhile a botched President Biden evacuation of Afghanistan originating in the incompetent negotiations of his predecessor he lock stepped followed rather than thoughtfully critiqued and did not fall in the pit for, is now being tainted with more shedding of innocent blood  on all sides tragically reminding us that phony or not there is a war going on in Afghanistan and the White Supremacy arrogance of a declining American and broader western elite are paralyzed in knowing what to do about it.It is because their conception let alone practice of peacemaking is grounded  in a ‘know it all attitude” with the presumption they must always be and remain in authority on top  rather than more culturally contextualized values for collaboration and win win solutions.

Perhaps another one or two U.S.Presidents down the road when the cracks in a declining West will be even more apparent for all to take note, will  contribute  to global leadership in  developing a new  sustainable global moral ethic in how nations should treat each other with decency and integrity no matter how rich or poor or their cultural demographic composition or governance ideological differences. No more ageist, elitist, ethnocentric ,  gendered, or  racist hegemonic hierarchical thinking, reasoning, and practicing.No more wars especially the fake ones with public lies about being for good while really doing bad things and ignoring the real quality of life needs of the helpless and vulnerable.  The making of a world for good for all of us in which arms and drug  dealers are no longer, by effectively designed and enforced national and international  laws and policies, allowed to fan wars which  maim and kill our loved ones to increase their profits and likewise effectively enforced laws and policies prohibiting the greedy international grab of natural resources in impoverished nations and murdering their innocent citizens and immigrant residents in the process of such rapings of lands of others.

With such collaborative and mutually respecting and empowering  global leadership,we will be on track as a world in which we realize we are all made in the same Godly image as human beings ; all brothers and sisters with the same needs and desires for love, care, and decent quality of life . It will be a world in which  generations from now our  children’s reading about Afghanistan in America and around the world will be a stern reminder of a  moral and spiritual  lapsing hedonistic world of a distant  past we are determined not to return to and repeat. And will not.

While the impact of the terrorist attacks and the following military mobilization of the U.S. leading to invasion of Afghanistan influenced the geopolitical debate in the post-9/11 period, the country’s early victories provided solid ground to the general belief that global order was best described by a stable U.S.-led unipolarity.

Unipolar hubris sustained

Back in 1999, William C. Wohlforth famously wrote in his article titled The Stability of a Unipolar World, “The system is unambiguously unipolar,” adding that “the current unipolarity is not only peaceful but durable.” Wohlforth also boldly stated that “for many decades, no state is likely to be in a position to take on the United States in any of the underlying elements of power,” bearing in mind the economic, military, technological, and geopolitical components.

In the same manner and year, Samuel P. Huntington characterized the world order in Foreign Affairs magazine as “unimultipolar.” The author argued that although the U.S. may at times have required some assistance from weaker countries to accomplish its goals, Huntington still believed that the “lonely superpower” was “the sole state with preeminence in every domain of power—economic, military, diplomatic, ideological, technological, and cultural—with the reach and capabilities to promote its interests in virtually every part of the world.”

The described narration concerning the U.S. global supremacy was not significantly impacted by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In general, the ability to deploy U.S. troops far away from its shores nourished, rather than diminished, the deep conviction of unipolarity. One year later from the tragic events, writing in a Foreign Affairs magazine’s article titled American Primacy in Perspective, Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth argued that “if today’s U.S. primacy does not constitute unipolarity, then nothing ever will. The only things left for dispute are how long it will last.”

What is even more interesting than the mentioned analyses of the status was the overwhelmingly optimistic view of the U.S. about its ability to keep the considerable distance between itself and other powers in the world. When potential contenders were considered, Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo were mentioned as frequently as Beijing while, strangely, New Delhi was not even taken into account. With respect to the U.S. ability to sustain its strong growth, Brooks and Wohlforth wrote after the 9/11 attacks that “it would take… an extraordinarily deep and prolongued domestic recession juxtaposed with robust growth elsewhere—for the United States just to fall back to the economic position it occupied in 1991.” They further added that “the odds against such a relative decline are long, however, in part because the United States is the country in the best position to take advantage of globalization.”

On the other hand, few experts entertained any serious thought that China could become a regional or global power. Brooks and Wohlforth perfectly articulated the predominant thinking of that time by writing that “Fifty percent of China’s labor force is employed in agriculture, and relatively little of its economy is geared toward high technology.” They also reminded their readers that “in the 1990s, U.S. spending on technological development was more than twenty times China’s” and “most of China’s weapons are decades old.” Today, knowing that, according to the World Bank data, employment in agriculture in China was reported to stand at 24.73 percent in 2020, the country’s spending on research and development hit a record-high 2.4 percent of gross domestic product in the same year, which gives us 2.44 trillion yuan ($377.8 billion) as well as the fact that Beijing is spending more on defense than ever before; we can easily argue that the things have not stayed the same, to say the least.

When reality bites back

In the recent years, an increasing number of analysts started to believe that the U.S. supremacy may not last forever. While economic liberalization in emerging economies resulted in continuously higher growth rates than in the developing countries, the U.S. formerly inexhaustible might appeared to be waning due to its expensive and tremendously irresponsible military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was related to President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.” As a result, this has dealt a severe blow to the U.S. legitimacy and worked to the advantage of emerging powers. As Amitav Acharya writes in the book The End of American World Order, the decline discourse “took off after the early ‘mission accomplished’ optimism of George W. Bush quickly gave way to the Vietnam-like feel of an Iraq quagmire, and the rapid transformation of a Clinton surplus to a historic deficit.” Unipolarity’s demise, according to Acharya, “was hastened not by isolationism but by adventurism.”

What Randall Schweller and Xiaoyu Pu observed in their article published in 2011, titled After Unipolarity: China’s Visions of International Order in an Era of U.S. Decline, is that “unipolarity, which seemed strangely durable only a few years ago, appears today as a “passing moment.” The authors added that the U.S. “is no longer a hyper power towering over potential contenders,” as “the rest of the world is catching up.” This has not gone unnoticed by the mainstream press as, among other takes on the said topic, Financial Times’ articles like “America Must Manage its Decline,” written in 2011 by Gideon Rachman, or “Summits that Cap the West’s Decline,” penned by Philip Stephens in 2012, have significantly impacted the public debate in years to come. Most importantly, as far as the former example is concerned, Rachman correctly recognized that “new powers are on the rise,” noticing that “they each have their own foreign-policy preferences, which collectively constrain America’s ability to shape the world.” The author also predicted that “that is just a taste of things to come,” having in mind New Delhi’s and Brasilia’s support for Beijing during climate-change talks, and made a critical remark that “if America were able openly to acknowledge that its global power is in decline, it would be much easier to have a rational debate about what to do about it.”

Even though many people still believe that the U.S. “must not abandon” the Middle East, like it was famously voiced by The Economist in 2015, or argue that the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan was “tragic, dangerous, and unnecessary,” like former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair recently claimed, it is fair to say that the country’s military interventions in places like the Middle East contribute to the instability in the region far more than to the cause of the desired peace. Ironically, bloody conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, and several African countries, are a harsh reminder that millions of people around the globe do not associate the U.S.-led unipolarity with stability and perceive the country as one of the greatest threats to international peace.

An increasingly important factor in shaping the future of military adventurism is the U.S. public, which strongly supports the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and demands ending the endless wars. The fact is that as long as the U.S. power remains preponderant, we will see the continuation of the same disastrous outcomes as we have seen in Afghanistan. As Nuno P. Monteiro argues in his book Theory of Unipolar Politics, unipolarity “is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation, in which conflict is hardly avoidable,” and there is no evidence that technological advancement will allow to avoid similar horrors and costs to those associated with the war in Afghanistan, which are both felt by the U.S. and the Afghan people.

The moment of reckoning

As of today, the majority of mainstream thought leadership give very little benefit of the doubt that non-unipolar order can be as peaceful, or even more peaceful than the well-known unipolar order of the past, with intellectuals like Niall Ferguson, quite strangely, arguing that the alleged “America’s decline mirrors Britain’s a century ago,” when commenting on the country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. In fact, Ferguson’s thinking resembles the British imperial logic, which, once faced with the fact that the continuation with the project is impossible, believed that “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible,” as Lord Salisbury famously stated.

Contrary to the mentioned belief, there is no evidence that non-unipolarity may be less peaceful than unipolarity, which has been rich in military struggles in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Inchon, the Mekong River delta, Iran, or Luanda. Apart from eradicating the likelihood of great power struggle, the anatomy of a unipolar arrangement does not have a directly advantageous effect on the general likelihood of peace. Unipolarity itself creates conditions where recurrent conflicts between the hegemon and unyielding minor powers and conflict between small powers, which are harder to be managed by great-power allies, occur. Besides, unipolarity is free from restraint, which often leads to adventurism and hubris, as we have witnessed when the U.S. inavaded Iraq. Therefore, unipolarity is predisposed to be burdened with asymmetric and peripheral conflicts, like in the formerly mentioned example, as well as smaller wars, like in the case of the Russo-Georgian war of 2008. To conclude, it is uncertain if unipolarity influences the reiteration and severity of intra-state war.

It is equally worth mentioning that the frequently argued indispensability of hegemon to maintain international order is also challenged. As Simon Reich and Richard Lebow claim in their book Good-bye Hegemony! Power and Influence in the Global System, there is no prerequisite for hegemony to be in place in order to achieve international stability. The authors even go on to suggest that the concept of hegemony is itself “inappropriate” in a non-unipolar world scenario.

As Amitav Acharya predicts, non-unipolarity will not be chaotic and insecure. Quite the opposite, the author believes, the said arrangement could result in greater international collaboration, providing regional powers with more space for local and regional creativity. At the same time, writing in The End of American World Order, Acharya believes that “no major Western analyst…accepts that the U.S. decline might be good for international order either in general or in specific areas such as development, governance, and international justice.”

Looking from the U.S. persective, putting too much emphasis on preserving unipolarity risks being labelled as self-interested power by the international community, which is not so much interested with maintaining global satability as much as achieving self-serving goals. Furthermore, Frans-Paul van der Putten writes in European Union Institute for Security Studies report published in 2013, “it is not in Europe’s interests to support the perpetuation of U.S. global leadership at all costs, if this involves the danger of long-term global instability [and] the paralysis of global governance.”

Towards Brave New Post-Unipolar Order

There is no doubt that we are no longer living in the unipolar world, and, therefore, the non-unipolar reality requires us to question the post-Cold War’s liberal cosmopolitan orthodoxy and rethink our views to deal with global challenges, ranging from climate change, failed states, poverty reduction, and nuclear proliferation.

With power and responsibilities being spread more evenly, the world has a unique chance to strengthen cooperation and engage much more voices than ever in human history. Furthermore, a constructive embracement of the non-unipolar world will allow us to fully appreciate the fact that the post-unipolar world will be much more prosperous thanks to the improvement of the economic condition in countries in the developing world.

To mark this significant transition, the U.S. would be well-advised to engage other major powers, especially China and Russia, and leverage their cooperation to rebuild Afghanistan, which markes the end of unipolarity and has a realistic potential to mark the beginning of the post-unipolar future.

From our partner RIAC

 In October this year, the Biden Administration will be looking towards election to the UN Human Rights Council, after President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Council three years ago in 2018.

A Brookings article on the topic is titled “As the US returns, it will have to deal with China and its friends”, working under the presumption that the US will definitely be able to muster the votes required. But first, the US needs to get elected.

The usual criticism of the body we hear often is that the UN human rights council is a joke and it is only filled by bad actors. It is true that the countries with problematic human rights records actually focus their energy and efforts to get on it in order to be able have a say especially on the types of rights and issues that would affect them, and to block action. A big part of it is also the selection of the UN Special Procedures of the UN human rights council – the independent experts that ultimately decide what country or issue to prioritize. States want to have a say there, arguably selecting for the position that expert that will be the “lesser evil” for them, if they can foresee where an expert would go in advance.

It’s noteworthy that human rights bad actors are often also not elected to the UN Human Rights Council. Saudi Arabia — the US’s friend – was notably denied a seat on the Council in 2020. So that’s a positive. Previously, I have written about why the US should be denied a seat on the Council for their complicity in Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, which is the biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet and is also of the US making. In October, we should follow the 2020 Saudi Arabia vote as a good practice example and deny a seat to the US on similar grounds.

The other big issue for most countries at the UN as regards the US election is Israel and the US’s blind support for Israel even in the face of obvious human rights violations. The US carte blanche often blocks any action at the UN Security Council to shield Israel. UN member states are generally wary of allowing the US on UN human rights matters where its actions and coalitions also risk undermining the objective review of Isreal’s human rights record. The US carte blanche support for Israel at the UN Human Rights Council has run uniformly over the past 15 years, irrespective of Democrat or Republican administrations.

The US is the most military intervention prone country, and arguably is the country with the worst human rights record in the world if we count the victims of all the US wars and military action over the last century. The CIA is the most subversive and treacherous institution in the world. The US government constructs anything that happens in the world to be “national security” and that’s why it meddles through illegal means in everyone’s business, often violating human rights on a mass scale. It always finds a way to sugarcoat everything as freedom and human rights.

The humanitarian disaster that’s unfolding in Afghanistan is the current issue that will have an effect on the US election to the Council. We have to see how it will play out. The UN Human Rights Commissioner will report on Afghanistan in September this year, exactly before the potential US election on the Council.

Another prominent issue before the Council is the US government’s systematic treatment of African-Americans. This year, the UN Human Rights Council June session was dedicated to Black Lives Matter and to the human rights violations by US law enforcement, on the occasion of the one year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd.

It is also worth mentioning the US government’s unfair practices at the UN human rights council – like at the selection for the UN special rapporteur on freedom of speech in 2020, when the Trump Administration played dirty to stop me as a Trump critic at the final, using illegal means, in a selection process that was led by China. The 2020 episode also had an effect on my non-selection to the UN Working Group on the rights of people of African descent this year, as a Black Lives Matter supporter,. The Biden Administration and the State Department want to cover up what the Trump Administration started and did last year. The US government plays dirty in the UN human rights system and they don’t deserve to be a part of it.

We can’t allow the US to be elected to the UN Human Rights Council. To quote a favorite movie character: “You shall not pass”: You Shall Not Pass – The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (7/8) Movie CLIP (2001) HD