Zhou Enlai’s supposed judgment on the French Revolution has always looked unbeatable for magisterial long-termism. “Too soon to tell,” the Chinese premier is meant to have said, with an unelected leader’s freedom to wait. How striking, then, to see a chamber as democratic as the US Senate better his epigram at last. In a motion about Syria and Afghanistan, a bipartisan supermajority of 68 Senators has warned against the “precipitous withdrawal of United States forces from either country”.
The US has been in Afghanistan for 17 years. Both world wars and the Korean war put end-to-end do not equal this epic. Americans who were not yet born when the first tanks poured in are now eligible to serve. Thousands of their compatriots have been killed or wounded in the violence, and there is a kind of savage deadlock to show for it. Withdrawal might still, on balance, be foolish. The proposed accommodation with the Taliban is hideous to digest. But to characterise exit as precipitous, or “cutting and running”, as though the US only showed up last month and never leaned in to the work of nation-building, is to drain language of all meaning.
It also corroborates one of Donald Trump’s paranoias about Washington. There is such a thing as the foreign policy “blob”. Members of an otherwise riven governing class have at least one thing in common: a stamina for overseas intervention that, as well as bucking voter opinion, is amazingly unreflective about the past two decades.