(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times via Getty
Soon after becoming Vice-President in 2009, Joe Biden told Barack Obama and the entire national security council that the United States should: stop trying to build a feminist democracy in Afghanistan of all places, stop trying to build a national army from a pre-national population, and stop paying Pakistan more than $2 billion a year for the use of the port of Karachi and the road to Kandahar while Pakistan was funding the Haqqani network that specialised in killing Americans.
White House staffers, and Obama’s first Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, would ridicule Biden’s repetitious perorations that simply ignored the expert consensus: both the civilian and military chiefs in the Pentagon, backed by leading “think tank” experts, fully agreed with Generals McChrystal and (Dr.) Petraeus. They were the commanders in Afghanistan who believed that progress was accelerating as more and more Afghans were rejecting fanaticism to embrace progress… and the first-class experts agreed with them! Petraeus would soon promulgate his Counterinsurgency manual FM 3-24 ( my review: “counterinsurgency as military malpractice”).
On April 1 2011, when Mazar-i-Sharif demonstrators attacked the UN Assistance Mission, they killed three “Christians” including the female Norwegian colonel Siri Skare. This after President Karzai (yes, him) had denounced a Koran-burning incident in the United States. At no point did Petraeus stop and deplore the Koran burning, nor the murders, or the responsibility of made-in-USA Karzai for the fiasco.
Biden’s Afghanistan problem was that he could not persuade Obama because Obama was already fully persuaded. But as a new President new to Washington, new even to politics Obama simply refused to oppose the Washington consensus of media-savvy generals, would-be tough think-tankers and CIA-friendly columnists. It all had to wait till Biden himself became President, but by then his Afghanistan policy (evacuate) had become Trump’s and so…
But in 2009, Biden’s other problem was even bigger: one more reason he wanted the US out of Afghanistan (and Iraq) was to focus on China as a rising threat, when very few Americans agreed with him, and none in the White House. At that very time — the worst of the financial crisis — the US was asking the Europeans, Japan and also China to pump up public spending to save the world economy that was falling into a depression. The Europeans were skeptical (“Crisis? What crisis? Just your Lehman crisis, you fix it”, was the European response). Only the British responded, and the Chinese, who immediately launched Belt and Road, and other projects that deliberately employed tens of thousands with shovels — not just bulldozers. Obama was grateful and the US Treasury Secretary Geithner was ecstatic —it took two years (!) for the Europeans to react, and even then they moved very slowly, and spent very little.
In this climate, Biden was again isolated when he pointed out that China’s helpful public spending included very fast-growing military spending that contradicted its Peaceful Rise policy proclaimed in 2004. Having long chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Biden heard warnings from several experts including the present writer [The Rise of China and the Logic of Strategy Harvard U Press 2012] and more importantly, Kevin Rudd, then Australia’s prime minister, who explained that China’s leaders believed that the fatal “General Crisis of Capitalism” had finally arrived. It had come too late for the USSR but just in time for the PRC to become the world’s most powerful state.
When Obama White House aides plaintively asked (the Treasury was more dignified) for fast spending from the PRC, its leaders took it as their licence to assert China’s power in all directions. Of that I received a personal intimation from Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying 傅莹. She had always been a charming lady, but when I met her in Beijing at the height of the 2009 financial crisis she was almost shouting: “America is down! China is up!”. When I later complained to Zheng Bijian author of the Peaceful Rise policy he replied: “Shīkòng de mǎ”, 失控的 — “runaway horses”.
Rudd’s opinion was especially weighty because he was considered pro-Chinese (he happily speaks Chinese and even has a Chinese name, Lù Kèwén). In that year, 2009, Australia published a Defence White Paper that called for a broad coalition to contain China. At the time, India’s PM Singh refused to be diverted from the economy, Japan had its first neutralist government and Washington liked China better than Europe. It was only later that Japan’s 2010 Senkaku incident — which resulted in anti-Japanese riots, border intrusions in the Himalayas, and incidents at sea — changed attitudes. And it was only at the end of 2011 that Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State spoke of rotating out of the Middle East to focus on China, with Susan Rice on Obama’s staff strongly disagreeing… until Xi Jinping ‘s 2015 visit ended all illusions.
Again, as on Afghanistan, Biden’s China policy was anticipated by Trump, who in his own blundering way finally implemented Kevin Rudd’s coalition strategy, meeting Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe even before his inauguration, and India’s Modi as soon as he could, building up the alliances; while his White House staff cut off China from the US technology pipeline, in spite of Silicon Valley’s resistance. So it is only now that Biden can finally implement his 2009 policy — covered in opprobrium because the Afghan army had turned out to be a fraud exactly as he had predicted, leaving him only the cruel choice between sending troops back to Afghanistan or chaotic flight. But on China at least he has full support at home, and in every country around China except for Pakistan — which will not receive one cent more from Biden.
Professor Edward Luttwak is a strategist and historian known for his works on grand strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations.
ELuttwak 
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SubscribeBeing a child means every option is on the table.
That’s the joy of childhood.
Being an adult means having to make life choices based on your needs and wants tempered by your abilities.
You can’t have everything.
The David anecdote is a perfect example of transitioning from childhood dreams and expectations to hard adult choices.
David is now happy because he is satisfying his own personal priority list.
IMO, millenials, or whatever the current tag is for the younger generation, are really just suffering from stunted emotional growth.
I don’t blame them entirely because they’ve been lead to believe, mostly by doting parents and coffee bar communists, that not only can you have it all, the inability to tick every life goal box somehow represents a failure of the system.
You aren’t young and naive – you’re a victim. (I believe the neo-liberal corporate kleptocracy is the Voldemort du jour)
But don’t worry, we will rise up and fix it.
They aren’t victims.
They’re just not adults yet.
‘David, a youth campaigner in his twenties who moved to London after university to help found a new charity,’
Talk about a non-job. No sympathy whatsoever. Ah…upon reading further I see that David saw sense and got out of London. But we do not learn whether or not he left the non-jobbing behind.
Founding a charity seems quite impressive to me. Do please provide a list of real jobs that have your approval.
Law, accountancy, medicine, the armed services, the church, engineer, banker, plumber, electrician, fire brigade, police, sales & marketing, retail, manufacture, import & export, farming, university lecturer, university admin, gym instructor, sport, sport admin, archeologist, lab technician, actor, dancer, modelling, musician, grocer, delivery driver, haulier, shelf stacker … need I continue?
Thanks for your list of jobs. They’re all great in my eyes. It doesn’t really address my point though which was why the previous contributor was so dismissive of someone setting up a charity a ‘non-job’.
Not sure much has fundamentally changed- I graduated from a London University & started a professional training contract in 1979-for the first 5/6 years I lived in the outskirts of London in a room in a shared house whilst I run up a sizeable amount of debt.Eventually my earning increased but I was 30+ before I could buy a property and thatw as only because my employer lent me the deposit.
During a career in IT my Golden rule was never to look for a job inside the M25, no matter how much it paid. Although I occasionally had the misfortune to go into London for a meeting. In a lot of ways I’m an anywhere person but considered London to be a no-way-I’m-working-there place.
Is there anything smugger than those having left London for the Shires or small town life looking down in Millennials?
To paraphrase this nasty article: “Look at us and how clever and talented we are to have left the rat race. We have book clubs and artisan crafts and an excess of talent – and we don’t have coronavirus the way you city souls do. How dare Millennials be so arrogant as to sleep on sofas and commute long distances for no money.”
Should we all upsticks to the country and write columns for Unherd?
It seems to me everyday we find new ways to classify people, open verus closed, millenials versus genX, anywheres versus somewheres. In our ever finer dichotomy of society we are not valuing the individual, but resorting to a lazy and dishonest mental short-cut to classify them and dismiss them with all kinds of implied qualities (smart versus dumb, globalist versus bigoted, leavers versus remainers). We forget that individuals are infinitely more complex than these clever tags.
“The result, I argued last November, is a socially-liberal, economically aspirational graduate precariat, clinging to the big-city dream while scraping a hand-to-mouth existence in cramped, expensive shared housing.”
You’re talking about my kids. This middle-aged white conservative male thinks that millennials should go en masse to parks and, while scrupulously observing social distancing protocols, sunbathe to their hearts’ content, and tell any copidiots who harass them to keep their far king distance.
Not everyone is a nimby
Always lived in the shires as my family have for generations. Glad to say all my children do as well. Today I went to pick up my weekly supplies at the local farm shop. The whole yard was full of clearly London millenials on bikes all with those stupid helmets they wear. ignoring as they felt they had the right to all social distancing and yabbering away at each other. I live in an area where the richer ones have second homes ( or daddy does) . This puts the farm and the workers in peril and as the whole area is now under much more police surveillance puts the farmer himself under pressure he does not need. .
My small town does not want then here. Not now and not ever really.
No doubt your ‘small town’ is the beneficiary of far too generous farming subsidies? No doubt it also gleefully accepts the largesse handed out by ‘daddy’ and his pampered offspring?
Yet, both you and it remain chippy and envious. You should banish the green eyed goddess and count your blessings. The perpetual whining of the shires, most notably by such organisations as The Countryside Alliance is one of the most unattractive features of modern Britain and its chemically saturated landscape.
I think it’s s shame that a thought provoking article has elicited so many antagonistic responses. I don’t agree with everything in the article but the general thrust, identifying a clear and damaging societal split, is spot on. And I’d like to come to Boris Johnson’s defence regarding the author’s pooh-poohing of his aspirations for ‘levelling up’ the country. I think he’s referring to a general economic levelling up between our major population centres as much as between town and country but it strikes me he is on the same page as the author and deserves some credit for this ambition. Let’s hope he manages to turn it into a set of successful policies.
The English have long tended to celebrate the provincial and rural over the metropolitan. And smug metropolitan-hating parochialism and swaggering philistinism have long defined the shires, compelling many a bright young thing to escape to the big city. Some of those bright young things may return, as the provincial ‘somewhere’ is held up as a seedbed of community, meaning, the good life and authenticity against the emptiness and shallowness of city life. It is a persistent motif of a return-to-nature, back-to-basics counter culture, disenchanted with the excesses and false promises of liberal, urban civilisation. Yet can this somewhere be found in a hinterland, which is more a myth than reality? Is this ‘somewhere’ merely another car-dependent nowhere, an elevated suburbia of renovated cottages, identikit housing estates, out-or-town shopping centres, industrialised food production and farming, dingy towns, inadequate infrastructure, all repackaged by a bogus heritage culture and imported artisanal pretension? Life in the sticks may be an interesting counterpoint to frenetic, big city life, yet there needs to be some critical balance against London bashing and back-to-somewhere delusion and proselytising.
Yes, move to a small town, there’s no chance of finding small-minded, disapproving people who will never accept you as anything but a blow-in. And you won’t miss the bookshops, concerts, diverse restaurants, fashion choices and just being with other young people like yourself. It will be so easy to find a good music teacher etc. …..
why would you not be able to go to a concert just because you moved out of the city? fashion choices? everyone shops online so same choices unless you like weird clothes from Camden Market. Bookshops? Believe it or not people outside of cities also read as well, lots of towns have great independent bookshops. Same with food and believe it or not, there are young people outside of cities, shocking i know!
The best bit of moving out of London? Hell of a lot less crime, do i miss the high levels of crime and constant threat of danger? Not on your life! There is nothing trendy about the constant fear of someone pulling a knife on you, throwing acid in your face, stealing your phone/wallet/bike etc It is certainly no place to bring up a young child that is for sure.
Be trendy or be safe? No brainer for me really
I did just that; 40 years in London and finally got out. To deep rurality, but with a wonderful classical and modern music scene (and music teachers – starting right next door), lanes and barns full of artisans and creatives making all sorts of wonderful things, good food and much cheaper and less pretentious, and even bookshops. And publishers, writers, bookclubs… Amazing, there’s life out here, culture, creativity, and friendly people.