We came to Afghanistan as liberators, but are seen now as occupiers, imposing our ideas, values, and satraps. After eight years of war in Iraq and ten in Afghanistan, we are coming home with Iraq going its own way and Afghanistan tipping toward the Taliban.
Why did we not succeed? First, because we are poor imperialists who lack the patience and perseverance of the British. Second, because the age of imperialism is over. What all peoples demand today is self-determination, sovereignty, and freedom from foreign domination. Third, because it was always utopian to believe we could impose a system rooted in Western secular values on people steeped for ten centuries in Islam. The war to do so has only made us enemies where they did not exist.
We failed to understand what motivated our attackers. They did not come to kill us because they abhor our Constitution, or wish to impose Sharia on Oklahoma. They were over here because we are over there. They came to kill us in our country because we will not get out of their countries. Terrorism is the weapon of the weak who wish to be rid of foreign domination. From Plains Indians to Afghan mujahideen, from Menachem Begin’s Irgun to the Algerian FLN, from the IRA of Martin McGuinness to the ANC of Nelson Mandela, it has ever been thus.
Terrorism is the price of empire.
Anti-Western terror comes out of countries where the West is seen as overlord. When the British left Palestine, the Stern Gand attacks stopped. When the French left Algeria, the Paris bombings ended. When the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan, the mujahideen did not follow. When the U.S. Navy stopped shelling and the marines left Beirut, the attacks on Americans in Lebanon ceased. Osama bin Laden ordered 9/11 because U.S. troops were stationed on sacred Saudi soil that is home to Mecca. We will never end terrorist attacks on this country, until we remove our soldiers from those countries.
If we have a vital interest in that part of the world, it is that no hostile power should be able to shut off the flow of oil, the lifeblood of the industrial West. But the countries of the Middle East also have a vital interest in seeing to it that the oil flows. Without oil exports and the revenue they produce, the Middle East would sink to the level of the sub-Sahara.
—Patrick Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower, 2011
Nation building is a failed experiment. NATO, after the Cold War, is a failed pact without the U.S. America “brought the Warsaw Pact and three former soviet republics into NATO” and none of them are vital to U.S. national security.
These are just brief statements argued by Pat Buchanan in the tenth chapter of his 2011 book Suicide of a Superpower. The depth of history and political analysis he’s able to summon goes into his often ominous predictions of the fate of our civilization—that is, if we continue to be unable to get ourselves together.
Buchanan’s prophetic prowess is undeniable. The first book of his that I picked up was The Death of the West, published in 2001. Being that this was published in 2011, it’s unfortunate to see his predictions come true. There are many pages where his wisdom and age comes forth. His depth of history and political analysis has gone unrecognized in the Republican Party for a long time. He was a voice that was acknowledged too late in the game, where his cautions have gone unheeded.
As we near 2025, we can reflect back on the subtitle: will America make it? Buchanan does seem to answer yes, but it isn’t a resounding yes. It isn’t wholesome. It’s a meek yes, with the brutal recognition that she will only make it Balkanized from one another, within one country, but hardly as one people.
This is a good read for anyone who can critically engage with him and think about what he’s writing. Many casually dismiss Buchanan as racist, and whatever else, but that charge seems to come from those who can’t comprehend the basic human truths that Buchanan lays before us. Buchanan is not saying anything new here. Whether one agrees or disagrees with him, an honest criticism will have to take the same amount of substantiation that he provides for his work.
The reality of civilizational decadence is not for the feeble minded or the ideologically stubborn. This is too serious a subject to be confounded and plagued with childishness.