Are China and Russia unhappy to see the U.S. abandon the Afghans?

Almost every sentence of Joe Biden’s little talk about Afghanistan was dishonest, flawed, or both. Here’s one example. Biden said:

Our true strategic competitors — China and Russia — would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely.

The U.S. was spending about $52 billion a year to support its military effort in Afghanistan and about $6 billion on foreign aid. That’s a lot of money, to be sure. But China and Russia understand that these amounts aren’t going to have any meaningful effect on the state of the massive U.S. economy.

The idea that these two adversaries “would love nothing more” than to see the U.S. continue these outlays is laughable.

Here’s something China and Russia would “love more” — seeing the U.S. humiliated on the world stage. Or, as Mark Steyn puts, seeing the U.S. become a “dead superpower walking.”

When Kabul fell, Steyn wrote:

If you’re an Afghan schoolgirl, today is the fall of Kabul; elsewhere, in the chancelleries of allies and enemies alike, it’s the fall of America.

Steyn suggests that the fall of Kabul is America’s “Suez moment.” The Suez crisis of 1956 “marked the great divide between the words ‘British Empire’ being still taken seriously and their being a sneering punchline.” The past days in Afghanistan “may well do the same for the term ‘global superpower.'”

They may, indeed. But even if they don’t, China and Russia will be happier to have witnessed this disaster and its fallout than to see the U.S. spend $60 billion a year or so preventing it.

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