Is America Becoming a Failed State?
By Patrick Buchanan
https://www.creators.com/read/pat-buchanan/08/21/is-america-becoming-a-failed-state
Suddenly, Sunday, a riveting report came over cable news:
The U.S. embassy was urging all Americans to "leave Afghanistan as soon as possible." Message: Get out while you can.
Adding urgency was news that three northern provincial capitals, including Kunduz city, had fallen to the Taliban, making it five provincial capitals overrun since Friday.
The huge investment in blood and treasure by the United States over two decades to remake Afghanistan appears about to be wiped out, whole and entire, and we appear about to sustain our worst diplomatic and political defeat since the fall of Saigon.
Not once in this century has the U.S. decisively won one of the wars it launched — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen or Libya. And the sole superpower status we enjoyed as the 21st century began is gone with the wind.
Yet America's hawks are urging us to give a new war guarantee to Taiwan, should Beijing exercise its claim, though former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger assented in 1972 that Taiwan is "a part of China."
Before we issue any war guarantee to Taipei, we might consider the Pentagon's evaluation of the results of a recent war game in which the U.S. confronted China over Taiwan.
How did it go? Says vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten, "Without overstating the issue, it failed miserably.
"An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. … They knew exactly what we were going to do before we did it, and they took advantage of it."
Are we Americans prepared, in any way, for an air-sea-and-missile war in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific over islands they claim as their historic national territory but we have never claimed as ours?
Here at home, the COVID-19 pandemic, now in a fourth wave, is infecting 100,000 Americans every day, with hospitalizations rising commensurately. For that third of a nation still unvaccinated, the delta variant is a potential death sentence.
Despite this medical crisis that is common to us all, our political divide is manifesting itself in savage battles over vaccinations, masks and mandates.
And while COVID-19 continues to infect, hospitalize and kill, scores of thousands of Americans are being annually lost to drug overdoses and opioids. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 93,000 overdose deaths occurred across the country in 2020, and 3 in 4 fatal overdoses can be attributed to opioids.