Goodbye Middle East, Hello Far East

The Commander in Chief Barack Obama has not pursued the Aiken Doctrine in Afghanistan. George Aiken was the Republican senator who, in the Vietnam War, recommended that the U.S. should simply “declare victory and get out.” The denouement in Vietnam was chaotic (for the Americans) with the unforgettable image of the evacuation by helicopter from the roof of the embassy in the former Saigon.

The announcement of a reduction in American troops in Afghanistan (33,000 soldiers until the end of 2012) was one of Obama’s initiatives in which he did his best to be moderate on everything and frustrates half the world. Analysts and humorists did not cut him any slack and repeated that the president wants both to leave and to stay. Senator Aiken would have been annoyed.

But, in the end, it is the start of the U.S.’ disengagement from the longest war in its history. The trick is to get out without declaring victory in a war that has generated so much fatigue and so little glory. It would be ridiculous to declare victory. Just look at the success of the heinous and breathtaking Taliban attacks in recent days. No matter what, for the Americans, there are the obvious reasons to be tired of war; not to forget that Afghanistan is in a hole, but the American fiscal hole counts more. With one eye on his re-election campaign (and the same is being done by the battalion of Republican candidates), Obama has emphasized that the focus now is domestic. To use a saying that’s common in the U.S. these days, the priority is rebuilding bridges in Kansas City and Baltimore, not in Kandahar and Baghdad.

The regional disengagement is profound, but not exceptional, much less immediate. The Americans will continue to be involved in Afghanistan (troops will stay there for a long time in counterterrorism roles, and no longer in counterinsurgency or construction, in a country that seems nearly impossible to fix), in Iraq and various parts of the Middle East and North Africa. But the missionary zeal that followed the terrorist attacks of 9/11 has lost intensity.

And it’s not just about budgetary considerations, but is also about the limits of geopolitical change, in the context that historian Paul Kennedy called “Imperial overstretch.” A country needs to establish a correspondence between resources and goals. Getting out of the Middle East and of other neighboring hot spots is going to let the Americans concentrate their strategic, military and financial firepower on other parts of Asia, in the Far East, nearer to China. The commandant of the Marines Corps, General James Amos, is not concealing his plan to relocate troops freed up from Afghanistan and Iraq to bases in the Pacific. The American hegemony requires ever-increasing investment in naval corridors around China.

It is this, incidentally, that its allies (Japan in particular) want and what even those not allied with the U.S. in the Asia-Pacific region (Vietnam) want. China, Vietnam and other countries in the region are involved in disputes over islets and reefs in the South China Sea. Beijing is making its claims while the Communist regime is taking on ever more nationalist tones (a convenient change of ideology and message in the market-Leninist country).

The Chinese are worried by the Vietnamese, and the Americans took the side of their adversary in the war in the ’60s and ’70s (which, in turn, had a brief conflict against China). The Chinese have augmented their naval capacity, and their first aircraft carrier is here. The Chinese military and diplomats warn the Americans not to “play with fire” like various Asian countries embroiled in border disputes with Beijing have done.

There is no doubt that China is the only country that threatens the global supremacy of the U.S. (and we’re not just talking about the economy). This is an inflection point, with the transfer of American strategic and military resources from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region to counter China. The drama is that the Americans need the Chinese, too, for their domestic reconstruction.

For Obama and his successors, there will be a challenge to take the middle road. Today’s president is storming ahead with this practice. We will see with the next ones. There is a fatigue with war in the U.S., but history has its tortuous (or circular) routes. You never know. One day, the Americans could again be, because of China, in a war in Vietnam, just like in Senator Aiken’s time.