What a New Defense Pact Reveals About America
A deal between the United States, Britain, and Australia serves as a rebuttal of the argument that Washington is in retreat.
After the fall of Kabul last month, many observers of U.S. foreign policy concluded that America had lost interest in its allies, and that its allies had lost faith in America.
An important development in Asia, however, serves as a powerful rebuttal of both arguments.
The conventional wisdom in August was that Washington was no longer a reliable partner and that allies’ trust had been destroyed by the manner of its withdrawal from Afghanistan. One unnamed former British intelligence officer, for example, to a reporter that the chaotic close to the Afghanistan mission marked “the end of an era of Western liberalism & democracy that started with the fall
