A year after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Americans are still licking their wounds. Last year President Joe Biden’s demanded that the all U.S. forces withdraw from Afghanistan by an artificial timeline. He disregarded the Afghans who fought with them for twenty years. He abandoned $90 billion in weapons to the Taliban. He left Bagram Air Force Base and the riches of a country filled with rare minerals to China. And last week, he tried to convince Americans that everything was perfect because the U.S. was able to kill al Qaeda boss Zawahiri.
To discuss the true consequences of the withdrawal for the U.S., its allies, its superpower rivals and the morale of U.S. forces, in this week’s Mideast News Hour, I spoke with two top national security officials from the Trump administration: former deputy national security advisor Victoria Coates, and former deputy assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, Simone Ledeen. Leeden spent more than two years in Afghanistan over three deployments during the Bush and Obama administrations as a civilian embedded with the Army.
From Afghanistan we moved to Iran and the nuclear deal – what it means for the region and for the U.S. and what America’s spurned allies are capable of doing on their own to prevent Iran from emerging from the deal as the regional hegemon. The three also discussed the deal’s implications for the future of nuclear non-proliferation.
Finally, we moved to the rapprochement between Israel and Turkey. The governments announced they will be exchanging ambassadors for the first time in over a decade last week. We discussed Turkish President Recep Erdogan motivation for normalize ties with Israel despite his anti-Semitism and hatred for Israel and the implications of the rapprochement for the future of the gas exploration in the Eastern Mediterranean and how it can impact Iran’s rise as an actor in the Mediterranean gas industry through Hezbollah-Iran.
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