Americans are merchants of hope, a retired diplomat from a Gulf state told me this week. So they are. His sentence evoked two occasions when I saw former American ambassadors to Ukraine promise an audience of young Ukrainians that the US would always stand behind them. Three hundred miles behind us, some wits in Kyiv joked after the US embassy moved to Lviv in the west of the country on 14 February. Double that when it finally left for Poland a week later. But the problem is many in those audiences believed the diplomats. Like their young cohorts in Kabul, they made life plans on that premise.
We now live in the middle of a great recession. American power is everywhere retreating, leaving behind vacuums that others strive to fill. The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan is the best symbol of the great recession, which started with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2011. Repressive as the new Afghan regime already is – and the repression can only grow – it is at least a national movement. In eastern Europe, the decline of the American empire is magnified by the incipience of European power, creating a combustible mixture, a propitious landscape for a war of worlds. In Ukraine the end of the American empire is taking an even grimmer form than in Afghanistan: a war of genocide whose declared goal is the extermination of Ukrainian nationhood.
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