2021: a disgraceful escape
From my point of view as a geopolitics and geo-economics journalist, it is not any of the multiple tussles involving Putin, Biden, Jinping or Johnson - or even NATO - and not even the SARS-CoV-2 mutations or the advance in the anti-Covid vaccination that for me is the most relevant event of 2021.
The disaster of the evacuation of military troops in Afghanistan is a watershed for the West, which the United States is dragging down in its decadence with its shameful, disorganised flight, ignoring the NATO allies it has dragged into Afghanistan since it triggered Article 5 of the Alliance and forced an allied block defence and invasion after the attacks of 11 September 2001.
The twentieth anniversary of those regrettable terrorist events and the ensuing occupation of Afghanistan could not have a worse story than the one that took place last August.
It was the victory of Odysseus over Polyphemus, the savage ignorant of justice and the law, who with his one eye thought himself lord and master and exercised his imperialism after the Second World War and had settled in to reign alone after the dismantling of the Soviet-Communist bloc and what seemed to be the end of the Cold War.
But all empires come to an end, just look at Rome whose agony began amid family betrayals with a rot among its legislative bodies and a corruption that stank from the very sewers... even the catacombs heralded its destruction.
See also the case of the great Alexander the Great who did not avoid his own destruction devoured by the ambition of the devastating conquest, the Macedonian Empire spread over such distant lands reached its zenith on 13 June 323 BC with the death of the Greek warrior in Babylon at the age of 33.
The 21st century is the tomb of American power that can no longer eclipse the rise of China, nor the competition from Russia, nor the preponderant role that India will play sooner rather than later.
There is also global weariness. The weaker countries are tired of the carrot and stick policy and the traditional allied nations feel betrayed, vilified and ignored for several years now by US foreign policy obsessed only with undermining and preventing China from taking over the entire circumference.
The US has forgotten how important alliances are. Russia and China have not. While Washington's foreign policy is interwoven with bad decisions that only generate more confrontation, many weak countries seek to rebel against the policy of plunder, occupation, violence and bloodshed that, from the White House, has been set in motion as if it were a blinding machine.
Odysseus has killed the Cyclops, cut out his eye, expelled him from his lands, but before that he has removed his entrails and watered his soil with his blood as if he wanted to fertilise new seeds for each son killed... for each father... for each mother and for each life that the giant devoured during his occupation.
Afghanistan has ended 2021 with the Taliban back in power, like a mandrake that you cut and it grows again, and you cut and it grows again and again.
But the difference with the defeated Afghanistan of two decades ago is that the poorly organised and shameful departure of US troops has empowered the Taliban, empowered many other terrorist groups, and empowered the satraps who have seen America's tactical might dwindle before their eyes.
For you can have hundreds of bombs but no tactics, and tactics always make the difference between victory and defeat. You can have thousands of soldiers but be defeated by a hundred because tactics are not synonymous with numbers.
That Thursday 26 August 2021 will be indelibly marked in world history: the terrorist attack near Kabul airport that took the lives of 13 US soldiers and killed hundreds of other civilians (claimed by the Islamic State) will bring a series of misfortunes for the West, not only because of its vulnerability to terrorism but because it lacks effective organisation and obvious cohesion. Afghanistan is just the cry of the wolf, a sad taste of what lies ahead.