One Casualty Of The Military Defeat In Afghanistan Will Be NATO

President Biden joins G7 summit leaders in a group photo in June 2021. In a G7 meeting last week, European leaders pushed the US to extend the August 31 deadline for troop departure. Photo: Reuters  

Jen Kirby, VOX: NATO allies are preparing for a future without America’s “forever wars” 

How the US’s Afghanistan withdrawal echoed overseas. 

Afghanistan wasn’t just America’s 20-year war. It also belonged to US allies. 

“This has been above all a catastrophe for the Afghan people. It’s a failure of the Western world and it’s a game changer for international relations,” the European Union’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell told an Italian newspaper Monday, according to the Washington Post. 

“Certainly,” he continued, “we Europeans share our part of responsibility. We cannot consider that this was just an American war.”  

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WNU Editor: Former President Trump put pressure on fellow NATO members to keep their promises on defense spending .... and for that was branded as someone who wanted to destroy NATO. But what President Biden has done is on a completely different level, and it has now put into question on how solid can NATO be if its main partner conducts itself without consulting its allies. 

Bottom line. 

While Afghanistan has opened up new fault lines in NATO, it is not the thing that will fracture it. But the botched military withdrawal has added to a growing skepticism in Europe of the United States, and its larger commitment to collaborating with its allies.

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