As the Americans go through the early stages of Imperial Overstretch, the calculus of a competent empire in decline would involve which satrapies and allies to cut loose to consolidate diminishing resources and influence. There is no evidence of the USA having been at any point a competent empire (nod to Jerry Pournelle for use of his term) so it is no surprise that they are not getting any cannier about their foreign policy as they begin the slide from Superpower to mere Great Power.
The recent violation of Diplomatic Immunity of a US consular official in Pakistan gives the US State Department a fleeting opportunity to grow a pair and begin this process of retrenchment. Pakistan is fucked and is absorbing a lot of $US for no useful return; to accept this sort of treatment from a fundamentalist Islamic country that you have poured billions of dollars into in the last decade is embarrassing. There are certain standards that civilized countries hold themselves to, and this is not within that.
That particular situation is of course a molehill, but you can see the mountain from it. There is nothing in Pakistan or Afghanistan which is worth the life or limb of our soldiers or the money of our taxpayers. If they want to descend into another Islamopocalypse and drive out the last of the “infidels” the only useful thing we could do is to help those Christians, Hindus and Sikhs who remain to get somewhere safer.
The most effective way to do that will of course not happen, since it’s known variously as a pogrom or ethnic cleansing. Problems with violent Muslims in Indian Kashmir? Push them all over the border and repopulate with people who need to get out of Pakistan in a hurry. I of course don’t have a plan for that (another Indo-Pakistani war would figure prominently), but it would be 1947 all over again.
That seems a bit of a tangent, but it illustrates the whole “Clash of Civilizations” thing, and the fact that we are best off working with people who are not inimical to our way(s) of life. India has problems but one of its problems is China and another is Pakistan, both on Western radar as trouble for us. The adversary of our troublesome geopolitical adversaries should be a very close friend. More importantly, India is not in the grasp of an ideology that wants our civilization destroyed.
This is the big-picture stuff that Emperors have done for millennia, at least when other groups were too powerful to conquer easily and/or more useful as allies. There are few direct parallels as modern transport and communications have changed “The Great Game” in all respects, but the key part is ensuring the interests and thereby the longevity of your kingdom, etc. This is something that modern democracies are fundamentally incompatible with and that the Americans prove themselves time and again incapable of grasping at almost every level of government.
For the United States of America today, a snippet from the late Victorian Age:
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
Change the scenery a bit and you have the U.S. sphere of influence today, much of it the British empire of Kipling’s heyday. America has lost much face and will be doing well to salvage any reputation with its allies, let alone hold the places that don’t like it to begin with. Some new leadership (REAL leadership) in the U.S.A. could stop the rot, but it’s looking more and more all the time like this:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
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