The Bad Faith Hawkish Credibility Argument Just Won’t Die

If there’s one thing hawks enjoy, it is creating doubt about U.S. reliability:

Mr. Biden “knows from long experience that America’s actions abroad matter, but he is willingly ignoring the far-reaching consequences of America’s withdrawal in Afghanistan,” said Bradley Bowman, an Afghanistan veteran and senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Center on Military and Political Power, a hawkish think tank in Washington.

“We can expect Chinese and Russian diplomats to ramp up with new credibility a whisper campaign in capitals around the world that Washington is an unreliable partner who will abandon its friends sooner or later,” he said.

Maybe Chinese and Russian diplomats will make this claim, but why would anyone else take it seriously? The only people that seem to believe that US credibility everywhere else hinges on prolonging an unwinnable war in Central Asia are the hawkish dead-enders that never wanted our involvement in the war to end. The appeal to credibility here is disingenuous, and it is the last resort of war supporters that have no other arguments left. As Mike Black put it on Twitter yesterday:

Love that FDD is doing our adversaries' work for them by openly talking about this mythical whisper campaign on how a landlocked country in Central Asia is a barometer of the US's commitment anywhere else, because they all have brain worms https://t.co/3yY3Yn6kgm

— Mike Black (@MikeBlack114) August 11, 2021

These hawks warn that the US will lose credibility with all of its allies unless it does exactly what the hawks want in every crisis or conflict. They impute their own preferences to the allies to make them seem more important to US interests than they are. It is remarkable how all of our allies are supposed to have exactly the same view of every issue as the most aggressive American hawks. Hawks said that the UShad to bomb the Syrian government’s forces in 2013 to maintain credibility with allies the world over, and then when the US did not do that there were zero consequences for US credibility. They insisted that the US had to retaliate for the Abqaiq attack in 2019 or there would be dire consequences for US credibility in the eyes of its partners. The US did not retaliate, and US credibility was unaffected. Now they tell us that the US is proving itself an unreliable partner again by withdrawing from Afghanistan after almost twenty years. One wonders just how many decades the US has to prop up a client state in order to be considered reliable.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.