Peace is a deal
On a simple map, Afghanistan just looks like a small country on the edge of the Middle East. In reality, it’s far different. Can you find Afghanistan on this NASA image?
Why did the Biden administration dump the deal we’d worked out to leave Afghanistan? Because disparagement of deals is not new for the left. Back in 2017 when President Trump first started addressing conflict in the Middle East, he said that “The United States will encourage peace and really a great peace deal.”
I immediately started seeing things like this from friends on the left on social media:
Oh. My. God. Peace is now a “deal.” And the work of presidents and peacemakers since 1976 is now deemed worthless because of one big fat orange deal-maker.
“Trump’s comments,” she said, “dismantled one of the key pillars of the US-led peace efforts since before the signing of the Oslo accords, which envisioned the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish one.”
The first Oslo accords were signed nearly a quarter of a century ago and the two-state solution has been the non-negotiable basis of negotiations since 1974. In all of those forty-seven years there has been no peace in the Middle East. Palestinian representatives broke the Oslo accords almost as soon as they were signed, while the Israelis continued to honor the accord under pressure from the West.
Because we made the two-state solution non-negotiable, Palestinian representatives didn’t have any need to compromise to achieve it, and instead used it as the starting point to push for their real, stated goal: a one-state solution where Israel is destroyed.
Not treating peace as a deal has produced nothing except more terrorism. It is crazy to make a “solution” that hasn’t worked since before Carter was president non-negotiable.
By putting everything on the table for negotiation, negotiations became more likely, which made peace—and even the two-state solution—more likely. It also made finding a different solution that would actually work more likely, such as the Abraham Accords that Trump’s team negotiated. The Abraham Accords are deals, and by all appearances, good ones.
The inability to understand that peace requires deals has been a long-standing problem on the left for as long as I’ve been alive. For as long as I can remember, the left’s understanding of peace has been a unilateral one. I believed it myself when I was younger and on the left. If we want peace on our streets, we disarm the police.1 If the United States wants peace in the world, we stop making nuclear weapons, we stop making defense systems.
If we stop fighting against crime, if we stop defending ourselves, there will be peace.
But unilateralism doesn’t work; it means less peace, because it means aggression goes unopposed. It means chaos that spreads from country to country as bad actors realize they don’t have to honor agreements or even public opinion. What’s happening in Afghanistan now is the left’s inability to understand that peace is a deal.
The Biden administration completely tossed the deal that President Trump’s administration had worked out, a deal that involved steps and conditions, that involved maintaining the ability to retaliate if the Taliban broke the deal. Instead, Biden abandoned not just our military bases but the weapons on those bases. The Biden administration’s non-plan to leave Afghanistan is a textbook case of why we must have enforceable deals to have peace.
Unilateral concessions rarely bring peace, not in our time, definitely not with honor.
Not recognizing that peace cannot be unilateral is why we still don’t have peace in the Middle East. It is why terrorism continues to grow there to threaten the rest of the world. It is why Afghanistan has fallen into chaos and why the United States has suddenly lost all credibility on the world stage.
Deals require both sides to honor them; deals require both sides to compromise. Deals require enforceable steps and enforceable actions. They require credible deterrence to not honoring the deal. By attempting to make peace unilaterally, with the United States simply assuming that everyone wants peace and all we have to do is leave, the left ensures that terrorists don’t have to honor any deal in order to get continued concessions and even payoffs.
The Biden administration’s jettisoning of the important parts of the deal the United States already had in place has ensured that the Taliban doesn’t have to honor any of it in order to confiscate military supplies, weapons and, probably soon, hostages.
If we want peace in the Middle East, we must recognize that we will only get peace if both sides treat it as a deal.
It reminds me of the people of Oric in Elliot S! Maggin’s wonderful Last Son of Krypton. They don’t make deals. They see deals as the “vulgarity” of other races.
Nothing, in fact, could be bought and sold. Gifts were exchanged a great deal—it was the primary occupation of most of the creatures on the planet.
The ability to make deals is one of the pre-requisites of civilization. Without an acknowledgment of deal-making, life is barbaric. Every exchange is likely to be rescinded as soon as one side feels like they can get away with it, which means most people’s “primary occupation” is, rather than building things or creating new industries, desperately trying not to lose ground.
The people of Oric made exchanges, but they didn’t make deals. Such non-deals are complicated, time-consuming, and easily broken. The result is not just that it takes far longer for civilization—and the peace that civilization brings—to advance2. The disparagement of deals is also part of what made Oric the best place for a galactic terrorist to begin his plans of ruling the small arm of the spiral galaxy we happen to live in. It’s what required a Superman to make things right when that terrorist expanded his operations to Earth.
It’s what is happening right now in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is what happens when you disparage deal-making, and its effects will continue threatening us long after the initial chaos ends. There is no Superman to intervene, and as long as the official U.S. position is to disparage deal-making, there is no real-world superpower either.
“Defund the police” is not a new position for the left. They just used to word it less blatantly.
↑From Superman and Luthor’s discussion of the differences between Earth’s deal-making civilization and other planets:
- Luthor: What’s the intelligent population of the planet Regulus-6?
- Superman: About 760 million.
- Luthor: And at what stage of scientific development are they?
- Superman: Last time I was there, someone had just figured out the steam turbine.
- Luthor: And it’ll be centuries before anyone comes up with the idea of putting it to use in transportation or trade.
- Superman: When were you on Regulus-6?
- Luthor: Remember when I broke out of jail last year and nobody knew where I was for three weeks?
Afghanistan
- Kabul ‘75: Terrified Afghan Civilians Cling to Departing US Jets, Then Plunge To Their Deaths as Their Grips Give Out: Ace at Ace of Spades HQ
- “For a city to ‘fall,’ it must actually attempt to resist the barbarians at the gates, right? Instead, Kabul just surrendered to the Taliban, in a deal that seems to have been made weeks ago.”
- Oh God, Not Like This: Stephen Green at Vodkapundit
- “Had President George W. Bush pulled us out when he damn well should have, in 2002 or ’03, the result would have been the same as it was on Sunday: a rapid takeover by the Taliban. Had President Barack Obama pulled us out after killing Osama bin Laden in 2012, same result. Had President Donald Trump pulled us out last year, yep, same thing. But it didn’t have to be like this…”
Biden administration
- Biden’s State Dept Halted Trump-Era Crisis Response Plan Aimed At Avoiding Benghazi-Style Evacuations: Raheem J. Kassam
- “The ‘Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau’—which was designed to handle medical, diplomatic, and logistical support concerning Americans overseas was paused by Antony Blinken’s State Department earlier this year. Notification was officially signed just months before the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan.” (Hat tip to Ace at Ace of Spades HQ)
- I ran Team Trump’s Afghan withdrawal—Biden’s attempt to blame us is just sad: Kash Patel at The New York Post
- “We handed our entire plan to the incoming Biden administration during the lengthy transition. The new team simply wasn’t interested.”
- Trump Administration’s Careful Afghanistan Withdrawal Plans Were Ignored By Biden Regime, Former Trump Aide Says: Debra Heine at American Greatness
- “The Trump plan included retaining control of Bagram Air Base until all Americans were withdrawn from Afghanistan. A large, sprawling site, Bagram has multiple airfields and other facilities that safely can handle significant amounts of traffic and also host a large population.”
- We’ll Pay Dearly for Biden’s Reckless Determination to Get Literally Everything Wrong: Stephen Green at Vodkapundit
- “The original deal with Trump was to keep Bagram in our hands until all American’s and equipment to be DRMO’d was gone. That is, conditions based. Biden’s Clown World gave up Bagram before any of that was done, and turned it over to the Taliban. Now we have both people and military equipment trapped in place.”
- Why was Bagram Air Base closed?: Douglas Herz at American Thinker
- “The Taliban respect American air power… U.S. air power in Afghanistan is projected from Bagram Air Base, located 40 miles north of Kabul. President Donald Trump had been using this strategic American asset as leverage during his negotiations with the Taliban.”
big picture
- Farewell to Bourgeois Kings: tinkzorg
- “The reason it shouldn’t have had those same connotations as the fall of the Berlin wall is because it was not only planned in advance and decided upon by the 45th president, not the 46th, but because almost everyone at this point wished for the war to just end. But it is how it has ended that has really thrown back the curtain and shown the world the rot festering beneath. The Soviet Union was dying in 1989, when it completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. It still managed to do so in an orderly fashion… The American withdrawal, by contrast, is a grotesque spectacle, laid bare to the eyes of the world…”
- Meltdown of a Superpower: Mark Steyn at Steyn Online
- “It is not just that General Milley and the Joint Buffoons of Staff cannot plan; they cannot execute. Compare the 2,500 Americans evacuated from Kabul over this last week to the 7,000 Americans and allies choppered out of Saigon in just nineteen hours. Can Milley do anything in nineteen hours other than call his tailor and order up his next row of ribbonry?”
- Superman: Last Son of Krypton
- “Last Son of Krypton” explores the responsibility of power and the side-effects of universal good deeds through the super-powered adventures of Superman.
- We Will Never Win Another Foreign War Again, Because The Left Has Set Us Into Permanent War With Ourselves: Ace at Ace of Spades HQ
- “By fomenting constant internal war, the Marxists have guaranteed that the US will no longer intervene against their foreign allies. They have insured that we can never win a war, and that we know that we can never win a foreign war.”
More Afghanistan
- Taliban revisionism, historical amnesia
- It might not be wrong to leave oppressive murderers in power in other countries. It is wrong to pretend that that isn’t what we’re doing. It is wrong to pretend that apathy in the face of oppression is a noble effort.
- Drug war undermining Afghan, Iraqi peace
- Prohibition continues to fund terrorist organizations, and we continue to pour money into maintaining prohibition. Prohibition is, as it has always been, one of the best and easiest means for criminal organizations to grow.
More civilization
- Money Changes Everything: Empowering the vicious
- Barbarism empowers the rich, the powerful, the vicious, the strong. Civilization empowers everyone else. Gun control and centralized economies, darlings of the progressive left, have empowered the vicious since the beginning of time. The beltway crowd prefers no competition from people free to barter, or free to defend themselves.
- Barbarism and the Global Village
- If we don’t protect our borders, we don’t protect our civilization. When Rome let the barbarians in, they became barbarians.
More peace
- World Chancelleries
- Compiled shortly after the devastation of World War One, World Chancelleries is a plea for peace at any cost. It also sheds light on pre-Second World War viewpoints of progressive outlets like the Chicago Daily News.