The Taliban have retaken control of Afghanistan. The quixotic, United States-led, 20-year nation-building project in Afghanistan is over. “I . . . don’t think anyone thought Afghanistan would turn so badly so quick,” a US official is quoted as saying recently.1 If that is true, then no one read my book, The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, which in fact predicted these events in detail six years ago.2 As I watched yet another foreign country imagined by the United States collapse and another foreign military built by the US Army disintegrate, ...

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I stopped by the post office on my way to the newsroom of the Washington, DC–based newspaper where I worked as an editorial writer. I wanted to mail a postcard of the World Trade Center, where I had just been for an interview with a foreign dignitary a few days before. “This no longer exists,” the postal employee said as he looked at the postcard I had shoved into his hand. “Word is, next plane is headed for the Capitol,” he said, cranking up the radio. A few short minutes later, I watched plumes of smoke from the Pentagon clog up the horizon as I drove ...

The 9/11 attacks’ effects on the United States and its foreign policies cannot be understated. The United States, in essence, lost its innocence that day and has never been the same. The attacks spurred changes in the way the United States handles national security, secures air transportation, and shares intelligence. The attacks also resulted in, directly and indirectly, two major armed conflicts that lasted the next two decades. These conflicts served as the catalyst for the most significant strategic shift in the US Army Reserve’s history—the organization’s transformation from ...

“Disaster Diplomacy” and the US Response to COVID-19 https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/ Dr. C. Anthony Pfaff This article was originally published by the Atlantic Council on April 15, 2020, and can be accessed at https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/disaster-diplomacy-and-the-us-response-to-covid-19/. In 1999, after decades of animosity driven by a complex history, Greek and Turkish relations positively transformed almost overnight. The catalyst for this transformation was Turkish provision of rescue personnel and other assistance to Athens, which had been struck by a devastating earthquake. Of course, those efforts would not have been transformative had the foreign ministers of both Greece and Turkey not already been considering ways to improve relations. But had it not been for the crisis, the effects of those efforts may never have been felt.