American Credibility After Afghanistan – By Joshua D. Kertzer (Foreign Affairs) / Sept 2 2021
What the Withdrawal Really Means for Washington’s Reputation
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and sudden collapse of the government in Kabul have led critics of President Joe Biden to argue that American credibility has been dealt a staggering blow. Allies no longer trust that the United States will keep its commitments, they claim, and adversaries no longer fear the same thing. Writing in the Financial Times, the journalist Gideon Rachman proclaimed, “On Afghanistan, Biden’s credibility is now shot.” Officials who worked for President Donald Trump have piled on as well. His one-time national security adviser H. R. McMaster warned of “severe political consequences, in connection with our credibility with our allies and partners.” Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged that “this debacle will certainly harm America’s credibility with its friends and allies.”
These concerns about credibility are overblown. Credibility is whether others think you mean what you say in a given situation. It is context-specific; because circumstances can vary widely, credibility is judged on a case-by-case basis. How a state has behaved in the past is an important component of its credibility, but it is not the only one. The Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan will affect these calculations the next time the United States commits to an extraordinarily costly venture in a place not vital to the country’s core security interests, but it is unlikely to sabotage U.S. credibility writ large.
Credibility is different from reputation, however. If credibility is whether others think your deeds will match your words, reputation is what others think of you in the first place. On this count, the consequences of the U.S. withdrawal will likely be considerably greater. The pullout has been messy and chaotic: the Taliban took control of Afghanistan more quickly than the Biden administration had publicly predicted, and members of a regional branch of the Islamic State (or ISIS) launched a deadly bomb attack at the Kabul airport as Afghan and foreign citizens attempted to evacuate the country. Vivid photographs of Afghans clinging to U.S. military aircraft to avoid being left behind have circulated widely in the media. The damage these events and images have inflicted on the United States’ reputation—for competence, for a commitment to human rights, and for playing a leadership role in the international community—is real and likely to persist.
