Let me summarize it without any sugarcoating

USSR had USA mired in Viet Nam

So USA created a Viet Nam for the Soviets by funding, arming, and training fighters against them (Afghan Arabs, Mujahideen) and drawing them into a costly occupation to drain their resources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

Afterwards, we went in and spent 20 years and trillions doing exactly what the Soviets were doing, but on our own dime.

This past decade, the CIA even did studies and confirmed that arming rebels hardly ever does anything good, but we continued to do it anyway (latest was in Syria).

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/us/politics/cia-study-say...

The million refugees that Lebanon accepted from Syria have now contributed to an economic crisis of epic proportions in that country, which FOX News is almost completely not covering — certainly silent relative to Venezuela — because it can’t blame socialists so it lacks the “moral” cautionary tale for its viewers.

For being hesitant to get involved in Syria, Obama’s adminstration was called “weak” and Republicans said they would “prefer Putin was our president” while the media and Congress chastized him for not “leading” in that region. The entire issue was framed around whether USA is the “indispensable nation” and Obama had to literally cite destroying peaceful alliances and making countries “barely hold together” in the face of rebels with American weaponry. Mind you, the point of citing all was NOT to highlight a negative for the people on the ground, but as evidence for domestic consumption to portray us as “leading” more than Russia in that region. As if our ego and “indispensability” was the most important thing. The framing is quite dystopian:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wib6cLJ99yY

Meanwhile, the very groups (including Al Nusra Front) creating the instability and civil war came to be as a result of our actions in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.

USA and Saudi Arabia funneled billions to rebel groups who later founded Al Qaieda, and simply left them there with no oversight. Hillary Clinton pretty much openly admitted it:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2f52cp

Then that created massive security problems for USA and Saudi governments, with some of the largest terrorist attacks on their own soil coming from the same Wahhabi groups they funded. So they started the war on terror, passed the PATRIOT act, and put in place a lot of mechanisms to erode civil liberties at home (indefinite detention etc.) torture nearby (enhanced interrogation etc.) and for invading and occupying countries thousands of miles away (including the Authorization to Use Military Force) which the executive branch of the US government alone pretty much used to go into many countries without Congress authorizing war, relying on that AUMF even a decade later in conflicts seemingly unrelated to 9/11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...

We put together some international coalitions, destabilized Iraq by ousting all Sunnis we had installed earlier, turned Libya into a total failed state by outsting the Gaddafi government, and the Wahhabi ideology spread to other countries via Boko Haram (Nigeria, for example), and ISIS (Iraq Syria and many neighboring countries).

People around the world are LESS SAFE because of this cold war era stuff, that has turned into War on Terror after the USSR the “evil empire” fell apart. And we still seem to prefer risking escalation to conflict rather than increasing diplomacy and cooperation with geopolitical enemies (Russia, Iran, North Korea depending on which president is in power). Back in 2016 Hillary Clinton was promising as President to escalate “no-fly zones” in Syria with the country with the closest nuclear to our own, as the nuclear clock was moved closer to midnight. Later on, after Russian hackers got involved in the US election, we opted for sanctions on Russia while rebuffing any cooperation on combating hacker groups in both countries. Trump, for his part, escalated a trade war with China.

PARTISANSHIP OVER SENSE OF PROPORTION

When our own people (four in a consulate in Benghazi, or one Kashoggi) are killed, it is front page news for weeks. Not so much when millions of people live in failed states where they and vulnerable to be behaeaded, killed or raped by gangs (Boko Haram, ISIS, Sinaloa cartel, Zetas etc.) to name just a few.

Inquiries into what went wrong in Benghazi are renewed up to a dozen times when the administration is the opposite party. But when the largest attack on American soil occured, the 9/11 commission was NOT renewed even once after it ran out of time. Three thousand people died in New York City. Yet the report of the 9/11 commission was redacted and we never found out why NORAD was diverted and why the army systematically lied to the commission. But apparently THAT was not even 10% as important to the Congress at the time, to renew THAT commission of inquiry, as Benghazi was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Commission

One major problem is the schitzophrenic nature of the changing administrations, which each try to undermine deals made by the other. In the past, the Republican administrations would scuttle variois diplomatic deals that the only governments in power offer (as they have with North Korea’s Agreed Framework, the Iran deal, etc.) considering it appeasement. The Republicans in power in the legislative branch even openly wrote a letter to Iran saying that our treaties and deals can’t be trusted! (Imagine if our politicians had been so candid when making treaties with the native American tribes.)

https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/387223/

And this rebuffing of diplomacy and compromise winds up being even more costly later. For example, Clinton already had negotiated a deal with Kim Jong Il, the previous leader of North Korea, to ease sanctions in exchange for not developing a nuke:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreed_Framework

The Republican administration after him called it “a bad deal” and “appeasement” and the deal was scuttled (sound familiar?) North Korea went on to get nukes, and even tried to proliferate the tech to Syria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Outside_the_Box

And we are currently keeping sanctions on Cuba for decades, despite them not developong any nuclear weapons or threatening us in any way.

So coming back to the Taliban taking over Afghanistan… we could have signed a peace treaty twenty years ago, but Rumsfeld refused. And now, after trillions spent and soldiers deployed for tweny years, we have lost Afghanistan to the Taliban: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-afghanistan-taliban-peace-...

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. How great is it that the world’s policeman seems to be acting insane?