Foreign disaster makes domestic chaos feel even more apocalyptic (Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.)

I've been trying to understand why the reactions to the failure to defeat Afghanistan have been so much more doom-and-gloom, compared to every other failure to control foreign nations after WWII. It's puzzling since we've been out-of-control in Afghanistan for the entire duration of the invasion, 20 years. It's not like it's a revelation that we were never going to absorb Afghanistan into our sphere of influence. What's so special about the current climate?

First we need to review the history of failures that did not provoke an apocalyptic response in the American public's psyche. And after WWII, all we've done is fail.

Yet nobody remembers the failure to control North Korea in the late '40s and '50s as a monumental disaster, even though we leveled their entire country and still lost so badly that Eisenhower won on GTFO the war. We lost the Philippines at the same time, and no one recalls that as a dark milestone along the way of American imperial decline, even though it clearly was that.

Nobody remembers the repeated failures to control Central America during the '80s and '90s, when all of the leftist groups we had tried to suppress ended up in control of their national governments. Ditto for the failure to coup Chavez out of office in Venezuela in the 2000s.

Nobody remembers our failed attempt to take over the leading state of the former Yugoslavia as it was breaking up -- Serbia -- in the '90s.

Everyone does remember the failure to win Iraq, however it's not recalled in the same funereal tone as the ongoing reactions to the loss in Afghanistan. Awful mistake, what were we thinking, etc., but not as a sign of the apocalypse. Nobody remembers the failure to absorb Libya in the early 2010s, or the rest of the Arab Spring color revolutions of the time.

Nobody remembers in dark tones the Islamic Revolution in Iran from the late '70s. They do have bad memories of the hostages taken at the US embassy, the botched rescue mission, and how long it was drawn out. But that is a distinct event from the toppling of the US-backed Shah, who we had installed via coup in 1954, and the irrevocable loss of Iran as a member of the American imperial sphere of influence. If the new government had not taken American hostages, we would not remember that geopolitical death knell at all.

The only one of the never-ending string of failures post-WWII that has left indelible scars on the American psyche is the loss in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, in the late '60s and early '70s. Everyone knows the reference, countless works of popular culture have been made about it, it will never leave the public's awareness, and it will always carry a negative doomer connotation.

Aside from the sudden collapse of the American attempt to control Afghanistan, there was a similarly doom-and-gloom reaction by the elites to the American failure to oust Assad in Syria after their government invited Russia to turn the tide against the jihadists. All of those apocalyptic news cycles about the "Fall of Aleppo" (to the anti-jihadists), the horrors of the Syrian refugee crisis, and the like, during the late 2010s.

Also, the "what world are we living in?" feeling when Trump met with Kim Jong-un, became the first sitting US president to set foot on North Korean soil, and in general struck up a friendly tone with the North Korean leader (after the "fire and fury" outburst of 2017).

If China feels confident after witnessing our collapse in Afghanistan, and takes over Taiwan in the early 2020s, that will also provoke an apocalyptic response (both pro and anti).

So what's in common between Vietnam and Afghanistan? The domestic climate, namely one of civil breakdown, riots, and other forms of collective unrest. This climate runs in a cycle that peaks every 50 years, as modeled by Peter Turchin well ahead of the 2020 peak that he predicted a decade in advance.

Most recently was the Wokeness / Black Lives Matter / Antifa chaos of the late 2010s and early 2020s. Before that, the peak in the late '60s and early '70s (known afterward as The Sixties (TM)), centered on a radicalized Civil Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War activism, and student / youth rebellion.

Every failure of the American empire in between those peaks -- and they did nothing but lose -- was felt as a disappointment, a pressing concern at the time, and so on. But they did not have the apocalyptic feeling of the failed wars circa 1970 and circa 2020.

Ditto for the failures after WWII but before Vietnam, crucially the Korean War. At worst people remember the dark prospect of nuclear war surrounding the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in the early '60s, but they don't react that way to the overall loss of Cuba in the late '50s and afterward.

According to this view, we would have felt a similar apocalyptic reaction to our failed wars around 1920, but we were still an expansionist empire back then and never lost. Not to mention WWI was not fought on our soil, and we didn't enter until the end. Our other attempts to control countries through force succeeded, e.g. the occupation of Haiti from 1915-'34.

Over in Europe, however, there was absolutely a climate of apocalyptic reaction to the disasters of the late '10s and early '20s. Their empires had all been born in the early modern period and were at the end of their life-cycles. Nobody was going to win big over the others, since no one was still in an expansionist phase, all stagnating for decades at the time. So, their domestic civil unrest was amplified by a foreign policy loss, whereas our civil breakdown of the same time was not coupled with a lost war.

That may also explain why the South still feels such a bitter sting over losing the Civil War and getting Reconstruction imposed on them. That was somewhat of a "foreign policy" loss, given that they had seceded from the Union, but losing a big war no matter whether you consider it foreign or only quasi-foreign. That took place amidst a broader backdrop of civil unrest, riots, and the like, circa 1870, in line with the 50-year cycle.

If hypothetically, the North and South had fought a war around 1900, when there was no broader climate of civil unrest and state breakdown, it might not have left such a bitter taste in the mouth of the Southerners. No one likes losing, but they'll get over it eventually (Korea, Nicaragua, Serbia, Iraq, etc.). When it's coupled with, and amplified by, a climate of domestic unrest, it takes on a whole different meaning.

Why? Well, the foreign catastrophe would seem to only be further evidence that, domestically, things are going to hell in a handbasket. That it's the literal end of the world as we know it. And it is only going to make people undergoing domestic breakdown all the more worried if they get defeated in war at the same time, because the victors of that war could invade and control us, while we're bitterly torn apart internally. And typically a foreign invader isn't going to have our best interests at heart, so that will only accelerate the end of the world as we know it.

That's more or less what happened when the South lost the Civil War and then got occupied by the Union Army during Reconstruction. Luckily we're not surrounded by mighty empires right now, or we would really be going nuts. What if we didn't just fail to absorb Afghanistan, but it or one of its allies were a powerful or at least nascent empire, that decided to pounce on our foreign disaster and domestic breakdown, by invading and occupying us?

As our empire enters its death spiral, after decades of stagnation, that will only become more likely. Thankfully, though, we're not surrounded by powerful armies, and those that do exist would rather just kick us out of their sphere of influence (e.g., China kicking us out of Taiwan, or Russia kicking us out of the Middle East).

In the meantime, it does seem like "Afghanistan" is going to be the next "Vietnam" in the public's awareness. It is far from the only time when the supposedly strongest military in the world had to suddenly GTFO of some supposedly backwards shithole country after failing to absorb it into our sphere of influence. But it is the first failure since Vietnam to unfold during a climate of domestic breakdown, only adding to the sense of chaos and disintegration that we've felt in our daily local lives over the past few years.