Sleepwalking into disaster in Afghanistan

John C. Hulsman says that America’s declining status will ultimately doom its Afghan campaign. Obama must learn from Britain how best to manage the decline of an empire

I have just returned from two weeks talking to my friends in the administration and it is horrifyingly apparent that the Obama White House is sleepwalking toward disaster in Afghanistan. The President, reminded by his domestic advisers of the fate of another domestically ambitious president, LBJ, has hesitated before going all-in to rescue the mission in Kabul. He is right to take his time before risking his presidency on a war whose outcome is clearly uncertain. But by all accounts, pressured by both his generals and the neoconservative opposition, Obama is about to make the fateful decision to go ahead with a significant new deployment. And the problem is, as Bismarck put it, that when you draw the sword you roll the dice.