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Western media, for the most part, has ignored a remarkable array of Chinese pilot products in industrial automation, executed primarily by Huawei, the world’s largest maker of telecommunications infrastructure and the target of a global suppression campaign by the United States. Fully automated factories, mines, ports, and warehouses already are in operation, and the first commercial autonomous taxi service is starting up in Beijing. Huawei officials say the company has 10,000 contracts for private 5G networks in China, including 6,000 in factories. Huawei’s cloud division has just launched a software platform designed to help Chinese businesses build proprietary AI systems using their own data.

There’s no indication that the Biden administration’s restrictions on high-end chips and the software and machines that make them have slowed China’s drive for dominance in the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution—the application of AI to manufacturing, mining, farming, and logistics. Although the fog of tech war makes it hard to evaluate China’s progress with precision, available information points to surprisingly rapid progress in China’s efforts to work around technology restrictions.

The Three Potential Outcomes

China’s single-minded goal is to lead the next wave of industrial technology. Former World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin, now a professor at Peking University and a councilor of China’s State Council, wrote in a 2021 book:

China’s 5G technology has become the world leader in the new industrial revolution. In the past few years, the US has repeated its old tricks and suppressed Chinese companies with groundless accusations, using all of its national resources. If the US succeeds in suppressing China by means of a blockade in the new industrial revolution, China will not be able to achieve its second centennial goal. How can China break through the US blockade? It can only do this by working hard to lead the new industrial revolution.

China is leading in the application of AI and high-speed broadband to business productivity. This can have one of three outcomes:

1. The United States and its allies make a concerted effort to leapfrog China and reclaim technological leadership in industry;

2. America and Europe adopt Chinese industrial technology and become followers, as China was a follower of developed markets a generation ago;

3. America continues to lose market share in industry and increases its import dependency, following the United Kingdom’s path of industrial decline.

The first option would require an industrial policy of some kind. America has turned towards such through the CHIPS Act, which has motivated $200 billion in projected investment in semiconductor production, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. How effective the research and development (R&D) component of the CHIPS Act will be remains to be seen. Whatever the merits and flaws of the legislation, building chip fabs in the United States is justifiable on national security grounds but does not necessarily contribute to the productivity of other industries. On the contrary: the same quality (and even better) chips can be imported at a lower cost from Taiwan and South Korea; TSMC reportedly will sell chips made in the United States at a price 30 percent higher than the same product made in Taiwan. And beyond chips, the United States has not begun to consider a broader industrial policy, let alone begin to put such a policy into place.

To some extent, the second option—adopting Chinese technology—already is taking hold in increments. As noted below, only American companies that already have large-scale manufacturing operations in China have adopted AI/5G applications, entirely in the auto and related sectors.

The third alternative, continued deindustrialization, is unacceptable.

China’s Chip Dominance and the Failure of U.S. Tech Controls

Western analysts have overestimated the impact of technology controls on China, and underestimated China’s ability to work around them. There is a great deal of confusion about the importance of the latest generation of computer chips, whose narrow gate width allows more transistors to be packed into a single chip. The newest iPhones run on chips with 13 billion transistors; for reference, the computer that took the Apollo capsule to the moon in 1969 had about 64,000. The faster speed and energy efficiency of the newest chips are indispensable for 5G handsets. The graphics processing units (GPUs) produced by Nvidia and AMD make tractable the enormous datasets required for large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT. But older chips, alone or working in parallel, can handle most business AI applications. More important than raw chip speed is the availability of the right data, the ability to transmit it quickly and conveniently, and the overall system architecture.

After the Trump administration banned sales of high-end U.S. semiconductors to Huawei in 2020, Western media predicted that China’s 5G rollout would grind to a halt. The Nikkei Asian Review wrote, for example: “Huawei Technologies and ZTE, China’s two largest telecoms equipment providers, have slowed down their 5G base station installation in the country, the Nikkei Asian Review has learned, a sign that Washington’s escalating efforts to curb Beijing's tech ambitions are having an effect.”

On the contrary: the number of 5G base stations in China doubled in 2021 to 1.43 million, and rose to 2.31 million in 2022, out of a world total of 3 million. Huawei simply built the 5G base stations with mature chips (with a 28-nanometer gate width rather than the 7-nanometer chips banned by Washington). Energy consumption was higher than optimal, but the system worked. Without access to the newer chips, Huawei’s handset business, the world’s largest in the second quarter of 2020, shrank drastically, because 5G handsets need powerful, energy-efficient processors.

Now it appears that Huawei can design its own high-end chips and manufacture them in China. Chinese research firms report that Huawei will reenter the 5G handset market in the second half of 2023. Reuters reported on July 12 that, “Huawei should be able to procure 5G chips domestically using its own advances in semiconductor design tools along with chipmaking from Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC), three third-party technology research firms covering China’s smartphone sector told Reuters.” Caixin Global Daily reported in March that Huawei had co-developed Electronic Design Automation software with local firms for older 14-nanometer chips. It isn't clear whether SMIC can make enough 7-nanometer chips to meet Huawei's requirements, or whether the reported new 5G chips use another technology, for example, “stacking” two 14-nanometer chips in a “chiplet” to achieve 7-nanometer performance.

Consumer technology like handsets, though, is a subplot. The decisive issue is business productivity. Huawei and other Chinese companies now offer cloud-based AI services along with training and consulting to propagate the new technology to thousands of firms.

Huawei Cloud CEO Zhang Pingan July 7 rolled out a business-centered AI system before the 6th World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, with a dismissive nod to ChatGPT: “The Pangu model does not compose poetry, nor does it have time to compose poetry, because its job is to go deep into all walks of life, and help AI add value to all walks of life.” Unlike OpenAI’s LLM, Huawei’s entry will train AI systems for customers in manufacturing, pharmaceutical R&D, mining, railways, finance, and other industries, Zhang said. The platform is powered by Huawei’s own Kunpeng and Ascend AI accelerator chips. Like the American LLMs, Pangu writes computer code, according to Huawei. But “it was designed for industry, and will be dedicated to industry,” Zhang added.

Most of these are embryonic, but with the Pangu system, Huawei Cloud offers its customers “large-scale industry development kits. Through secondary training on customer-owned data, customers can have their own exclusive industry large models,” the company said.

Zhang Pingan added that Huawei has built an AI cloud platform based on its own Kunpeng and Ascend processors, supporting a suite of AI software. Although “Nvidia’s V100 and A100 GPUs remain the most popular GPUs for training Chinese large-scale models,” a recent study notes, “Huawei used its own Ascend 910 processors” to train the Pangu model. Second, China appears able to produce proprietary AI chips like Ascend, although U.S. sanctions continue to prevent it from fabricating its Kirin smartphone chipset in Taiwan. Chinese chipmakers are keeping their cards close to their vests about fabrication capability.

The overriding issue is that industrial systems rarely require the complexity and computing power that ChatGPT applies to composing school essays and Valentine’s Day poems. China can’t import the fastest and most efficient chips with gateways of 7 nanometers or less, let alone the equipment to manufacture them. But it can make 7-nanometer chips with a costlier process, or approximate the performance of the fastest chip by stacking older chips into so-called chiplets, or jerry-rig older chips to approximate the performance of newer ones through clever system architecture.

Think of the railroad in the nineteenth century, which made it profitable to grow large crops far from water transport. This unleashed ripple effects that made the U.S. economy the world’s largest. Whether the train traveled at 40 or 80 miles an hour made a small difference to its impact on the broader economy—what mattered is that the distance could be crossed. The combination of AI and high-speed broadband creates a data highway that will transform the way most businesses run.

China Is Pushing Ahead on Tech, and It Shows

The United States and China approach AI differently. The trillion-dollar valuations of the great American technology companies mainly come from consumer entertainment. China, as Huawei’s Zhang said, has no time for poetry. Rather than guess when the machines will become sentient or when AI will replace human beings, China has focused on the automation of drudge work: inspecting parts on a factory conveyor belt, checking the bins near the coal face for foreign objects, detecting anomalies in machines, picking containers out of ships and placing them on autonomous trucks, and so forth.

China’s plan to assert leadership in the Fourth Industrial Revolution—the application of AI to production, logistics, and services—appears to be on track.

Except for large manufacturers who already maintain large-scale operations in China, American manufacturers have shown little commitment to Fourth Industrial Revolution technology. To my knowledge, the only U.S. manufacturing firms that have installed private 5G networks to support factory automation are General Motors (which made 2.3 million cars in China in 2022), Ford (which made 500,000 cars in China in 2022), and John Deere (which rolled its 70,000th Chinese-made tractor in February). These firms have joint ventures with Chinese manufacturers and can be considered auxiliaries of Chinese industry.

The trouble is that what is left of American manufacturing after the great decline of the 2000s often does not have the scale to realize the benefits of AI applications. The installation of private 5G networks does not coincide completely with AI applications; wifi and fiber optic cables can transmit information just as well in certain factory environments. But 5G has obvious advantages over cable-based communications in environments with fast-moving heavy machinery, especially in robot-intensive manufacturing, mines, ports, and warehouses.

According to a count by the European 5G Observatory, about sixty factories, ports, and airports have built private 5G networks, prominently including automakers like Volkswagen, Porsche, Saab, and Toyota. Again, most of the manufacturing and transport firms applying this Industry 4.0 technology have a major presence in China.

As a Western consumer technology, 5G has been a disappointment. As the Wall Street Journal headlined a January 2023 report: “It’s Not Just You: 5G is a Big Letdown.” With download speeds of about 150 mbps per second, moreover, American 5G networks are half as fast as China’s. And some U.S. 5G networks have higher latency than the 4G networks that preceded them, making them less useful for applications like autonomous vehicles. Reduced spending on 5G infrastructure pushed Ericsson into a loss during the second quarter of 2023.

China, by contrast, views 5G as an industrial technology, and expects 5G2B (5G to business) to drive sales. The relative stock price performance of Western vs. Chinese companies contains some forward-looking information. Huawei, the largest provider of telecom infrastructure, is a private (employee-owned company) and has no listed stock price, so no insight can be gleaned there. But China’s number two telecom company, ZTE, provides a rough proxy for Huawei. Its stock price has doubled over the past five years, while the second and third-ranked global firms, Ericsson and Nokia, have lost about 30 percent of their market value (price performance calculated in U.S. dollars). That is noteworthy considering that the broad European market rose 23 percent between July 2018 and July 2023 while the Chinese market (CSI 300) is almost unchanged. American pressure has excluded the Chinese firms from the U.S. market and many European markets as well, but the Chinese firms dominate their home market and most of the Global South.

China thus has a distinct advantage in 5G broadband, a critical element in business automation. Transmitting large amounts of data (for example, thousands of photos of a factory conveyor belt per minute or real-time video of underground mining operations) is more of a bottleneck than chip speed. Last month, China was the first country to allocate spectrum in the 6GHZ band to 5G and 6G services, to promote “global or regional division of 5G/6G spectrum resources” and provide the groundwork to “promote mobile communications and industrial developments at home.”

U.S. spectrum allocation favors wifi over mobile broadband, allocating virtually all of the 6GHz band to “unlicensed use,” that is, Wi-Fi. As the industry website Lightreading observed, “the ruling represented a win for the cable industry and other Wi-Fi proponents ranging from Apple to Cisco. But for 5G network operators – which continue to argue they don’t have enough spectrum for high-bandwidth services like fixed wireless – the FCC’s ruling came as a setback.”

In other words, U.S. policies continue to favor consumer-oriented Big Tech over industry applications.

Telecom infrastructure and related applications have also buoyed China’s exports to the Global South, which have risen 50 percent since 2019 in ASEAN, nearly 100 percent in Brazil, and 250 percent in Turkey. Broadband has a transformational impact on countries with a high proportion of informal employment. It puts payment systems onto smartphones and opens banking and credit to previously marginalized people, and provides information and sales opportunities to entrepreneurs. It reduces the cost of delivery of services, including education and healthcare, and fosters new industries.

Because of all of these efforts, China in 2023 became the world’s leader in the largest manufacturing industry, automobiles, with $3 billion in global sales. High-tech manufacturing and economies of scale are likely to increase China’s edge. In 1908, Henry Ford defined an era of mass ownership of personal cars by pricing the Model T at $800, then America’s per capita GDP. China now produces electric vehicles with adequate range and power at around $11,000, just below China’s per capita GDP. China’s cheap but full-featured electric cars may dominate the low end of Europe’s auto market. Once China’s best-selling brand, Volkswagen’s market share has fallen, with annual sales down to 3.2 million units in 2022 from 4.2 million before the coronavirus pandemic. The benefits of 5G2B and artificial intelligence are thus tangible and visible: Cheaper industrial products, more efficient ports, deployment of automated vehicles, and so forth.

Meanwhile, in the West, how LLMs will drive profitability is less clear. Generative AI may find more lucrative uses in the future, especially in the automation of software, but how the existing technology justifies the trillions of dollars of additional equity valuation inspired by ChatGPT remains something of a mystery. OpenAI’s ChatGPT model meanwhile appears to have peaked as an object of popular curiosity, with a 10 percent decline in website visits in June.

As for present usage and estimates, the picture is sanguine. An Asia Times study noted that replacing every help desk employee in the United States with a chatbot would save a mere $1.6 billion a year, while replacing the bottom 25 percent of computer programmers by earnings would save just $2.5 billion.

Why Have U.S. Tech Sanctions Failed?

For several reasons, U.S. sanctions are ineffective in constraining AI development in China.

First, as noted, China’s home designs are competitive in industry applications, which typically require less computing power than LLMs and may already offer performance equivalent to the Nvidia and AMD offerings

Second, China’s SMIC can produce 7-nanometer chips, albeit with much higher costs and lower efficiency. It can certainly meet the requirements of China's military for 7-nanometer chips. These are probably quite small; existing military systems overwhelmingly use older chips, which are more robust and easier to harden, as the RAND Corporation explained in a 2022 study.

Third, Nvidia’s fastest AI chips are readily available in China through third-party sellers although at higher prices. Slower versions designed by Nvidia to stay within U.S. guidelines are still sold to China, although Washington reportedly may ban these as well.

Stopping Chinese firms from using American AI computing power via cloud services won’t accomplish much, according to US industry leaders. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was asked by CNBC July 6: “One of the things the administration has floated is the idea that Chinese companies wouldn’t have access to kind of AI-grade cloud computing resources through hyper scalers, through cloud providers, like Amazon. Do you have a sense of how that would affect Amazon if Chinese companies couldn’t access AI scale computing on [Amazon Web Services]?” Jassy replied: “Well, the reality is that there are some very strong cloud providers who are Chinese cloud providers in China. So Chinese companies in China are going to have access to AI capabilities, whether they come from U.S. companies, European companies, or Chinese companies.”

Compete Seriously or Perish

U.S. limits on technology exports to China do not appear to have stopped or even slowed the rollout of the AI applications that have the greatest strategic impact. At the same time, restrictions on sales to China reduce the revenues of U.S. semiconductor companies and endanger their R&D budgets. In December 2019, the Defense Department vetoed a Trump administration plan to ban the export of high-end chips to Huawei on the grounds that the loss of Huawei as a customer would impinge on chipmakers’ ability to sustain R&D. President Donald Trump initially backed the Pentagon position, but reversed this later in 2020 after the coronavirus epidemic hit with full force.

The semiconductor industry is unique in the scale of its R&D requirements. It budgeted $200 billion for R&D on $600 billion in 2021 sales (the actual total will be $160 billion or less due to market softness). No other industry devotes a third of revenue to R&D. The world’s largest industry, automobiles, spends about one-fourteenth of its revenue in R&D. For companies like Qualcomm, which earns a third of its revenue in China, or Nvidia, which earns one-fifth of revenue, the support available under the CHIPS act will not compensate for revenues lost due to federal regulation. These companies are lobbying the Biden administration to relax controls on China, and they have a good case—in fact, the same case the Pentagon made in December 2019.

Restrictions on technology exports to China at best are a stopgap. Eventually, China, which graduates more engineers each year than the rest of the world combined, will develop its own substitutes, as ASML, the world’s premier maker of chip lithography equipment, avers. Even as a stopgap, though, the controls are failing. They impose high costs on China in several ways but have not impeded the Fourth Industrial Revolution. On the contrary: the limited adoption of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies by American industry is concentrated in firms that have major commitments to China.

Whatever its merits, the CHIPS Act is not a substitute for the kind of effort the United States made under the Apollo program, or during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when DARPA funded the invention of the digital economy. In 1983 the United States devoted 1.2 percent of GDP and 5 percent of the U.S. budget to federal R&D. Today we spend only 0.6 percent of GDP on federal R&D and barely 2 percent of the federal budget.

To maintain a technological edge over China, we will have to spend an additional several hundred billions of dollars, train a highly-skilled workforce, educate or import more scientists and engineers, and provide broader incentives to manufacturing. It is simply too late to try to suppress China. That is no longer within our power. What remains within our power is to restore American pre-eminence.

David P. Goldman is Deputy Editor of Asia Times and a Washington Fellow of the Claremont Institute. He is the author of You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, How America Can Lose the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and Restoring American Manufacturing: A Practical Guide.

Image: Shutterstock.

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This summer, the bipartisan, congressionally mandated Afghanistan War Commission (AWC) will kick off a four-year inquiry into the origins, conduct, and conclusion of America’s war in Afghanistan. You should care about this Commission, and you should care about the report they are going to issue. If the AWC produces a quality report—fair, comprehensive, evidence-based—it will guide and inform the next generation of U.S. foreign and security policy.

The AWC presents a rare opportunity: America’s democratic institutions roused to ask pointed questions of the men and women charged with our country’s national security. The Church Committee of the 1970s, and more recently the 9/11 Commission, suggest these types of congressionally-mandated inquiries happen once a generation. A British historian once joked that Britons acquired their empire in a fit of absentmindedness. That is an astute observation. For anyone, myself included, who has patiently explained to friends, family, the pharmacist, the grocer, and others that yes, we really were still in Afghanistan more than two decades after the initial invasion, it certainly rings true. As a nation, we obligated the authorizations and signed the checks without giving much thought about what it is we were authorizing, what we were paying for, or why.

The AWC’s report could ultimately prove to be a consequential moment for the United States. If we get a quality report; if the American people are allowed to read it and consider its meaning and implications for the whole nation, and not just this or that slice of America; and if the report ultimately informs real reforms; it will be significant. More importantly, if you’re looking for proof that democracy in America still works, it counts for something that, after two decades of war, the U.S. government has appointed capable, public-spirited people to investigate and explain clearly and openly what went down in Afghanistan. Exploring and identifying exactly what happened, however, will require AWC members to ask pointed questions ranging the entire breadth of America’s longest war.

Who Was Actually in Charge?

The first question the AWC will need to answer is: how was the war authorized? Authorities are the tendons of our national security. They are the invisible thread that connects the fire team on the ground to the American people back home, linking the budgetary and lawmaking authority of the legislative branch to the operational authority of the executive. Authorities matter.

There are different kinds of authorities and a key question in Afghanistan is: what took place under military authorities, civilian authorities, and intelligence authorities? In a war, authority is usually concentrated in the hands of a commander who, by literal definition, commands the war effort. The commander oversees the theater of conflict, and in this capacity works with Washington to set and implement the president’s strategy. A clear chain of command means clear responsibilities, and responsibility enables the American people to hold commanders accountable for failures and recognize them for their successes. That is the theory.

Yet well before the first American boots hit the ground, Afghanistan defied the logic of normal military operations. America’s involvement in the country before 2001 was driven primarily by the U.S. intelligence community (IC), and the IC took the lead in the discussions about going into Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 Al Qaeda attacks. This, in effect, placed the U.S. Central Command in an apparently subordinate role to the IC. In 2004, for instance, while many former Taliban headed to Pakistan to join the armed opposition to the U.S.-backed Afghan government led by then president Hamid Karzai, the U.S. forces commander on the ground, Lieutenant General David Barno, drafted policies to avoid harm to civilians. But, according to a comprehensive history of the war in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Barno did not command all of the special operations forces conducting the operations in Afghanistan. Numerous books, studies, memoirs, and newspaper reports suggest that, in Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence officers exercised significant autonomy. So then, who was in charge?

A related question is this: what is the appropriate role of intelligence in policy decisionmaking? In theory, intelligence is the function of gathering and analyzing information to inform military and policy decisions. A good AWC report on Afghanistan should ask whether that happened and whether we have—whether we need—updated guardrails to further separate the IC from the U.S. military and policy decision making process.

At the same time, if intelligence officers were in the drivers’ seat, the AWC should ask what impact they had on the core intelligence mission to generate objective, actionable information. Did confusion between the intelligence and policy process have an impact on intelligence? For example, the U.S. IC’s assessment of the durability of Ashraf Ghani’s government following a full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan very likely was a critical component of U.S. war and policy planning efforts. Unfortunately, this assessment appears to have been inaccurate. The question is why.

What Were Our War Aims?

The United States sent its forces to Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda and bring Osama bin Laden to justice in the wake of 9/11. The moment American forces swept the Taliban from power—and the U.S. administration at the time refused to consider any post-war power structure that included the Taliban—the United States also became engaged in nation-building, whether America’s leaders liked it or not. Yet, it wasn’t really until 2005 that the George W. Bush administration started defining and funding a post-war Afghanistan. By then, however, the Taliban had already launched its insurgency in earnest. As that and subsequent U.S. administrations defined what post-war Afghanistan should look like, they became more and more committed to an idealized vision for developing a social democracy in one of the poorest countries in the world. Why did U.S. objectives seem to grow and then balloon even as it became clearer and clearer to informed observers that lasting, outright victory in Afghanistan was becoming less and less possible?

One excellent study has charted the U.S. tendency over the years to escalate its commitment to Afghanistan in the face of growing adversity. In democratic politics, as in bureaucratic politics, doubling down often cements authority, while flipflopping is the kiss of death. Added to that, Afghanistan was so far removed from day-to-day politics back home that the costs of staying the course in Afghanistan never seemed as bad as the risk that cutting U.S. losses could lead to a major disaster, perhaps including the reemergence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. This logic seems to have driven policy makers from U.S. presidents to senior officials on the ground, apparently motivating them to respond to chronic American underperformance in Afghanistan by chronically overpromising future results that never materialized.

The proliferation of outsized objectives in Afghanistan was often matched by the proliferation of international actors. Beyond Washington and Kabul, funding appeals were met, policies set, and decisions taken by NATO in Brussels and other international organizations and actors in other foreign capitals, which combined created a dense web of overly ambitious commitments to Afghanistan. Did the many, overlapping lines of effort impede coherent planning or complicate U.S. efforts to set and follow its own established operational priorities? It is worth the AWC asking whether the internationalization of development and security assistance efforts in Afghanistan contributed to a mismatch between ends and means, between promises and what was achievable on the ground.

Post-conflict reconstruction is a tremendous task under the best of circumstances. In Afghanistan, the AWC should ask how and why a major, international peacebuilding effort coincided with a major counterinsurgency campaign to secure Afghan population centers and prop-up the then Afghan government. Fortunately, the AWC will have at its disposal the voluminous records of the Department of Defense’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which documented and continues to document the challenges and pitfalls of reconstructing that country in the midst of a war. Yet SIGAR’s reports are necessarily limited to U.S. governance and U.S. expenditure, which comprise only part of the story. The same question that applied to military command also applies to nation building: who was in charge, and what was the strategy?

The AWC might also consider the wider impact of the contradiction between U.S. reconstruction and war efforts in Afghanistan. U.S. military forces and civilian personnel in Afghanistan typically relied heavily on elite, English-speaking Afghans, familiar with the language of Western governments and donors, to tell them what was going on. What did it mean for ordinary Afghans to experience both the high-flying rhetoric of social reconstruction and the horrors of insurgency and counterinsurgency? What did it mean for hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans, who responded to the call to defend democracy overseas?

Making Peace

Just as Americans need to understand why U.S. leaders found it so hard to define their objectives for the war, so too should we ask why the United States found it so difficult to find a path to a working and sustainable peace settlement in Afghanistan. This is not a purely historical consideration. In an era of great power competition, the United States needs to be able to speak with its enemies, and needs to be capable of defining limited, achievable objectives amid conflict. This capacity is critical to America’s ability to limit, control, and halt conflict.

There is general agreement among many observers that the Taliban attempted to engage the United States between 2002 and 2005; U.S. officials, however, did not seriously consider talking to the Taliban or initiate Washington’s outreach efforts in earnest until 2010. The U.S. troop surge was well underway and could have provided an important bargaining chip in negotiations, but the surge also reflected years of America’s fighting and sacrifice in Afghanistan. By 2010, interests and suspicions were deeply entrenched on both sides. There were no substantive negotiations. Instead, for years after 2010, a cycle of preconditions and talks about talks wore on. The available evidence suggests there was no effort to link U.S. policy in Afghanistan—the troop surge, for instance, or the drawdown that followed—to any viable process or framework for peace talks.

Why did it take the better part of a decade of war to think about diplomatic engagement? Why did it take another decade to conclude a three-page agreement with the Taliban? Wars cannot be limited in scope and duration—they cannot end—without diplomacy. The commitment to dialogue, dealmaking and compromise is a necessary component of the use of force. Benjamin Franklin’s dictum, that a bad peace beats a good war, recognized that even a peace based on a three-page agreement is when the hard work of development and engagement and changing minds can truly begin.

Speaking with our enemies is hard. And yet the greatest risk to diplomats is not the enemy, but the perpetual fear their own country will condemn them—or worse—for seeking something less than total victory somewhere other than the field of battle. What is achievable is not always just; what is workable is not always reasonable; but we are always just one more offensive away from ideal conditions.

Thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later, the American people deserve to understand why it was so much easier to prolong a fruitless war than to seek a functional peace. Of all the questions the AWC could attempt to answer, this is the most profound. Understanding how and why and when to start or control or stop a fight is the most essential function of statecraft. The Afghanistan War Commission offers America a chance, unique for our generation, to ask whether the U.S. government could have done a better job in Afghanistan and could do a better job in the future of navigating the perils of the very dangerous world we now face. We owe it to ourselves and future generations alike to get this right.

Andrew Baker has over a decade of experience in the public sector and holds a DPhil in International Relations from Oxford University.

The views expressed herein are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government.

Earlier this week, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu received an invitation from the White House to “probably” meet with President Joe Biden, before the end of the year, somewhere. Meanwhile, Yitzhak Herzog, Israel’s non-partisan president who has limited power, spent Tuesday meeting with Biden in the Oval Office before addressing a joint session of Congress on Wednesday to mark Israel’s seventy-fifth anniversary.

Herzog’s invitation to Washington, arriving before one for Netanyahu, should be viewed by Jerusalem as a reflection of the United States’ deep commitment to Israel, but a recognition that its current policies are out of sync with Washington’s. Having different policies is unarguably Israel’s sovereign right, and Netanyahu’s as its leader. But if those differences become the default, it can threaten to permanently alter the nature of the relationship.

The right approach to Iran, for example, always the dominant foreign policy concern for Jerusalem, continues to divide Israel and the United States; even as strong bilateral communication and meaningful cooperation on the topic has helped mitigate public disagreements, as happened in 2015 over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But even excellent communication is unlikely to mitigate a public, and angry, Israeli reaction if the Biden administration agrees to even a limited agreement with Tehran. 

As communication has improved on Iran, it conversely seems to have fallen off when it comes to other major foreign policy challenges. The proposed expansion of settlements and settler-Palestinian violence is slowing the pace of progress between Abraham Accords members, most recently demonstrated by Morocco’s decision to cancel the latest Negev Forum. The accords, however, are something the United States places great weight on; a new position was just created at the State Department dedicated to the issue.

Further abroad, Netanyahu’s decision to visit China later this year is prime to compound misalignment since it seems to be less about a genuine bilateral China-Israel relationship and more about a way to needle the United States and compel it to increase its regional involvement.

But Israel is neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE, both of which are trying to employ a strategy of hedging between the United States and China. As Mark Dubowitz, a longtime ally of the Israeli Right and CEO of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said on Twitter, “If Netanyahu thinks he can … play the US and China off each other, he better hope that Israel becomes a major oil producer, returns the $38 billion in US military aid and no longer requires American support at the UN.” 

The announcement over Netanyahu’s decision to visit Beijing follows U.S. frustration with the Israeli leader for his refusal last winter to provide Ukraine with HAWK anti-aircraft missiles, currently sitting in storage. Israel has long been concerned that providing weapons to Ukraine could lead them to fall into the wrong hands and be reverse engineered, threatening Israel’s security. Moreover, Jerusalem was concerned that transferring them to Ukraine would lead Russia to impede Israel’s freedom of action to strike Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria, where Russia still operates.

But by denying the request, Netanyahu essentially dismissed out of hand the United States’ biggest near-term global priority in exchange for hoping Russian president Vladimir Putin doesn’t interfere with Israel’s interdiction strikes; all while Russia’s military relationship with Iran grows closer.

And in Israel itself, civil unrest will probably come to a peak over the next two weeks as legislation to curtail the power of the Israeli Supreme Court as an independent check on the legislature advances.

I happen to be in Israel this week for a conference. On Saturday evening, I wandered from my hotel down to Kaplan Street to observe the judicial reform protests in person. What I saw was tens of thousands of overwhelmingly diverse, patriotic, and scared Israelis, fearful that the judicial reforms will fundamentally undermine, in their view, Israel’s democracy.

While a strong U.S.-Israel relationship will, and should, continue no matter what happens with the legislation, there is no way to minimize or avoid that democracy is a shared, core, and fundamental tenet of the U.S.-Israel relationship; even if both of ours are imperfect works in progress.

The United States engages and has strong relationships with lots of countries that don’t share its ethos for democracy and freedom. But those relationships all come with an invisible ceiling.

On Tuesday, Biden told New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that there is a need, “to seek the broadest possible consensus,” when it comes to the judicial reforms; a follow-up to his comments in March when he said, a “compromise” is needed. Back in March Netanyahu responded to those comments with seeming annoyance, noting that Israel is a “sovereign country” and rejects “pressure from abroad.” But the President then, like now, was not seeking to interfere in Israel’s domestic politics. Rather, he was implicitly reflecting his own Zionism; almost certainly concerned that if Israel no longer meaningfully shares the bedrock principle of democracy, over time, the US-Israel relationship will transform from one with few limits, into a much narrower one with a ceiling.

And that is the challenge of misalignment as a whole. Allies can always agree to disagree on policies. But when they begin to be out of sync on too many of them, it can threaten to alter the contours of the broader relationship, no matter how strong. Such a policy chasm is not going to jeopardize the U.S.-Israel relationship today; but if it continues and widens, it can in the future. 

At some point this year, Biden will probably meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu. How it goes will depend on whether or not the US and Israel are better aligned. 

Jonathan Panikoff is the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council and the former deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East.

The views expressed are the author’s and do not imply endorsement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Intelligence Community, or any other U.S. government agency.

Image: Shutterstock.