REUTERS/Toby Melville
The UK's defense secretary in a new interview suggested the US is no longer a superpower because it wasn't willing to stick it out in Afghanistan.
"It is obvious that Britain is not a superpower," Ben Wallace told the Spectator magazine.
And in comments alluding to the US and its withdrawal from Afghanistan, he added: "But a superpower that is also not prepared to stick at something isn't probably a superpower either. It is certainly not a global force, it's just a big power."
Wallace has been critical of the US withdrawal, blaming the mayhem enveloping it on former President Donald Trump. In February 2020, the Trump administration signed a deal with the Taliban to remove US troops by May 2021. The Biden administration largely upheld the deal, though it extended the timeline for the pullout.
"The die was cast when the deal was done by Donald Trump, if you want my observation," Wallace told "BBC Breakfast" last month.
"President Biden inherited a momentum, a momentum that had been given to the Taliban because they felt they had now won," Wallace added. "He'd also inherited a momentum of troop withdrawal from the international community, the US."
Wallace said the "seeds" of what the world witnessed in Afghanistan in recent weeks were planted "before President Biden took office."
And back in April, Wallace called Trump's deal with the Taliban "rotten."
"At the time of the Trump deal with, obviously, the Taliban, I felt that that was a mistake to have done it that way," Wallace told Sky News at the time. "That, we'll all, as an international community, probably pay the consequences of that."
"I think that deal that was done in Doha was a rotten deal,"Wallace added. "It told a Taliban that wasn't winning that they were winning, and it undermined the government of Afghanistan, and now we're in this position where the Taliban have clearly the momentum across the country."
The last US troops in Afghanistan were pulled out of the country on Monday after weeks of chaos surrounding evacuations from the airport in the capital city of Kabul. The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in mid-August, which came after the militants captured major cities at a blistering pace, caught the Biden administration off-guard. It led to harrowing scenes Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, with the thousands desperate to flee the country.
There was also an ISIS-K terror attack at the airport last Thursday that killed 13 US service members and 169 Afghans.
The US departed the country with a few hundred Americans left behind as well as thousands of Afghan allies. A US official on Wednesday said "the majority" of Afghan allies who applied for Special Immigrant Visas were not successfully evacuated.
President Joe Biden in a Tuesday speech from the White House touted the operation as an "extraordinary success."
