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The problem was that, once the initial euphoria wore off, the public wasn’t much interested in it. Coverage in print media remained solid, but cable-news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off quickly, especially once

“America’s not at war” was a common refrain among the troops. “We’re at war. America’s at the mall.”

now those same Americans have the full withdrawal from Afghanistan they apparently want: Some 70 percent of the public supports a pullout.

Not that they care that intensely about it; as the foreign-policy scholar Stephen Biddle recently observed, the war is practically an afterthought in U.S. politics. “You would need an electron microscope to detect the effect of Afghanistan on any congressional race in the last decade,” Biddle said early this year. “It’s been invisible.”

What the public does care about, however, is using Afghanistan as raw material for cheap patriotism and partisan attacks (some right and some wrong, but few of them in good faith) on every president since 2001.

nor did they want to think about whether “draining the swamp” and modernizing and developing Afghanistan (which would mean a lot more than a few elections) was worth the cost and effort.

Maybe it would have been worth it. Or maybe such a project was impossible. We’ll never know for certain, because American political and military leaders only tried pieces of several strategies, never a coherent whole, mostly to keep the costs and casualties down and to keep the war off the front pages and away from a public that didn’t want to hear about it

Nor did Americans ever consider whether or when Afghanistan, as a source of terrorist threats to the U.S., had been effectively neutralized. Nothing is perfect, and risks are never zero. But there was no time at which we all decided that “close enough” was good enough, and that we’d rather come home than stay.

Biden’s policy, of course, is not that different from Trump’s, despite all the partisan howling about it from Republicans. As my colleague David Frum has put it: “For good or ill, the Biden policy on Afghanistan is the same as the Trump policy, only with less lying.”

But as comforting as it would be to blame Obama and Trump, we must look inward and admit that we told our elected leaders—of both parties—that they were facing a no-win political test. If they chose to leave, they would be cowards who abandoned Afghanistan. If they chose to stay, they were warmongers intent on pursuing “forever war.”

A serious people—the kind of people we once were—would have made serious choices, long before this current debacle was upon them. They would today be trying to learn something from nearly 2,500 dead service members and many more wounded

Biden was right, in the end, to bite the bullet and refuse to pass this conflict on to yet another president

His execution of this resolve, however, looks to be a tragic and shameful mess and will likely be a case study in policy schools for years to come. But there was no version of “Stop the forever war” that didn’t end with the fall of Kabul

before we move on, before we head back to the mall, before we resume posting memes, and before we return to bickering with each other about whether we should have to mask up at Starbuck’s, let us remember that this day came about for one reason, and one reason only.Because it is what we wanted.

How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path?

For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. The delegation wanted to extend into the international sphere the classic liberal notion of press freedom, which would prohibit governments from censoring the news and enshrine the rights of journalists to access sources and to dispatch the news across borders.

Carlos Romulo, the legendary Philippine diplomat and journalist who had uncovered Japanese atrocities in his country, went so far as to call freedom of information the “touchstone of all the freedoms to which the UN is consecrated.” World War II had been horrifying in scale and severity; information barriers were believed to have played a part. Japan’s and Germany’s bids for autarky had insulated their citizens from global currents, incubated aggressive nationalism, and, from the perspective of American policymakers, driven the world into war.

The answer, Sam Lebovic’s new book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization, convincingly argues, largely comes down to American policy in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

But when 600 or so journalists, media magnates, and diplomats arrived in Geneva in 1948 to draft the press freedom clauses for both the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, definitional difficulties abounded. Between what the U.S. meant by “freedom of information” and what the rest of the world needed lay a vast expanse.

By 1949, American films made up around half of the European and Asian markets, 62 percent of the African market, 64 percent of the South American market, and three-quarters of the Central American and Pacific markets.

Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. S.A. Brelvi of India called for the wealthier nations to equitably allocate the “supplies of physical facilities and technical equipment for the dissemination of information between all countries.” But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press

The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.

The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.

But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns. The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63 percent of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year. A materials shortage would hamper newspaper production across much of the world into at least the 1950s (though this did provide the fringe benefit of enabling political interference with the press: The CIA supplied Italian anti-Communist newspapers with newsprint in the lead-up to the 1948 election, while the U.S. occupation administration in Japan cut the allocation of newsprint to local Communist newspapers). The war had also laid low foreign news agencies—Germany’s Wolff and France’s Havas had disappeared entirely—and not a single news agency called the global south home. At the same time, America’s Associated Press and United Press International both had plans for global expansion,

The focus of A Righteous Smokescreen is broader. It is a study of both sides of the globalization ledger: As the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little

it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach.

Containment, Lebovic shows, wasn’t just a territorial strategy committed to holding back Soviet expansion into Europe and Asia. Rather, it began at the American border and it involved policing the flow of people and ideas that were potentially inimical to the American status quo

An Iron Curtain, to rejig Churchill’s famous speech about Soviet policies in Eastern Europe, had descended around the U.S.

can be seen in the American national security state’s efforts to block out “propaganda.”

Throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century, Americans had to seek government approval to purchase magazines, books, and even stamps from China, North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, and Vietnam.

An untold number of parcels—untold because for several years of the program they didn’t have to notify would-be recipients that the government had decided to destroy their mail—never arrived at their American destination.

even without direct state interference, American culture had inward-looking tendencies

Few of the films shown in American cinemas were foreign (largely a result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry began imposing on itself in 1934; code authorities prudishly disapproved of the sexual mores of European films)

Few television programs came from abroad (about 1 percent, in fact, in the early 1970s—compared to 12 percent in Britain and 84 percent in Guatemala)

Few newspapers subscribed to foreign news agencies. Even fewer had foreign correspondents. And very few pages in those papers were devoted to foreign affairs.

In 1910, nearly 15 percent of the American population had been born overseas, but by 1960, that portion shrank to only 5.4 percent. Similarly, bureaucrats in the burgeoning national security state kept a variety of radicals from entering and leaving the country. Since World War I, foreign anarchists, Communists, and others—ranging from German spies and saboteurs to Black internationalists—found the gate to the U.S. bolt-locked. Likewise, Americans whom the State Department identified as holding so-called “alien” beliefs were barred from the exits.

In-person contact with foreigners was limited, too, thanks to travel controls.

Two exhibitions, one in the U.S., the other in the Soviet Union: Yet neither artist could attend their own exhibition because of American border policies. The State Department had denied Picasso a visa back in 1950 on ideological grounds, and it refused to issue a passport to Kent because of his alleged sympathies for communism.

So-called “area restrictions” forbade all Americans from traveling to countries in the Communist bloc.

in the 1940s and ’50s, hundreds or even thousands of Americans—more precise data from the innards of the national security state is rather difficult to come by—were denied passports and many, many more never thought to apply for one in the first place, out of fear of what a background check might turn up.

(about half of all foreign scientists who sought to enter the U.S. in the early postwar years encountered visa difficulties).

how “actively engaged” was the U.S., really? The answer in Menand’s exploration of culture in the early Cold War is: very. Menand points to the rest of the world’s ravenous consumption of American entertainment as evidence, as well as how Americans “welcomed and adapted art, ideas, and entertainment from other countries”

as Louis Menand notes on the first page of his recent book, The Free World, it was an era in which “the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world.”

in Lebovic’s telling, this was a narrow stream. A lot of its contents were foreign imports that had already been thoroughly Americanized.

The flow of foreign culture and ideas into the U.S. was so limited that building bridges with the rest of the world became an important impulse of the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s,

The oldest of the books of the Hebrew Bible date to roughly 3,000 years ago; the pyramids of Egypt go back about 5,000 years. These were not prehumans or near relatives. They were like us: complex, organized, alive to meaning and living at a time beyond reckoning.

Ruth Tringham of the University of California, Berkeley, who has devoted years to humanizing the remnants of this city of the dim past by focusing on one skeleton, of a woman she has dubbed Dido. Dido replastered her walls regularly, kept her home swept clean, covered the floor in reed mats and decorated the place with art: clay figures of animals and stylized human females. In other words: much like us.

Catalhoyuk was founded by pioneers of urban living. “When the earliest construction began,” Newitz writes, “many people coming to live at Catalhoyuk were only a generation or two removed from nomadism.” It was brand-new, this fixed settlement thing, but it proved remarkably successful. By the time Dido was born, the city was about 600 years old

A thousand years ago, meanwhile, East St. Louis, Ill., was the site of an urban sanctuary that archaeologists today call Cahokia. With a population of 30,000, it was larger than Paris was at the time. Like Paris, with its Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame, it had distinguishing physical landmarks in the form of black earthen pyramids. It sprawled across both sides of the Mississippi River, beckoning visitors from all over the present-day Southern United States.

Cahokia seems to have been a place of spiritual pilgrimage, which drew diverse groups of Native American peoples, who spoke different languages and worshiped in various ways but came to share a reverence for this city and its ceremonial customs, which included human sacrifice. Its multiethnic, year-round population apparently serviced the religious pilgrims and, in the off-season, went about their own affairs.

Cahokia died not as a result of sudden catastrophe, like Pompeii, but seemingly because it lost its spiritual significance over time. Its people didn’t perish. The pilgrims just stopped coming; the local residents merged with other tribes. There is linguistic and other evidence that the Sioux are their descendants.

Newitz devotes space to debunking the popular notion that civilizations of the past “collapse” and become “lost,” pointing instead to indications of gradual change.

The operative lesson from the past, at least from this curated offering of former metropolises, seems to be that human culture is a plastic thing. Rather than lamenting the fragility of our current urban structures, we might do better figuring out how to bend and shape society for the future.

the effect of reading “Four Lost Cities” was more meditative. This is a long, long, long ride we are on. Much is beyond our control. Humanity trundles on.

But I was constantly confronted by the contradictions embedded in American leadership, the knowledge that our government arms autocrats while its rhetoric appeals to the dissidents trying to overthrow them or that our nation enforces rules — for the conduct of war, the resolution of disputes and the flow of commerce — while insisting that America be excused from following them when they become inconvenient.

He helped extend the war in Vietnam and expand it to Cambodia and Laos, where the United States rained down more bombs than it dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II. That bombing — often indiscriminately massacring civilians — did nothing to improve the terms on which the Vietnam War ended; if anything, it just indicated the lengths to which the United States would go to express its displeasure at losing.

For decades, he was a coveted guest at gatherings of statesmen and tycoons, perhaps because he could always provide an intellectual framework for why some people are powerful and justified in wielding power

Mr. Kissinger was fixated on credibility, the idea that America must impose a price on those who ignore our demands to shape the decisions of others in the future. It’s hard to see how the bombing of Laos, the coup in Chile or the killings in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) contributed to the outcome of the Cold War.

But Mr. Kissinger’s unsentimental view of global affairs allowed him to achieve consequential breakthroughs with autocratic countries closer to America’s weight class — a détente with the Soviet Union that reduced the escalatory momentum of the arms race and an opening to China that deepened the Sino-Soviet split, integrated the People’s Republic of China into the global order and prefaced Chinese reforms that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

From a strategic standpoint, Mr. Kissinger surely knew, being a superpower carried with it a cavernous margin of error that can be forgiven by history

Now history has come full circle. Around the world, we see a resurgence of autocracy and ethnonationalism, most acutely in Russia’s war against Ukraine

Just a few decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the same countries we’d bombed were seeking expanded trade with the United States. Bangladesh and East Timor are now independent nations that receive American assistance. Chile is governed by a millennial socialist whose minister of defense is Mr. Allende’s granddaughter.

Superpowers do what they must. The wheel of history turns. When and where you live determines whether you get crushed or lifted by it

But that worldview mistakes cynicism — or realism — for wisdom. The story, what it’s all about, matters. Ultimately, the Berlin Wall came down not because of chess moves made on the board of a great game but rather because people in the East wanted to live like the people in the West.

Economics, popular culture and social movements mattered. Despite all our flaws, we had a better system and story.

Credibility, after all, is not just about whether you punish an adversary to send a message to another; it’s also about whether you are what you say you are. No one can expect perfection in the affairs of state any more than in relations among human beings.

But the United States has paid a price for its hypocrisy, though it’s harder to measure than the outcome of a war or negotiation. Over the decades, our story about democracy has come to ring hollow to a growing number of people who can point to the places where our actions drained our words of meaning and “democracy” just sounded like an extension of American interests.

Similarly, our insistence on a rules-based international order has been ignored by strongmen who point to America’s sins to justify their own.

The generous defense is that Mr. Kissinger represented an ethos that saw the ends (the defeat of the Soviet Union and revolutionary Communism) as justifying the means. But for huge swaths of the world, this mind-set carried a brutal message that America has often conveyed to its own marginalized populations: We care about democracy for us, not for them.

In Gaza the United States has supported an Israeli military operation that has killed civilians at a pace that has once again suggested to much of the world that we are selective in our embrace of international laws and norms.

Meanwhile, at home, we see how democracy has become subordinate to the pursuit of power within a chunk of the Republican Party.

This is where cynicism can lead. Because when there is no higher aspiration, no story to give meaning to our actions, politics and geopolitics become merely a zero-sum game. In that kind of world, might makes right.

his is also a cautionary tale. As imperfect as we are, the United States needs our story to survive. It’s what holds together a multiracial democracy at home and differentiates us from Russia and China abroad.

That story insists that a child in Laos is equal in dignity and worth to our children and that the people of Chile have the same right of self-determination as we do. For the United States, that must be a part of national security. We forget that at our peril.