«These self-styled foreign-policy adults evidently failed to notice that America’s protracted negotiations with the Taliban had nothing to do with the Biden administration’s ending of that war with a skedaddle rather than a deal.

Russia’s Afghan war ended the same way, although it executed its withdrawal more brutally and more skillfully than America’s. The 1991 Iraq War ended with a cease-fire negotiated (badly, on the American part) at gunpoint; the 2003 war in surrender. One need not reach for Winston Churchill’s refusal to negotiate with Adolf Hitler or Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to negotiate with Jefferson Davis to realize that not all wars end in a diplomatically arranged peace.»

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/russia-ukraine-negotations-mark-milley/672198/

Unless I’m misremembering, I think Eliot Cohen was George Shultz’s assistant whom Congress wanted to charge with contempt at one point.

Good opinion piece, though.