“If you ever feel useless, just remember the USA took 4 presidents, thousands of lives, a trillion dollars and 20 years to replace the Taliban with the Taliban”. One of the jokes reported by the Arab news channel, Al Jazeera last week. To say that there has been Schadenfreude in the Middle East over the chaotic defenestration of American forces from Afghanistan would be an understatement. America's many enemies across the world have been dancing for joy at the Great Satan's humiliation.

The celebration was echoed in the UK by the former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Stop the War Coalition. They claimed vindication last week in their own 20 years of opposition to “America's wars”. It's hard to disagree. US involvement in foreign wars, not just in Afghanistan but in Iraq, Syria, Libya, usually with British support, has been an unmitigated disaster. The Project for a New American Century, which was the Neoconservative grand plan for spreading liberal democracy across the Middle East, has ended up two decades on with an addled President, blaming the Afghans for not being willing to fight on the very day that the US was skedaddling with its tail between its legs.

The Neoconservative project, which actually began on the right of the US Democratic Party, was premised on the West's victory in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. After the Berlin Wall fell, and the communist regime liquidated itself, it seemed as if the future was all American. Everyone wanted a piece of the Stars and Stripes. Soft power, in the form of rock music, McDonalds and Hollywood had encircled the globe. US military might was unchallengeable, it seemed, with its satellites, smart weapons and special forces who took out Osama Bin Laden in his own home in 2011. Now, in 2021, the United States has been defeated by peasant army with no air support, no armour, no eyes-in-the-sky, relying on hand-me-down weapons and amateur road-side bombs.

Liberal Interventionism, as it was known in the UK, has also been a dismal failure. Tony Blair has been conspicuous by his silence in the past week. Anything he says will simply evoke memories of George W. Bush, non-existent weapons of mass destruction and the needless deaths of British servicemen and women in the Iraq War. After the apparently successful military operations in Sierra Leone and Kosovo in the 1990s, the Labour PM believed that humanitarian objectives could be achieved through military means. Not only could, should. It was the duty of the West, as Mr Blair put it, not to stand idly by when people were being oppressed by murderous dictators like Saddam Hussein. It didn't end well.

The Iraq invasion in 2003 led to a deadly civil war, a million civilian casualties, the rise of Islamic State and left Iraq a failed state plagued by war lords and jihadists. A country with prodigious oil wealth can't even supply electricity to its cities. The chief power broker in Iraq today is the Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a jihadi militant the Americans spent years trying to assassinate. He reportedly negotiated the final US military withdrawal with Joe Biden. He has promised to end all US combat missions in Iraq by the end of 2021. Hopefully this time without refugees clinging to the undercarriage of US transport planes.

Afghanistan was always a side-show to the Iraq war, having begun in 2001 more as a policing operation to root out al Qaeda and bomb Osama Bin Laden, unsuccessfully, in Tora Bora. But the manner in which the Taliban returned has shocked the world. It is beginning to look like a defining moment in the decline and fall of America as a global power. Like an aged turtle, the US is withdrawing into its isolationist shell and leaving the world to its own devices.

Notice has been served on pro-democracy movements in the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe that America can no longer be trusted. It couldn't even manage a dignified and orderly withdrawal of its own citizens from this landlocked and impoverished country, let alone protect the tens of thousands who are now living in fear as Taliban militants search door-to-door to root out collaborators.

The country with most to worry about is perhaps Taiwan, the democratically-ruled island of 24 million claimed by China as part of its national territory. Last month, President Xi Jinping committed himself at the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, to “the complete reunification of the motherland” and to “smash” the independence movement there.

China was first into the the breach in recognising the Taliban government. It already has important mining interests in the country, principally for rare earth minerals for use in electric vehicles. It will treat the new regime with some caution. But provided the country remains relatively stable, Afghanistan will be integrated into the Chinese equivalent of the liberal-capitalist Neoconservative Project: the authoritarian-capitalist Belt and Road Initiative, BRI. Afghanistan could proved a link between Central Asia and the Indian Ocean.

China has funnelled hundreds of billions of dollars into building roads, power stations, dams and bridges around the planet to extend its strategic interests and commandeer raw materials for its burgeoning industry. The BRI has even been building coal-burning power stations in Serbia, in violation of climate change commitments. China and its apologists says it is only doing what Britain and latterly America did in the 20th Century. It is helping developing countries to become part of the world economy. However, China is a dictatorship and has no interest in promoting western values of human rights and democracy. Countries which accept loans from China for grand infrastructure projects, like Sri Lanka, quickly find that they've sold their independence cheap. Russia is in the same game in Eastern Europe, using energy as a lever to extend influence.

This is the downside of the American humiliation that the left has been celebrating this week. The departure of the US does not simply leave free peoples of developing nations to manage their own affairs safe from Western bombing raids. This is not liberation from tyranny. There is no democracy in Afghanistan. It is an Islamo-fascist dictatorship. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the original US involvement - and in my opinion the Afghan operation was justified in a way the Iraq invasion was not - the legacy of the US departure is a historic defeat for human rights in general and women's liberation in particular.

America is no longer a beacon for the world. It is hopelessly divided by race and culture wars at home and has lost its sense of purpose abroad. Its intellectual elites now despise patriotism and the flag, and regard its foreign policy as tainted by corporate greed. Perhaps it is a good thing that Nato countries will have to look to their own defence in future, not relying on the Global Policeman. At any rate, it will be a long time before we hear another President promising, as John F Kennedy did in 1961, “to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty”.