IT was probably the most significant conversation of my entire career. In August 1999, I had a long discussion with a CIA contact working in Pakistan. He’d just received intelligence from a source within al-Qaeda that Osama bin Laden’s terror group, based in Afghanistan during Taliban rule, was “planning to use planes to attack America”.

The story duly ran in the Herald, giving me and my CIA contact the unsettling status of being the first people to warn publicly of what became known as the September 11 attacks.

I’d been researching al-Qaeda for sometime. Towards the end of our discussion, the CIA officer said: “We’re going into a whole different world with these guys.” Looking back now, more than 20 years later, that CIA officer was horribly, presciently correct. The tide of history which flowed from those plans hatched by bin Laden has taken us into a truly different world.

In 1999, America was the sole superpower on Earth – the planet’s policeman. Today, as the Taliban sits in control of Kabul, after seizing Afghanistan in a lightning military operation, the world is witnessing the decline of American global power. This moment which we’re now living through may well be remembered by history as the start of the ‘twilight of the West’.

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There’s many analogies being made between the fall of Kabul to the Taliban and the fall of Saigon as America fled Vietnam in 1975. I was five years old when Saigon fell. Together with images of the bloodshed in my own country, Northern Ireland, the end of the Vietnam War was seared into my mind – first memories of violence and death beamed into my home through the television. However, there is a great but subtle difference between Saigon and Kabul. Saigon showed the ‘limit’ of American power; Kabul shows its decline.

Saigon proved America was beatable, but not beaten. America, though humiliated by the North Vietnamese army, was still able to bestride the globe for the next 40 years or more. The flight of the West from Afghanistan today shows the inadequacy of American power – as well as the inadequacy of British power and the power of all those other nations which took part in the Afghan War.

In essence, Vietnam was America’s aggressive war against communism far from the shores of Western nations; the war in Afghanistan, however, at its core was about trying to protect democratic nations from Islamist terror attacks.

If America, the leader of global liberal democracy, cannot prevent Afghanistan once again falling into Taliban hands – with the assured, concomitant boost for terrorism – then we must ask whether the boundary of liberal democracy has been reached and with it the boundary of American and Western power. Certainly, Western foreign adventurism is over.

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Of course, right now, our focus clearly and understandably must be on the horrors that will inevitably befall Afghan citizens – particularly women – as Taliban medievalists stamp their will on the population; and the utter waste of life that has passed in the last 20 years: all those dead soldiers, all those dead civilians. At the very least, all the nations encircling Afghanistan should open their borders allowing civilians to flee, and every country which sent troops into Afghanistan should take its fair share of refugees who need a home. No ifs, or buts.

However, history will look at the long picture too. This moment of American decline doesn’t come in isolation. America shattered its reputation on the world’s stage during the Trump presidency. Under Trump, America witnessed an utter disregard for democracy at home which almost bordered on fascism-lite. America can no longer be trusted as the leader of the democratic West. Trump could return, or someone worse.

Around the world, democracy is in retreat. We see it in Europe – with nations like Hungary and Poland now barely worth the name of democracies – and in the rise of extremist politics in once liberal nations. What speaks of the undermining of democracy in Europe more than Marine Le Pen now being part of mainstream political life in France?

Human rights, democracy and liberty are in spring-back mode internationally. Freedom is cyclical – it grows and retracts. For much of my life, liberty was on an upward trajectory, now sadly we see it in contraction.

Most significantly of all, this decline in Western power and this shudder through democracy comes as we really begin to enter the Chinese Century. My grandchildren will not grow up in the same world in which I grew up – a world where America and its Western allies were not just the centre of global politics and economics, but also global culture.

So as Afghanistan proves the decline of America – and by extension Western military, political, economic and cultural power – China isn’t just ready to take centre stage, China has been standing centre stage for quite sometime waiting for the audience to realise there’s a new star in the show.

For the next few years, we here in the UK will mull over the fact that Afghanistan has shown us that UK foreign policy is – once again – merely an extension of the US State Department. We’ll watch the ‘Biden backlash’ as Americans turn on the president amid human rights atrocities in the streets of Afghanistan.

But perhaps a decade from now, we’ll be in a place to understand that in the summer of 2021 as pandemic still raged around the planet, we were living through one of the most significant moments in history – a moment when Western power began its inevitable slow retraction.

The question we need to ask is how the west adapts to this new world that’s coming – to the limits of our own power and the rise, in particular, of China. Do we enter into an era of compromise, in which we realise we cannot foist our ‘way of life’ on other nations; or do we enter into some sort of new Cold War with Beijing?

The West ‘won’ the last Cold War, but with our ideology now stretched to its maximum extension, one has to wonder if we could ever win another such confrontation, this time in China’s 21st century.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald