When you think about it for more than a second, the title seems ridiculous. It would seem Vietnam and Afghanistan exceed this humiliation by orders of magnitude when considering their cost in blood and coin with nothing to show for it. But those wars were intertwined with the goals of reluctant and half-assed nation building. In terms of signalling the demise of the American empire, this one gives the others a run for their money just in terms of the sheer delusional idiocy of their stated expectations.