Twenty-five years after 9\/11, its deepest legacy lies in the wars, surveillance and strategic overreach that hastened the end of US hegemony<\/p>\n
So much has happened since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, that the events now seem both very distant and perhaps less consequential than they appeared at the time. However, both impressions are misleading.
\nTwenty-five years is a considerable period in a human life, but little more than a moment in history, and however turbulent the past quarter-century has been, the significance of September 11 is only now becoming fully apparent.
\nLooking back, and setting aside the emotions of the time, what did the attacks actually mean for the international system?
\nAbove all, they brought an end to a decade of virtually unchallenged US hegemony in world affairs.
\nThe significance was partly symbolic in that the attackers struck at the two most obvious centers of American power, the World Trade Center represented its financial might, while the Pentagon represented its military strength. The post-Cold War period, during which the United States had come to believe that no fundamental threat remained to its security or interests, was over.<\/p>\n
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From Washington\u2019s perspective, the decade had begun with the almost miraculous disappearance of its principal geopolitical adversary, the Soviet Union, yet it ended with the realization that danger could emerge suddenly from almost anywhere.
\nThe fact that most Americans had previously known little about those who attacked them only deepened the shock and contributed to the impulsiveness of the response.
\nThe End of History, proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama as the Cold War was drawing to a close, was followed barely a decade later by history\u2019s turbulent and violent return
\nWashington\u2019s reaction set in motion a global realignment whose consequences are now much easier to see. Whether Osama bin Laden possessed some ingenious long-term strategy for undermining American power is impossible to know, but the result was obvious as the United States embarked upon a course that gradually weakened its ability to manage international affairs.
\nGeorge W. Bush\u2019s administration, strongly influenced by neoconservative thinking, was caught off guard by September 11, so its response rested on two broad assumptions.
\nThe first was that threats to America could originate anywhere, not merely from hostile states but from non-state groups newly capable of inflicting enormous damage, therefore such threats had to be confronted wherever they emerged, primarily through the overwhelming military power available to the United States.<\/p>\n
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The second assumption was ideological, given liberal theory held that democracies didn\u2019t wage war against one another, meaning if that were true, then the more democracies there were, the safer the United States would become.
\nFrom this emerged the increasingly assertive promotion of democracy abroad, which at times it became openly aggressive.
\nIts methods ranged from military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq to political and financial support for democratic movements in the former Soviet Union and pressure for liberal political reforms across the Middle East and Libya later became another example of Western military intervention producing consequences far beyond those originally anticipated.
\nSome episodes from that period are now half-forgotten, such as when Washington strongly encouraged elections in the Palestinian territories despite warnings from regional actors about the likely consequences. Naturally, Hamas subsequently won the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, dramatically altering Palestinian politics.
\nThe same confidence in political transformation characterized the American response to the Arab Spring as existing political balances across the Middle East were overturned, often without anything stable emerging to replace them.
\nThe consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq were greater still. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein destroyed a major component of the regional balance that had developed during the 20th century and unleashed forces that proved extremely difficult to contain.<\/p>\n
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America became trapped in what its own politicians would eventually call endless wars and these conflicts contributed to polarization inside the United States while attempts to export democracy damaged the reputation of democracy itself.
\nIn Iraq, this was compounded by the widespread belief that American strategic and economic interests, including oil, were inseparable from the intervention.
\nThe broader results were remarkable with prolonged wars, a destabilized Middle East and the expansion of radical Islamist movements. The architects of September 11 could scarcely have hoped for more when they planned their attack given relations between the West and much of the Muslim world also deteriorated.\u00a0
\nPresident Bush\u2019s early reference to a crusade against terrorism was probably an unfortunate choice of words rather than a deliberate provocation, but Islamist movements eagerly seized upon it as confirmation of their argument that Western hostility towards the Muslim world had changed little since the Crusades.
\nWashington subsequently tried to repair those relations, but the direction had already been set.
\nThe destruction of Iraq\u2019s complicated internal and regional balance created opportunities for radical movements while contributing to an image of the United States as an enormously powerful but unpredictable force in Middle Eastern affairs. As a result, for governments in the region, maintaining some distance from Washington increasingly appeared prudent.<\/p>\n
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September 11 also transformed the United States itself.
\nThe War on Terror was conceived as a global campaign to protect American national security, but its domestic consequences were profound as surveillance and state control expanded dramatically, whether in personal communications or financial transactions.
\nAlthough the original justification was terrorism, over the following quarter-century, new reasons for expanding these mechanisms appeared while technologies changed and political priorities shifted, but the general direction towards greater monitoring and control remained.
\nNor did the old problem of double standards disappear because, despite declarations of zero tolerance for terrorism, the familiar distinction between one side\u2019s terrorist and another\u2019s freedom fighter survived. This ambiguity becomes particularly apparent when the interests of major powers collide, whether those powers are the United States, Russia or China.
\nA quarter-century after September 11, the world bears remarkably little resemblance to the one that existed on its eve, but, of course, much of what followed would probably have happened anyway. International systems change because of forces far larger than any single event and China\u2019s rise, Russia\u2019s reassertion of its interests, technological transformation and the relative decline of Western economic predominance cannot simply be attributed to the attacks of 2001.<\/p>\n
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But September 11 was nevertheless a turning point as the attacks ended the extraordinary post-Cold War interlude in which American predominance appeared almost uncontested, and, more importantly, Washington\u2019s response accelerated the processes that brought that period to a close.
\nThe movement away from the unipolar order didn\u2019t happen overnight, but began gradually, gathered momentum through wars, crises and the emergence of alternative centers of power, and continues today.
\nWhat will replace it remains unclear, given the formation of another stable international order may take many years and whether that system proves preferable to the bipolar confrontation of the second half of the 20th century, or to the brief period of American hegemony that followed it, is impossible to know.
\nBut one thing now seems clearer than it did on September 11, 2001 in that the attacks didn\u2019t merely interrupt the post-Cold War order, but marked the beginning of its end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Twenty-five years after 9\/11, its deepest legacy lies in the wars, surveillance and strategic overreach that hastened the end of US hegemony So much has happened since the terrorist attacks…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-environment","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t