On Sept. 11, 2001, the post-Cold War era that had begun so euphorically on Nov. 9, 1989, came to an abrupt end. The “long decade” that stretched from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the World Trade Center was marked by military spending cuts, domestic political scandals and a general sense that American foreign policy was adrift. President George H.W. Bush spoke of the “New World Order” but had no policy to fit the clever phrase. President Bill Clinton had a clutch of policies, but he never found a neat way to describe them.
In the wake of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, an organizing principle suddenly presented itself. Like the Cold War, the “war on terror,” as it instantly became known, clearly defined America’s friends, enemies and priorities. Like the Cold War, the war on terror appealed to both American idealism and American realism. We were fighting bad guys, but the destruction of al-Qaeda also lay clearly within the sphere of our national interests. The speed with which we adopted this paradigm was impressive, if somewhat alarming. At the time, I marveled at the neatness of this new New World Order and “how like an academic article everything suddenly appears to be.”
Anne Applebaum
Applebaum writes a biweekly foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.
Archive
The events of Sept. 11 reverberated through American life, but nowhere more profoundly than in U.S. policy toward the outside world. Creaking and groaning, the supertanker that is the American foreign and defense establishment turned itself around as Americans prepared to face new enemies. We created a vast security bureaucracy, encompassing some 1,200 government organizations, 1,900 private companies and 854,000 people with security clearances, according to a Washington Post investigation last year. We launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We organized counterterrorism operations in such far-flung places as the Philippines and Yemen, and we changed the culture of our military. We sharpened our focus on al-Qaeda and imitators. We spent, according to one estimate, some $3 trillion.
And we were, in the terms defined by the war on terror, successful: Ten years after 9/11, al-Qaeda is in profound disarray. Osama bin Laden is dead. Fanatical Islam is on the decline. Our military remains the most sophisticated in the world. And yet, 10 years after 9/11, it’s clear that the “war on terror” was far too narrow a prism through which to see the planet. And the price we paid to fight it was far too high.
In our single-minded focus on Islamic fanaticism, we missed China’s transformation from a commercial power into an ambitious political power. We failed to appreciate the significance of economic growth in China’s neighborhood. When President George W. Bush traveled to Asia in late 2001, he spoke to his Malaysian and Indonesian interlocutors about their resident terrorist cells. His Chinese colleagues, meanwhile, talked business and trade.
We also missed, at least initially, the transformation of Russia from a weak and struggling partner into a sometimes hostile opponent. Through the lens of the war on terror, Vladimir Putin looked like an ally. As Russia’s president, he, too, was fighting terrorists. Though his battles in Chechnya were a different war against quite different terrorists (and not only against terrorists), for a brief period he convinced his American counterparts that his struggle and their struggle were more or less the same.
Loading...
Comments