For such a short period, the changes wrought by the events of 9/11 have been immense. It is too soon for judgments of historic import, though. At such a near distance one is tempted to over-ascribe cause and effect, to ignore roots of change that reach farther back, and to overlook unrelated developments of deep importance. And in the sense that “9/11” means the attacks and their aftermath, it is still unfolding. Its eventual significance will depend on future events and policy choices, key among them indicated here. Still, it is revealing to see the global upheaval at a glance, even if a report at this date should be thought of as only penciled in.
The most important point is the most obvious: 9/11 changed the United States far more than it did the rest of the world. It tore away the sense of distance and difference that has enfolded us throughout our history. Some time ago technology and globalization turned that safe and separate “city on the hill” into an illusion, but it was one we still believed in. “Homeland security” is more than a new word in our vocabulary, it is a concern that makes us more like the rest of the world than we have ever been before.
The attacks catapulted us into a genuine, not a metaphorical, war whose goals and geographic scope have steadily expanded. The first targets were the al-Qaeda network and Afghanistan’s Taliban. By January, in his State of the Union message, the president added a second “great objective,” that of keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, their state sponsors, or any regimes the United States considers too dangerous. These were identified as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—the “axis of evil”—but the list was open-ended. Today, the United States has 10,000 troops fighting in Afghanistan, and many more, uniformed and not, in Pakistan, India, and Central and Southeast Asia. It has occupied new bases, undertaken unprecedented intelligence collaborations, and embraced new allies, many of them uncomfortable bedfellows.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has suggested that 9/11 meant even more than this; that it opened a new era in international affairs: “I really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947 in that the events … started shifting the tectonic plates in international politics. And it’s important to try to seize on that and position American interests and institutions before they harden again.” From the heart of the U.S. government it may look that way, and for many Americans 9/11 is, still, the lens through which they see the world. But from the perspective of the rest of the world, which is far less changed than we, and considering all that was not affected, 9/11 does not—at least yet—look like such a transforming event. It does not, for a start, restore the strategic clarity and unitary purpose that have been missing in foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Probably nothing ever will.
Consider, for example, the economy. An economic doomsday was widely feared: a lengthy stoppage of trading, a market plunge, plummeting consumer confidence, capital flight from the United States, borders closed to trade, and a worldwide slowdown or even recession. Some of this has happened, but not because of 9/11. Recent data show that the U.S. slowdown was well underway before September and that the attacks had little effect on the subsequent recovery. So far, Kenneth Lay, Bernie Ebbers & Co. have been responsible for more damage to the U.S. economy than has Osama bin Laden.
So far, Kenneth Lay, Bernie Ebbers & Co. have been responsible for more damage to the U.S. economy than has Osama bin Laden.
A footnote is warranted, however. Like most major crises, 9/11 has unloosed a spasm of knee-jerk federal spending. Amazingly, no one can yet even say how much has been appropriated. Some of the spending is necessary; some feeds agendas linked only in name to the war on terrorism; some, perhaps much, will be wasted. The spending so far is not responsible for our overnight return to large federal budget deficits, but it contributes, and it is only a down-payment on what is to come. Its economic impact will depend on politics: how long it will be before legislators choose to examine 9/11-related spending with the same rigor they apply to anything else. Ironically, 9/11 highlighted hitherto unknown economic strengths at home and abroad. These include the remarkable resilience of Wall Street’s infrastructure (contingency plans and redundant data and information networks). Internationally, economic policymakers demonstrated their ability to act together in the face of an unprecedented challenge as central bankers swiftly injected liquidity into the financial system.
Globalization itself seemed the most certain victim. “The era of globalisation is over,” wrote historian John Gray shortly after the attacks, echoing the views of many. Francis Fukuyama predicted another end: of the “techno-libertarianism” of the roaring 1990s. The time of rapidly rising flows of money, goods, and services across borders seemed over. Except … it didn’t happen. Two months after the attacks, the World Trade Organization’s Doha meeting, widely expected to falter, got a solidarity boost instead and launched a new round of global trade talks. The momentum of anti-globalization protests was interrupted, allowing time for more focused, sober criticisms of the system’s real failings. Far from turning away from trade and foreign investment, countries are scrambling to join the WTO and to improve their investment climate. World trade is projected to grow by nearly 8 percent in the second half of 2002 and by even more next year.
Globalization is much more than economic integration, of course. The attacks, and what has been learned subsequently about the operations of terrorist networks, proved that global computer systems, communications, and media are as beneficial to terror, crime, money laundering, misinformation, and the radicalization of millions as they are to growth, education, and well-being. Yet there has been not the slightest glimmer of interest in constraining their operation.
Both politically and economically, then, 9/11 left the momentum of global integration unchanged. And, more powerfully than anything else could have, it underlined globalization’s other core attribute, the rising influence of non-state actors whether citizens groups or terrorist networks.
No world leader grasped more quickly the opportunity 9/11 offered him, or acted more decisively to seize it, than Vladimir Putin. On the day of the attacks he was the first foreign head of state to call President Bush. He followed that with an extraordinary string of actions—and non-actions—that amount to a wholesale reorientation of Russia’s foreign policy.
In one swoop, Putin abandoned the carefully calibrated foreign policy he had followed until September 10. Earlier, he had worked to improve ties with China, India, Iran, and North Korea, while at the same time reaching out to Europe and the United States. A move in one direction was offset by a move in another. From September 11 onward, often acting without the support of his foreign and defense advisers, he embraced the United States, recognizing its primacy globally and on his own borders. He even swallowed the end of the superpower strategic relationship, accepting U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty for the price of a formal arms cut. Putin has by no means surrendered Russia’s freedom of action to the United States, but the change is stunning.
What Putin saw in 9/11 was an opening for a huge leap toward an unambiguous partnership with the United States and the West. Putin will not be remembered as a great democrat, but he does seem committed to transforming and relaunching the Russian economy. For the Russian president, a real partnership is the premier resource for his country’s modernization. For that overriding goal he needs Western capital, technology, and market access.
Putin’s actions are strategic, not tactical, and they are likely to stick. But he must show gains in return, or he could follow the ill-fated Mikhail Gorbachev, criticized for making too many concessions and receiving too little back. So far, the returns have been ample. Putin’s other great vulnerability is to an economic downturn, which could quickly cut his political support from under him. There the outlook has been improved by 9/11, as the United States has encouraged Russia’s desire to increase its oil production and become a larger alternative to Persian Gulf producers.
The war on terrorism has also strengthened Putin’s hand domestically in important, and regrettable, ways. The Kremlin can now claim that the still ugly, unresolved Chechen conflict is part of the righteous international war against terrorism. Seen that way, it was the United States that joined Russia in the fight against a common enemy, not the other way around. Similarly, American restrictions on civil liberties in the name of homeland security make the growing domestic harassment and intimidation by Russia’s internal security agencies—including Putin’s own alma mater, the KGB—less of an international issue.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, as far as clarity of consequence, is the very mixed picture for China. For the short term, 9/11 produced some notable pluses while profoundly altering the geopolitical landscape along China’s periphery in potentially dangerous ways.
To China’s north, Russia, in vigorous pursuit of its new Western alignment, has provided significant political, economic, and military assistance to the campaign in Afghanistan. Its new posture greatly reduces, if not erases, Russia’s interest in cooperating with China in forging a common front against perceived U.S. hegemony and unilateralism. To the west, the campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban has led to major U.S. political and military inroads in Central Asia. The U.S. presence there potentially threatens China’s western borders and undermines Beijing’s efforts to construct a regional multilateral structure—the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—intended in part to serve as a counterweight to an eastward-expanding NATO. In the southwest, 9/11 transformed America’s relations with Pakistan, China’s closest ally. Although sanctioned by Beijing, this new relationship could one day weaken China’s influence in South Asia. And to the east, the war on terrorism has led to a significant—albeit thus far very limited—expansion of Japan’s military presence in Asia, increasing Chinese anxieties over Japanese “remilitarization.”
9/11 substituted a real and present enemy for those in the U.S. who believe China will become a future one.
Set against this ominous landscape is a big immediate gain: 9/11 substituted a real and present enemy for those in the United States who passionately believe China will become a future one. It ended, for the time being, a significant reheating of the periodic, American ideological debate on this point—prompted by mutual spying incidents and hostile U.S. rhetoric in the early months of the Bush administration. Marshalling resources to fight terrorists, and possibly to invade Iraq, Washington has paid dramatically less attention to the strategic implications of China’s rising power, and devoted less energy to countering it. In the interests of keeping the antiterrorism coalition intact, the United States will try to avoid distracting confrontations with Beijing.
More directly, 9/11 has provided China with low-cost opportunities to cooperate with the United States through intelligence sharing, efforts to unearth terrorist financing mechanisms, and the like. The increased cooperation and diminished American attention to a Chinese “threat” have lowered fears among Asian states of Sino-U.S. rivalry, allowing movement toward greater regional integration—a Chinese objective.
For all this, 9/11 has not altered the most basic structural and ideological sources of contention between the United States and China—just put some of them on hold. Critical differences and mutual suspicions remain over Taiwan, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, human rights, missile defense, and the role of American power in Asia and beyond. Even if the common terrorist threat were to grow, these differences would persist. And, if the trends on China’s periphery worsen, fueling fears of American “encirclement,” the aftermath of 9/11 could one day fuel a genuine strategic rivalry with the United States.
Sandwiched between the two behemoths are the five “stans” of Central Asia. The introduction of U.S. military bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan after 9/11, and the granting of limited landing rights by Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, deeply alters the geopolitical balance there. The retreat of Russian power has become irreversible, and the expanded U.S. presence is slowing Chinese inroads into this oil- and gas-rich region, as well.
Immediate military needs have turned the Central Asian states into short-term strategic assets for the United States; whether they will remain so or become festering sources of longer-term threats is far from clear. Soviet-era strongmen govern all five, and all show every intention of hanging onto power. No honest elections for president or parliament have been held anywhere in the region. Independent media and political groups are more hampered now than they were a decade ago. Corruption is endemic and there is little protection of private property. Political repression, crippled economies, rapid population growth, and feeble education and health care systems combine to create fertile breeding grounds for radical Islamic groups.
For these countries, the war to date has reduced but not eliminated the security threats that emanate from Afghanistan. The bombing campaign dealt Central Asian terrorists a serious blow, but many survived and are regrouping. The revival of Afghanistan’s drug trade following the fall of the Taliban gives these radical Islamists the means to be self-financing and further undermines the states’ fragile security forces. The United States is helping to modernize and bolster those forces, but unless the regimes rethink their economic and political strategies, the threats will persist or grow.
The U.S. and broader Western interest in the region has created an opportunity to rectify the mistakes of the wasted first decade of independence. But, save for some tentative steps toward economic reform in Uzbekistan, evidence of willingness to do so is scant. If anything, Central Asia’s leaders feel freer to resist reform, believing that as long as the United States needs their bases they will be able to follow the policies that make them a danger to their populations. There rests the challenge for Washington. Afghanistan may not prove to be the only failed state in the region.
September 11 had a whiplash effect on India. At first, Indians excitedly believed that the United States would have to see that Pakistani-backed militants attacking India in Kashmir were the same ilk as the United States’ enemy; that Kashmir was a terrorist war, not a freedom struggle. New Delhi pledged the United States full support, expecting a partnership that would isolate Pakistan. Instead, President Musharraf abandoned the Taliban and sponsorship of Islamic militancy, transforming Pakistan overnight from near-pariah to the United States’ most important ally in the war against al-Qaeda.
Momentum swung dramatically the other way after Islamist extremists attacked the Indian and Kashmiri parliaments. Washington risked exposure to a glaring double standard and a rupture in relations if it did not take India’s side in responding. A massive military mobilization—three-quarters of a million men—along Pakistan’s frontier raised the stakes. New Delhi resisted pleas for restraint by citing the U.S. example. If the United States could go halfway around the world to fight terrorists in Afghanistan, surely India could and should go a few kilometers to fight the terrorists threatening it. The United States was forced into an all-out diplomatic offensive to prevent another Indo-Pakistani war—possibly a nuclear one.
Before September 11, the United States had been building improved relations with both countries. Now it found itself caught in the long-standing, zero-sum contest between them. So far, Washington has managed adroitly. But, while Musharraf has clamped down on militants who work with al-Qaeda, he has moved slowly and unevenly against those who fight primarily in Kashmir and India. Indeed, covert support for these groups continues.
Musharraf is restraining infiltration into Indian-controlled territory, but he has made it clear that his continuing to do so depends on India’s engaging in negotiations on Kashmir. India may see no reason for such a dialogue once the violence is over. The United States cannot lean too heavily on Musharraf without risking the loss of his support against al-Qaeda or even the fall of his regime. Twice, the situation has gone to the brink of war.
Between these enemies, who have fought three wars in a few decades, the United States now sits with an unprecedented diplomatic and physical presence. The U.S. military is operating from bases in western Pakistan and recently conducted joint military exercises in India for the first time. FBI forces are pursuing counterterrorist operations in both countries. One of the most irreconcilable conflicts in the world has suddenly become Washington’s business.
September 11 did not so much change the Arab-Israeli conflict as intensify it by hardening all sides’ preexisting convictions and policy predilections. As India had hoped to do, Israel portrayed its efforts to crush the intifada as part of the U.S.-led war against terrorism. Palestinians, like Kashmiri and Pakistani radicals, saw theirs as a just freedom struggle and escalated the violence as Israel cracked down. Egypt felt vindicated in its repression of radical Islamists at home, as Saudi Arabia did in its refusal to allow any form of political opposition and its practice of exporting its domestic problems. Both sides of Iran’s hopelessly divided government did more of what they had been doing. Reformers seized the opportunity to cooperate with the United States against the Taliban. Hard-liners retaliated by providing safe haven to al-Qaeda fugitives and sending an arms shipment on the Karine A to the Palestinian Authority. Arab publics reacted to the attacks with a contradictory mix of revulsion, denial, and anger at being blamed. In short, 9/11 turned up the flame under a pot already near boiling.
For the first time, the wisdom of a longstanding bargain—U.S. tolerance of Arab political repression in return for oil and stability—has begun to be questioned.
From the moment of the attacks, the link between terrorism and the lack of democracy and political expression in the Arab world has been a focus of attention, though more outside the region than within it. For the first time, the wisdom of a longstanding bargain—U.S. tolerance of Arab political repression in return for oil and stability—has begun to be questioned. Yet, at the same time, the United States has demanded the ouster of the only popularly elected leader in the Arab world, Yassir Arafat, and increased counterterrorism cooperation with anti-democratic governments in Syria, Yemen, and Algeria. Reflecting an upsurge in domestic anti-U.S. sentiment, Saudi Arabia for the first time publicly questioned the acceptability of the U.S. military presence in the kingdom, while also making its most serious effort to date to assist the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Confusion and uncertainty must still be counted the dominant themes.
What the United States decides about Iraq could radically change everything. While no connection has been drawn between the 9/11 terrorists and Saddam Hussein (indeed bin Laden has labeled the non-religious leader an apostate), the attack put him squarely back in the United States’ crosshairs. It is not easy to specify the reason why. In part, it may be our heightened awareness of the dangers of proliferation and the possibility that Saddam might share weapons of mass destruction with terrorists. In part, a shooting war, an angered American populace, and a presumed heightened tolerance for American casualties may have seemed to provide the opportunity to be rid of the despot once and for all. Certainly, one of the most troubling aspects of post-9/11 Washington was, until August hearings in the Senate, the lack of any serious debate over whether and why, as opposed to how and when, to begin a new war.
September 11 has widened a transatlantic gap that opened years ago in the way Americans and Europeans view the international system. This is one of the most significant, as well as least expected, results of the attacks. Long before September 11, Europeans had become concerned about the American “hyperpower” and what appeared to them a growing tendency toward unilateral action and a disregard for international laws and institutions. Americans were beginning to doubt Europe’s strategic relevance and to wonder whether it could help the United States at all in preserving international security.
September 11 engendered a brief moment of transatlantic comity, symbolized by NATO’s unprecedented offer to defend the United States against attack under Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty. Europeans also supported the early stages of American military action in Afghanistan, relieved that the Bush administration appeared to be showing some restraint in its conduct of the war. Over the succeeding months, however, as the administration began contemplating regime change in Iraq and broadened the scope of the war on terrorism to embrace possible action against other “axis of evil” members, Europe began to view the United States as increasingly dangerous.
A series of American withdrawals from international treaties—the Kyoto Treaty on climate change, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, and withdrawal of the American signature to the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court—exacerbated these feelings. Capped by U.S. efforts to gain immunity from ICC prosecution, the aggressive expansion of the scope of the war on terrorism cast America, in the eyes of many Europeans, as a rogue colossus.
September 11 has meant that European and American government officials work more closely on more fronts than ever before. Yet, as one senior European diplomat observes, the closer we get the more we become aware of our differences. These extend to public opinion. A large majority of Americans, with 9/11 very much in mind, sympathize with Israel. An equally large majority of Europeans sympathize with the Palestinians and bitterly resent American accusations of anti-Semitism on that account. These differences over the Middle East are longstanding, but their extent and ferocity today trace to 9/11. With Europe’s long experience of domestic terror attacks and no illusions of an invulnerable homeland, the events of that day could never have held the significance for Europeans that they have for Americans, even if some of the carnage had been directly inflicted there.
Today, Americans worry about Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Many Europeans worry about an America that seems to them so powerful, so angry, and so heedless of the concerns of others that it poses a threat to the international order Europe seeks to promote.
The future of the U.S.-European relationship, and much else, depends in part on how America ultimately resolves a series of decade-old debates that 9/11 only sharpened. They are all aspects of the two central themes of the transatlantic rift: the appropriate roles for unilateral versus collective, international action, and different views of what constitutes security.
A debate over whether poverty, marginalization, and the lack of development are only humanitarian concerns or also security issues has raged for years; 9/11 greatly bolstered the broader case. The exact nature of the links between poverty and terrorism remain a matter of debate, but it is clear that the new U.S. interest in aid and development stems from the anti-terrorism connection. The administration’s decision to establish the Millennium Challenge Account—which, if it takes form according to the plan, will be the largest increase in U.S. foreign aid in forty years—reflects a decisively broadened view of the development imperative.
The administration’s Millennium Challenge Account proposes the largest increase in U.S. foreign aid in 40 years.
Closely linked to this is the debate over nation-building. Derided by conservatives as “foreign policy as social work” and by Mr. Bush during the presidential campaign, it now appears as an often necessary task, or at least an unavoidable one. Afghanistan is the case at hand, but others, possibly in Central Asia, will follow. Failed and failing states are clearly prime breeding grounds of new terrorists and their principal operational centers, and hence are real security concerns. Whether this recognition will translate into an adequately sized and sufficiently sustained effort—even in Afghanistan—remains highly dubious, however.
On the traditional security front, too, the post-9/11 story is mixed. The heated debate in the United States over withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and construction of a national missile defense simply evaporated in the face of Russian acquiescence to the former, and the new and immediate terrorist threats for which missile defense is irrelevant. While public appreciation of the dangers of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has grown, government action has been largely limited to improving the U.S. response to an attack. Stopping proliferation before it happens has been a surprisingly low priority.
The attacks did not alter the administration’s view that multilateral regimes can do little to control the spread of these weapons. Even in unilateral terms, the picture is ambivalent, at best. Before 9/11 the Bush administration held a very negative view of programs (known as Nunn-Lugar) to improve the security of the world’s largest and in some cases worst-protected source of nuclear, biological, and chemical materials in Russia; six weeks after, it supported large, new, emergency funding for them. However, in April, a divided administration announced that it could not certify that Russia is complying with its arms control commitments (a requirement of the Nunn-Lugar law), halting the programs in their tracks. In July, in another apparent reversal, the President asked his partners at the G8 Summit to agree to expand such efforts with a new, ten-year, $20 billion program, of which the United States would pay half. In the face of these confusing signals, the other six states—followers rather than leaders on this—will be waiting to see what the United States does.
Events trump intentions, but not ideology. Just as Bill Clinton came to office determined to keep his focus domestic, Mr. Bush promised less involvement and more humility in relations abroad. Yet the most dramatic effect of this year has been the tremendous extension in America’s foreign engagement. We have sent troops and covert forces into new countries, embraced new allies, put military bases in new regions, become engaged in new conflicts. In the early days after 9/11, many expected that the attacks would force the Bush administration to a more multilateral stance, given the unprecedented need for international help on everything from tracking terrorists to cracking open cross-border money flows and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. So far, the record is assertively unilateral and anything but humble. The United States decides; others can be “with us or against us.”
Two pending choices will largely determine whether Washington comes to be seen as an aggressive new Rome.
Two pending choices will largely determine whether Washington comes to be seen as an aggressive new Rome. In June the administration floated a plan to turn pre-emption— striking first—from one tactic among many into the guiding U.S. national security strategy. The change would have significant consequences for American policymakers and even more significant ones for how the United States is reacted to and prepared for by friends and enemies abroad. Most important, though, will be what America decides to do about Iraq and how it is done. If an invasion is undertaken that seems to others to defy international law and opinion, it will likely have heavy long-term costs even if it succeeds in unseating Saddam Hussein.
One final effect of 9/11 should not be overlooked. The new agenda of attacking terrorism around the world and building greater security at home is so consuming that it blots out other issues of major consequence. Mexico was to be the focus of Mr. Bush’s foreign policy. It, and the whole of Latin America—a good part of it approaching crisis—have been ‘disappeared’ by 9/11. A dramatically changing global climate might as well not be happening. The reappearance of large federal budget deficits is hardly noticed. Oddly, the need for change in an unsustainable energy policy has barely surfaced. Washington’s attention can only stretch so far, and now and for some time to come, 9/11 has cornered nearly all of it. That monopoly has heavy costs.
Ten years after 9/11 and the start of the war in Afghanistan, it is important to consider how the relationship between Western and Muslim publics has evolved, and what this means for policy makers.
The Syrian opposition will fail to bring about change unless it develops a clear transition plan and a credible political strategy for winning over key sectors in Syria.
The Strategic and Economic Dialogue, scheduled to be held in May 2012, will mark the first formal U.S.-China bilateral dialogue since the United States announced its strategic pivot to the Asia-Pacific region last year.
Relations between Ukraine and the EU have reached their lowest point yet. It could be time for the EU to come up with a new plan.
Putin’s surprising decision to skip the G8 summit means that he is putting the stability of his power structure above his diplomatic engagements abroad.
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