Did 9/11 Change the United States?

War lost its currency as an instrument of change

Anchal Vohra/ FP columnist and a freelance TV correspondent and commentator on the Middle East 

The West's protracted intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 broke the collective will of the US state and the American people to entangle themselves in further conflicts abroad. This sentiment is understandable: The United States lost thousands of troops and trillions of dollars over two decades, its attempts at nation-building failed, and all it gained was a global reputation as a warmonger.

US presidents have now given up on their perhaps naive hope that they can democratize authoritarian and conflict-riven countries. Every leader since President George W. Bush tried to end these wars, retreat from the Middle East, and turn their focus to the rise of China. In withdrawing from Afghanistan, Biden is the first to succeed. But it has turned out to be such a glaring humanitarian disaster that analysts have begun to ask whether continuing a limited US presence would have better served Afghans and American interests.

The Taliban have returned to power on the back of the deal they signed with the United States in Doha, Qatar, last year—but they still have ties with al Qaeda. Moreover, the attack on departing US soldiers and Afghans by the Islamic State-Khorasan at the Kabul airport shows that Afghanistan will remain a haven for terrorists determined to hurt US interests. It is unclear whether the recent turn of events in Afghanistan will encourage or deter Biden from following suit in Iraq, where there are still 2,500 US troops.

The United States' sudden distaste for war presents a second conundrum: If military force is rejected, and Russia and China's veto power at the United Nations Security Council continues to render diplomatic efforts useless, how can the international community stop dictators from killing and persecuting their own people? Then-US President Barack Obama's reluctance to go to war in Syria gave Bashar al-Assad and his Russian allies a free hand to bomb opposition areas and turn cities into rubble. Assad allegedly used chemical weapons against the Syrian people and got away with it, despite Obama's threats of military force. At the UN Security Council, Russia and China vetoed any inquiry into the Syrian leader's alleged war crimes.

War as an instrument of change when all else fails has lost currency in the post-9/11 world order. But the free world must consider what can replace military power to prevent a dictator from using chemical weapons, to stop religious vigilantes from beheading women, or to protect minorities from genocides. Biden's democracy summit later this year could be a good place to start.

The United States is no longer indispensable

Stephen Wertheim/ Senior fellow in the American Statecraft Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 

9/11 changed how the United States understands its role in the world—but not as its leaders hoped.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States opted not to retract its coercive power around the world. Instead, it embarked on a search to give this outsize power a purpose. "If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation," then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in 1998. But in the absence of a major threat and in a time of plenty, it remained unclear how much of a burden US citizens were willing to bear to make their country indispensable across the globe.

At first, the 9/11 attacks appeared to solve this problem—to imbue US power with an inarguable purpose. Bush immediately declared that the United States had been attacked because of the power of its example. He then responded by serving up spectacular examples of US power, launching what he termed a "global war on terror" and invading Afghanistan. Even that was not enough. Iraq offered a stage to imagine that the United States, knocked back on 9/11, could transform an entire region and drive history forward. The United States had to be indispensable to the fate of the world, and what better test than on countries that could not be more distant or different from itself?

When carnage ensued, the American people adjusted, turning against the wars as well as the US role that drove them. If being the "indispensable nation" meant waging fruitless, endless war, then the United States needed a new way to relate to the world. Trump repudiated the notion that the United States had a responsibility to guard international order by force, even as he continued to pursue military dominance, only wrapped in an aggrieved nationalism. His successor, Biden, has now withdrawn US forces from Afghanistan, vowing to end "an era of major military operations to remake other countries."

US global leadership has hardly come to a close. To the contrary, the United States is likely to gain power and influence by disentangling itself from costly conflicts. But it is finally possible to say, 20 years later, that 9/11 has shattered the US pretension to global indispensability. Two decades more and the United States might yet become a nation among nations, no longer lording its power over others to get what it needs.

Misinformation reshaped political discourse

Steven A Cook / FP columnist and the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations

It seems self-evident that much has changed about US foreign and domestic policy because of the 9/11 attacks. To my mind, US political discourse suffered some of the greatest collateral damage. In the days, weeks, and months after the twin towers fell and the fires were extinguished at the Pentagon, Americans were bombarded with analysis about the Middle East. Some of this work was useful, but many of the pundits, commentators, and newly self-declared terrorism analysts did a tremendous disservice to the country.

The misinformation disseminated about Islam and Arabs, as well as the politics, history, and culture of the Middle East, was harmful. Words like "madrassa"—which simply means school—and "sharia" (Islamic law) were made to sound sinister. The quality of the national conversation provided an opportunity for professional bigots to advance an agenda based on thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. It was during this era that Americans started hearing about "creeping sharia" and the supposed Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the US government, among other conspiracies regarding people from the Middle East.

As a result, Muslims and Arabs—or people mistaken for one or the other—were also targeted in airports and other public spaces. Perhaps these kinds of incidents would have happened after the attacks even if the commentary were more informed, but it is hard to ignore the impact of the post-9/11 discourse on the nationalism and white supremacy of today.

One could draw a straight line from the firehose of misinformation after the 9/11 attacks to today's political discourse, including that of white nationalists and Donald Trump. The former president's suggestions that the United States is at war with Muslims, that Muslims should be banned from entering the United States, and that Muslim residents should be placed under surveillance all have roots in the post-9/11 portrayal of the Middle East.

State power swelled—and not just the military

Peter Feaver/ Professor of political science and public policy at Duke University

The most enduring change brought about by the 9/11 attacks may be the way that American policymakers translated potential US power into kinetic power beyond the military domain.

The conventional wisdom is that the attacks catalyzed the militarization of US foreign policy. This isn't entirely wrong: Successive presidents converted a larger fraction of potential military power into military action. Essential tasks that could not be done effectively by nonmilitary elements ended up on the military's assignment sheet. But these trends well preceded Bush's response to 9/11; they were an important part of his critique of the Clinton administration on the campaign trail against outgoing Vice President Al Gore.

Indeed, the conventional wisdom obscures more than it enlightens, missing how policymakers also expanded the nonmilitary elements of state power and harnessed them in the service of US foreign policy. The defense budget doubled between 2001 and 2008, as every pundit knows. Less remarked upon is that the foreign aid budget more than doubled over the same period. Some of this increase was directly linked to military intervention, but much of it was directed at other development goals, including basic public health. In some cases, foreign aid was the substitute for increased military intervention.

Over the same period, the intelligence budget increased dramatically, and the techniques of intelligence transformed, making greater use of open-source intelligence and improving coordination between domestic and foreign intelligence and law enforcement. Successive administrations took homeland security seriously, including aviation security, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure protection, countering violent extremism, and confronting domestic extremists. The military continues to play a role in each of these efforts, but it is a supporting role in all but cybersecurity.

Policymakers also innovated to leverage US economic power to further foreign-policy goals. Instead of broad economic embargoes, targeted financial levers were developed and are now the tool of choice for policymakers before resorting to military force when US interests are challenged abroad. What this means is that US statecraft is not a one-instrument band, relying exclusively on the trumpet of military power. The military remains a vital element of national power, but it's one that is supported and often supplanted by others.

This change has implications for the United States' role in the world after its defeat in Afghanistan. The so-called restrainers, who have called for an end to US military operations abroad, are understandably cheering the retreat and assuring anyone who will listen that this will make the United States safer. Meanwhile, hawks warn that future threats will make this retreat as dangerous as the defeat in Vietnam, which emboldened Soviet bloc advances and put the United States on its hind legs for almost a decade—until then-President Ronald Reagan oversaw the culmination of a renewal in US geopolitical standing.

It is too soon to tell who is more prescient. But if something like the dovish expectation comes to pass, the way nonmilitary elements of national power have been mobilized in the service of US interests in the past 20 years provides one compelling explanation. Those elements can still be wielded even if the military returns to its barracks.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Foreign Policy, and is published by special syndication arrangement.