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I was pretty young when 9/11 happened, certainly young enough for it to be the formative political event of my early life. I used to react with a mixture of bafflement and disbelief when I started encountering students who not only couldn’t remember 9/11 but were actually born after it happened. The cliché that “9/11 changed everything” was so prevalent for so long that it seemed like missing out on experiencing 9/11 meant somehow missing out on one of the main events that defined our time.
Here’s the thing though. As I’ve got older and politics has changed, I’ve started to see that time - let’s call it The 9/11 Era - as something different. I no longer view it as the defining feature of our time, but rather as a brief interruption. 9/11 and the events it gave rise to came and, if not exactly went, receded and merged with other trends and continuities. Between 2001 and about 2016 there were plenty of people who wanted us to believe that we were living through World War III, the sort of event around which we define entire historical periods. But I now think that the War on Terror will go down in history more as a sort of War on Drugs, a hugely consequential background feature of an era which we ultimately understand mainly through the prism of other concerns.
Here’s why.
Geopolitics stayed mostly on course
Much of the popular discussion of geopolitics and American foreign policy in The 9/11 Era revolved around questions of intervention and nation-building. Proponents basically said that it was moral and feasible for the United States to topple dictators and then build better societies and governments in their place. Opponents said that it was immoral for the United States to take it upon itself to act as the world’s policeman and that nation-building was too complicated to take place at the barrel of a gun, particularly when that gun was held by a foreigner. Opponents didn’t always show total consistency on these questions, mostly supporting the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and opposing it in Iraq, but I think that on balance they clearly had the better arguments and they enjoy pretty universal support for their views today.
But in the background another, and I think ultimately more revealing, debate was going on. That was the debate between on the one hand people who said that America was right to focus the majority of its foreign policy attention on the Middle East, and on the other hand people who warned that doing so was a dangerous distraction from Russia and China. All sorts of implications flowed from this, including what kind of military America needed (guerrilla fighters or armor and navy?), who its main allies and adversaries should be, and where presidents should focus their attention.
I’ve always thought the following chart, which shows the American public’s perception that China was a major threat to the U.S., is pretty remarkable. You can see that after 9/11 and particularly the build-up to Iraq the focus on China dipped massively. When a Chinese plane rammed into a U.S. aircraft and caused the Hainan Island incident in April 2001, we caught a glimpse of the concerns that preoccupy American policymakers today, albeit with China much weaker than it is now. Then came 9/11. Nothing objective changed about China’s behavior or power between 2002 and 2004, but the attention of the United States was just elsewhere. Twenty years later, the figure is pretty much back where it was in 2002, with China again registering as one of the main threats that Americans feel they face.
The story with Russia is a bit more complicated. When 9/11 happened, Vladimir Putin was a relatively fresh-faced new president of Russia, representing a country which was widely perceived as being weak and preoccupied with internal problems. A few months before 9/11, George W. Bush famously said after meeting Putin that "I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul." Various people around Bush came to regret that he said this, and already there were signs that Putin had all kinds of ambitions that would put him on a collision course with America. The stage was already set and the fundamental contradictions in the two countries’ policies were already fairly clear. It would just take the coming years for the split to come.
But, because of The 9/11 Era, it took longer than it might. American leaders were not unaware that Russia and China existed during The 9/11 Era, but they approached the two countries from the perspective of completely different concerns. They tended to argue that although Washington, Beijing and Moscow had important disagreements, the scourge of terrorism was so threatening that they would be able to put their differences aside and focus on eradicating it. Grim events like the Beslan massacre gave some juice to this narrative, and there was even lots of speculation that Beijing would get on board because it faced a threat from religious extremists in Xinjiang. It took Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and Xi Jinping’s hijacking of the narratives of The 9/11 Era to begin a genocide to more or less put this idea down for good.
Looking back, the people who said that the main concerns of The 9/11 Era were a distraction from the most important geopolitical tends of the time were right. Russia has become an openly revanchist power and China appears to be one too. Terrorism turned out to be a fairly transient concern compared to great-power politics, just like the critics said it would. And basically none of the flashpoints in U.S. relations with China and Russia today - most notably Taiwan or Ukraine - are new. In fact, they were all predicted to be the major problems of the future in the 1990s. The U.S. just spent some time doing other stuff first.
Domestic politics doubled down
I think you can make a similar argument about U.S. domestic politics.
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