Some Reflections on the 16th Anniversary of 9/11
Sixteen years after September 11, 2001, the United States has not experienced a comparable attack on the homeland. It has crippled the core of al-Qa’ida and significantly increased its ability to project military power across the world through special operations raids and drone strikes. Unfortunately, though, it is difficult to argue that America’s counterterrorism efforts have, on balance, accrued strategic dividends.
The New York Times reported last month that “the Taliban now control or dominate 48 of [Afghanistan’s] roughly 400 administrative areas, the most they have held since the Americans ousted them from power in 2001.” Iraq, meanwhile, having (for now) defeated the Islamic State, must undertake what one Middle East correspondent assesses will be “one of the largest urban reconstruction projects since WWII.” It is quite plausible, moreover, that a variant of the Islamic State will incubate during that time. And chaos elsewhere in the Middle East — especially in Syria and Yemen — will only heighten pressure on U.S. policymakers to, once more, prioritize that region.
The duration and intensity of America’s interventions in the Middle East have prevented it from seriously recalibrating its role there, even amid the profound upheaval the region continues to undergo. Yet the longer the United States postpones that reassessment, the more likely it is that inertia will overtake strategy as the basis of its policy. It would also prove more challenging for the United States to accept some of the fundamental lessons of the past 15 years — foremost among them being that the ability of military power to achieve political outcomes is limited. And this is all not to mention the diminished influence the United States would have in shaping the evolution of the Asia-Pacific, whose regional economic integration is proceeding apace — increasingly on China’s terms.
What began as a narrow effort to attack al-Qa’ida’s base in Afghanistan has morphed into a global struggle against a dizzying, ever-changing roster of outfits. As presently conceived, it could well exist in perpetuity: While America’s technical capabilities for degrading terrorist groups are likely to grow more precise and lethal, those groups’ adaptivity and resilience seem poised to increase in parallel. According to Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Philip Gordon, moreover, policymakers have yet to define the campaign’s operational objective. He asked a decade ago: “[W]hat does victory — or defeat — mean in a war on terror? Will this kind of war ever end? How long will it take? Would we see victory coming? Would we recognize it when it came?”
The difficulty of recognizing victory in the context of counterterrorism points to a broader conclusion, one that will hold truer as America’s relative decline continues and disorder in world affairs intensifies. Given the intractability of many foreign policy challenges — whether Syria’s ongoing unraveling or North Korea’s nuclear odyssey — America’s successes abroad are increasingly likely to be quiet, small, and incremental. This realization runs counter both to Americans’ (commendable) can-do disposition and the impulses of social media, which is quick to pronounce failure and equate restraint with weakness. But policymakers must heed it if they are to husband the country’s power prudently. At a minimum, they must be unapologetic in proceeding from a hierarchy of national interests: A foreign policy that accords equal priority to every threat and equal attention to each crisis will inevitably collapse under the weight of its own ambition. They must accordingly make a more concerted effort to distinguish between phenomena that they can evidently influence, those that they may be able to shape, and those that are largely insusceptible to their interventions. Take, for example, the “great convergence” that is occurring between developed and developing countries; while the United States should be proactive in strengthening trade and investment links with the latter group, it cannot prevent the world’s economic center of gravity from shifting.
Two additional points bear mention. First, while it is appropriate for any reflection on the anniversary of 9/11 to begin by taking stock of America’s counterterrorism efforts and its role in the world, such consideration should extend further: Americans should remember why their country has achieved preeminence. While the United States has the world’s most powerful armed forces and the largest economy, it is a “superpower” for more intangible reasons. It established an order that has prevented a third world war, averted a repetition of the Great Depression, and facilitated the renaissance of many European and Asian economies. One need not indulge any hyperbole about the fairness or liberalism of that system to appreciate the gains in human welfare that have occurred under its auspices. America also retains an unrivaled capacity for reinvention and renewal, rooted in congenital optimism, relentless entrepreneurialism, and an enviable ability to incorporate people from across the world into its unfolding narrative. And it exemplifies the promise of an inclusive, tolerant society; Tom Malinowski, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor during the second term of the Obama Administration, explains that “[w]hen America is blamed for compromising this ideal, it is because the world counts on the country to live up to it.” Disengaging from the postwar order and abandoning the pretense of sustaining Malinowski’s ideal would undermine America’s ability to shape this century’s geopolitics.
Second, the preceding observations will matter little if America is unable to detoxify its political climate: No country can conduct a sustainable foreign policy if its internal divides become its defining characteristics. The more that Americans of different political convictions regard each other as incorrigible adversaries, rather than fellow travelers, the more likely it is that those leaders who happen to be in office will focus more on reversing the legacy of their predecessors than on forging one of their own; mutual retaliation, then, rather than shared purpose, becomes the central driver of governance. While such an outcome is not preordained, neither is it out of the question.
On the 16th anniversary of one of America’s darkest days, then, it behooves policymakers and citizens alike to consider not only the role they wish for their country to play abroad, but also the society they wish to nurture at home.
Ali Wyne is a Nonresident Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, Security Fellow with Truman National Security Project, and New Leader with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Views expressed are his own.
