9/11 Transforms U.S. Foreign Policy

The terrorist attacks carried out on September 11, 2001, by the jihadi group al Qaeda were the deadliest in U.S. history. Washington’s military response would follow swiftly—as Fouad Ajami noted in Foreign Affairs that fall, “there is now the distinct thunder of war.” The United States would be wading deep into a complex battle “over Arab and Muslim identity in the modern world,” Michael Scott Doran argued a few months later. “Washington had no choice but to take up the gauntlet,” he wrote. “But it is not altogether clear that Americans understand fully this war’s true dimensions.” 

Proposals advanced in Foreign Affairs mirrored—and, in some cases, accelerated—a broader shift in U.S. foreign policy. In early 2002, Martin Indyk contended that reducing the terrorist threat would require an overhaul of Washington’s approach to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab allies “whose policies are compromising U.S. national security.” And Kenneth Pollack urged the United States to “invade Iraq, eliminate the present regime, and pave the way for a successor”—even though, as he acknowledged, doing so was “not a necessary component of the war on terrorism.”

This building momentum also drew sharp criticism. As Washington “enlarged and complicated” its mission, Madeleine Albright wrote in 2003, it “needlessly placed obstacles in [its] own path” by failing to convince partners to back U.S. policies. G. John Ikenberry issued a more dire warning. What began with a response to terrorism was morphing into a “neoimperial grand strategy” in which the United States used force and meted out justice at will, he argued. Such a strategy would only “trigger antagonism and resistance,” leaving the country “in a more hostile and divided world.”