Since 9/11: A new world order

The traffic from London’s Heathrow Airport was as stagnant as the air in the slow-moving minicab. But the driver’s opinions flowed freely.

The slight, sad-faced man, a former Pakistani pilot, gripped the wheel grimly as he wrestled the car across the city.

The world was unfair, its inequalities shocking.

The United States was the new Roman Empire, the Muslim world a poodle, cringing at its feet.

And, as the cab heaved to my door, the final salvo.

“That will soon change,” he said. “Something very, very enormous is about to happen. You’ll be hearing about it everywhere. The whole world will know. Believe me, it will change everything.”

That was September 10, 2001: the last day of the world as we knew it.

A decade has passed and the cab driver’s curse has come true in ways few could have predicted.

A superpower’s pedestal has cracked and the tremors have shaken half the world. Petty tyrants were toppled and a new order of uncertainty arrived in countries where peace and prosperity once seemed guaranteed.

Today, the echoes of the 9/11 cataclysm have grown fainter. The buzz in the streets and offices is not of terrorist threats, but fear of a rebounding recession, one that has been stalking us since the global economic meltdown of 2008.

A decade after 9/11, the world has moved on. The global community is pulled by many strings and no one knows how strong or fragile they might be, or in what direction they will be jerked.

The New World Order is not what it was on that day before 9/11, when a sole superpower was the colossus on the global horizon.

Now, while the U.S. sags and Europe slides, China flexes its muscles. India follows on its heels with Brazil and Russia alongside. The nuclear club is expanding, and with it uncharted global influence. A multipolar world looms with more opportunity than certainty.

But the journey to 2011 can also be traced back to the blackened ruins of the twin towers on the day the geopolitical earth moved.

“There’s a contemporary feeling of things being out of control,” says sociologist Frank Furedi of University of Kent, author of The Politics of Fear.

“It’s an unravelling of security in a terrorist century, beginning with the World Trade Center, but going off into other things. Sept. 11 stands out as a marker, but its meaning has changed 10 years on. We’re left with a more divided, less confident public life.”

When Al Qaeda sent its deadly arrows into the heart of America, it was striking at a country that seemed invulnerable. The United States had seen off the mighty Soviet Union, coaxed reluctant allies into line, intimidated foes and dominated the economic, military and political landscape.

Suddenly it felt besieged, wounded and alone. It had been caught unawares, not by a hostile state but a ragtag band of cave-dwellers.

For the presidency of George W. Bush it was a galvanizing moment. His second term had begun with little interest in the Middle East and Central Asia. Now attention focused on the region like a laser beam.

“It was a dramatic shift,” says international affairs professor Stephen Walt of Harvard University. “Suddenly people in the administration were convinced it was a potentially grave threat to American interests and it was time to clean house.”

The housecleaning began with Afghanistan, where the Taliban was swept from power with head-spinning speed. And the hawks close to Bush were emboldened to carry out plans that had gained little traction until the Al Qaeda attacks.

“The neo-conservatives who were on record before the election urging an American effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein were handed an opportunity to put the plan into action,” said Walt.

The Iraq war distracted from Afghanistan, where UN officials called in vain for more troops to guard against a resurgent Taliban. Even as Washington toppled Saddam it was losing its way in both countries, which were fertile grounds for new insurgency and terrorist recruitment.

“The most important fact of Sept. 11 was to spur a very dramatic increase in the footprint of the American empire, contributing to a very serious case of ‘imperial overstretch,’” says Peter Beinart of the New America Foundation, author of The Icarus Syndrome.

To carry out both wars, American resources were stretched to the snapping point, setting the stage for long-term economic as well as military and political difficulties.

“In adding up the quantifiable costs of the war it is hard not to come up with a number in excess of $3 trillion,” said Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, co-authors of The Three Trillion Dollar War.

“The huge deficits to finance the war will have their toll in the long run. They help crowd out private investments that would have stimulated the economy far more than the war expenditures,” they wrote in The Guardian. “With 40 per cent of the funds borrowed from abroad, Americans will be sending interest payments abroad — lowering living standards at home.”

Bogged down in two wars, America was also embattled on the home front. After the launch of the “war on terror” in 2001, some 1,271 government bodies and nearly 2,000 private contractors were dedicated to working on counterterrorism, according to a Washington Post survey. More than 850,000 people — the population of Edmonton — were given high-level security clearance.

As terrorist attacks on Britain, Spain and India horrified Americans, and fear of another Al Qaeda assault mounted, there was little opposition to the expansion of homeland security, or the erosion of civil liberties that accompanied it.

More serious was the blowback overseas.

As the number of Muslims detained, deported in “rendition” programs and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay without internationally accepted rights increased, the initial sympathy for America turned to anger and anxiety in the Muslim world.

Images of prisoners shackled, abused and humiliated in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison turned many against the United States.

By 2006, the number of people in Arab countries who favoured the U.S. reached a low for that decade, says pollster James Zogby, who heads the Arab American Institute and does regular surveys of the Arab world.

“It was a combination of Iraq seeming out of control, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the Palestinian issue, which was still unsolved. They sucked the life out of the relationship with the U.S.,” he said.

When Bush set out to “reconfigure” the Middle East by displacing Saddam, his advisers saw the Holy Grail of a peaceful, Israel-and-America-friendly region in sight. By defeating one of the major tyrants, they reckoned, smaller ones would fall into line — or just fall.

“The grand scheme didn’t pan out,” says Walt. “The neo-conservatives didn’t understand there is a difference between overthrowing and recreating a government. Instead of putting friendly people in power, and putting Iran on notice, we have a situation where Iran’s influence in Iraq and the region is greater than before.”

Shiite, Persian Iran had been isolated in a mainly Sunni Arab neighbourhood. But, says Vali Nasr of Tufts University in Foreign Affairs, “by liberating and empowering Iraq’s Shiite majority, the Bush administration helped to launch a broad Shiite revival that will upset the sectarian balance in Iraq and the Middle East for years to come.”

While the Iraq war strengthened Iran’s hand in Iraq, its influence also solidified in Lebanon through Israel’s enemies Hamas and Hezbollah, now leading the Lebanese government.

But a realignment of power was also taking shape in Afghanistan, where Iran expanded its influence through donations to the government, and rising economic star India played a growing role in reconstruction — unsettling historic foe Pakistan.

“The extent of Indian involvement is a real problem for Pakistan,” says Paul Rogers, a professor of peace studies at University of Bradford. “It’s always seen Afghanistan as its line of defence against its primary enemy. And the Indians see Pakistan as a potential haven for terrorism, while looking over their shoulder at China.”

China, meanwhile, was gaining ground as the U.S.’s Iraq invasion alienated both friends and enemies. The chequebook diplomacy of the rapidly rising power was winning new allies.

Now its foreign investment is vast and its growth spectacular, even while the West is mired in economic angst. It has overtaken Japan as the world’s second biggest economy, although experts disagree on whether it can match the U.S.’s world stature within this century.

For many that is the new narrative of the post-9/11 world, and one that will resonate for decades to come.

“The tragedy of 9/11 was that so many people came to believe the real struggle was against jihadist militants,” says Beinart. “That distracted us from the more profound struggle — not against the losers of the international system, the fanatical ideologues — but people who are succeeding in challenging the notions that America is the most successful political and economic model around.”