Just about everything has changed since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC 10 years ago. The contours of the geopolitical and economic landscapes have been redrawn. The curious thing is how little the changes owe to 9/11.
This sounds counterintuitive after the tumult of the past decade. The US waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Violent Islamism transformed America’s view of the world, and the world’s view of America. Everything stood still for George W. Bush’s “war on terror” – or so it seemed. Al-Qaeda is still with us; so is Guantánamo.
During a visit to Washington in the spring of 2003, I heard a senior US official explain how the invasion of Iraq would establish the new rules of the international game. Forget all that mush about multilateralism, this official told an audience of (mostly mushy) Europeans. This was the age of the single superpower. With or without allies, the US would avenge the felling of the twin towers. We were present, I wrote then, at the destruction of the multilateral order.