The US felt not only under attack, but also vulnerable, as a result of the 11 September 2001 attacks. It was the first time in many decades that large sections of the American public had felt that an enemy could reach their homes, a feeling that they had hardly ever experienced during the four decades of the Cold War.
The fact that the enemy seemed elusive and badly organised, and for many came across as bands of seemingly mediaeval men, both exacerbated the sense of strangeness of the danger and the desire for revenge.
As a result, America unleashed its power not merely to destroy the groups that had attacked it and were hiding in the Asian steppes, but also and primarily to show the world and its own people that it could and was willing to use its unrivalled military power to punish those who had attacked it and to deter those who might be thinking of challenging it.
The latter point was key. In attacking Iraq in 2003, irrespective of the rhetoric about Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, America was not avenging the attacks of 2001, which Iraq had no links to. Instead, it was sending a clear message to the world about its ability to shatter any existing or would be challenger to the America-centred world order. In Iraq, America blatantly emphasised that it would sustain, by force if needed, the global order that emerged after the end of the Cold War.
Some observers argued that the American response to 9/11 was blinded by fury and that America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were strategic blunders. There were certainly elements of that. But there was also a strategic calculus. America wanted potential challengers, primarily but not only China, to see the capabilities of the American war machine and to understand America’s willingness to deploy these capabilities in far-off lands.
In so doing, America was ready to mobilise hundreds of thousands of American troops in different theatres of military operations, initially in Central Asia (Afghanistan) and later in multiple locations in the Middle East and the Gulf.
The message was received and registered by China and Russia, but also by many other countries that were both allies and foes of the United States.
The message was also intended internally for the American public and was intended to say that the era of peace, the decade of the 1990s after the end of the Cold War, was now over and that America was at war again. Militant Islamism, the Taliban, and Iraq under former president Saddam Hussein became the faces of enemies that the American imagination and its myriads of highly creative agents, from East Coast print houses to West Coast drama production studios, could conjure up in different forms.
But the underlying emotional current that was repeatedly pushed to the American public was that American values, interests, ways of life, and supremacy were far from secure and that they needed to be protected through America’s might.
This message has remained consistent through the Republican and Democratic Party administrations over the past two decades.
It is also interesting that what appeared to be the dismal political results of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars never lessened America’s penchant for using its military might abroad. It is true that influential circles, whether in the Republican and Democratic Parties or in key state institutions, have internalised the lesson of how challenging nation-building in the Global South can be. One of the most interesting exercises in serious strategic studies in America over the past decade has precisely reflected on the differences between the nation-building experiences in Germany and Japan in the two decades after World War II and the experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past two decades.
That aside, America understood that it must significantly dilute its nation-building endeavours. But there was a flip side to this understanding – that military might and the top-down imposition of American will, largely through force, have bigger roles to play in the world in the 21st century.
The Middle East became the primary theatre of successive deployments of American military might. It proved successful. America managed not only to achieve all of its military objectives in the Middle East, but it also significantly expanded its military presence across a region that remains of central importance to controlling the world’s key energy sources and the world’s busiest trade routes.
Military success in the Middle East, along with an imperial mindset in a historical moment in which America was indeed an unchallenged global hegemon, gave rise to other forms of ambitions to secure the American world order. Once again, the Middle East was the theatre of these ambitions.
As the next article in this series will show, the Middle East has become over the past two decades the ground for testing large-scale socio-political experiments that have effectively reshaped the Arab world and have had spillover effects on its key neighbours of Iran, Israel, and Turkey.
The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 October, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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