A striking phrase resonated at an international conference that convened last week in Geneva to evaluate global strategic change. It encapsulated the 21st century’s profoundest development in this way: the three most important words of the post 9/11 decade were not the ‘War on terror’ but ‘Made in China’*.
This reflects a theme that has increasingly been dominating the international intellectual discourse especially in the West. It is that while the so-called ‘war on terror’ became the overarching preoccupation of the US and its allies, the defining characteristic of this decade has been the spectacular shift in power from the West to the rest. This geopolitical change is the enduring one even though the rhetoric of war and terror has received more media attention.
This year’s annual conference organised by the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) coincided with the tenth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11. This focused the discussion not just on the dramatic changes sweeping the Arab world but on what the decade following 9/11 has entailed: the dilemmas and issues thrown up but not always resolved, and long term trends and their implications for international security policy.
The conference, which assembled over 300 delegates from more than 30 countries to assess ‘new strategic landscapes’, heard – as one would expect – fresh and diverse perspectives from an impressive array of experts and practitioners.
Different answers were offered to the question of what the tenth anniversary of 9/11 meant. For many it marked the closing of a decade-long cycle of war, chaos and security paranoia. Hope was voiced that the passing of the era of “security wars” would yield “collaborative” rather than unilateral leadership. This is especially so as the US adjusts to the relative diminution in its power in a world where the economic centre of gravity has shifted to Asia and when the age of America’s global primacy has ended.
In fact the US, distracted by the protracted ‘war on terror’, confronted its consequences in the shape of debilitating financial crises due in part to the debts contracted in this decade. Ten years later, this has urged the Obama administration to give priority to nation-building at home and begin disengaging from military interventions abroad.
As one speaker put it, more than September 2001, it was September 2008 – when the financial crisis erupted – which was more far reaching in its effects that reshaped the global strategic landscape. Economic troubles have forced the US into a mode of ‘managed retrenchment’ from a phase of intense kinetic operations and security surges.
There was general consensus that for all the hyperbole, 9/11 did not change the world. The world has changed since 9/11 but not necessarily because of it. Professor Francois Heisbourg, IISS chairman, chose to describe this ‘new age’ as that driven by the inexorable forces of globalisation. The 21st century, he said, had started with ‘strategic upsets’ and this was likely to remain its defining feature. In that sense the 9/11 attacks were a symbolic opening of the door signalling this trend. Globalisation was both a force for good and for violent transformation, wrenching in its consequences.
For Heisbourg and several others at the conference it is this transformational potential of globalisation that has been a hallmark of the 21st century. This also meant, as many delegates pointed out, that there were no oceans for countries to retreat behind. This obliges all nations – regardless of location, power, faith and nationality – to find a way of living together.
There was considerable agreement that the US had overreacted to the 9/11 attacks, tragic as they were. This also reflected a common theme in many analyses of the post 9/11 decade in the international media. Several thoughtful reviews have concluded that America’s response to the 9/11 attacks was a fateful, “wrong turning” that plunged the world into conflict, fear and paranoia and led to nullification of the very standards and values – of civil liberties and human rights – that the US and its allies claimed to uphold.
The exaggerated military response ensued from the way the 9/11 attacks were viewed: as a war waged on America not a criminal act. War had to be answered by war and kinetic action rather than law-enforcement. The conference heard several speakers debate this and refer to the diversity in approach between the US and Europe. Washington’s conceptualisation of the threat as a ‘global insurgency’ led to overreaction because it conflated the threat and militarised the response. As one speaker pointed out only when the US acquired better intelligence about Al-Qaeda, for which the capture and interrogation of Abu Zubaydah was a break through, was it able to fashion a ‘more normal’ response.
Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt highlighted the heavy price that the decade of war and destruction exacted: loss of western political credibility, compromise of values and polarisation between the Islamic and Western world. This made it a lost decade in that aspect. He could have added that a consequence of the 9/11 response was for the West to see Muslims including diasporas living in their countries through the lens of counter-terrorism.
For all the debate on the tactics, costs and policy dilemmas of the wars and campaigns against terror, there was little discussion of how western foreign policy had spawned or perpetuated unjust situations and unresolved disputes in the Muslim world and thus fuelled the very forces it sought to contain. When the British writer, Patrick Seale urged that attention be addressed to the “motivations” for violent acts or what we in the Muslim world call “root causes”, this got little traction from the panel of speakers on this issue.
What did echo during the debate were comments by Eliza Manningham-Muller, former head of M15, Britain’s domestic spy agency, from her recent lectures. She had stressed the resolution of global terrorism through politics and economics rather than arms and intelligence. Her warnings and those from others that the 2003 US-UK military intervention in Iraq would increase not diminish the terrorist threat were ignored with disastrous consequences.
The sessions on the ‘Arab spring’ were among the most hopeful in their prognosis of the trends ahead. But there was acknowledgement that this chapter was an unfinished one and could see diverse outcomes. There were also cautionary voices that the revolution of rising expectations that produced the Arab upheaval could yet turn into revolutions of failed expectations. Nevertheless there was optimism that what are quintessentially movements about justice and dignity would lead to democratic order and stability and so demonstrate that the soft power of globalisation was a more effective antidote to terrorist violence than the hard power of military intervention.
There were many take aways from the two-day conference. An insightful one was that the most consequential change in the last decade occurred not in the theatre of war but in the global economy. This led to a redistribution of global power between a rising Asia and an America diminished by military over reach and challenged by economic crisis.
While no one believed this would lead to an isolationist America, it did suggest that a domestically pre-occupied America might now engage in more consultative international conduct. Some lamented an America “leading from behind” as signalled by the Libyan intervention in which Washington avoided direct engagement leaving European powers to spearhead the Nato campaign.
But most delegates including this scribe felt that it remained unclear what kind of international leadership a greatly transformed world will see in the decades ahead. There was no single template out there in a global setting of such flux and uncertainty.
- The phrase seems to have come from a remark by an economist quoted in a Financial Times article, The end of hegemony (September 6, 2011).