After 9/11: Humility as Doctrine

Instead of engaging in global intervention, the United States increasingly turns inward.

One first notices how American airports changed after 9/11. Pull out your laptop and take off your shoes, only small quantities of liquids allowed in your luggage – all these policies are new, implemented after the Twin Towers came down. Up until then, checking in at the airport terminal was about as exciting as getting on the bus.

The country changed politically as well, but perhaps not as permanently as was thought early on when the catchphrase was “nothing will ever be the same again.” Rather, the situation brings to mind a pendulum that first swings in one direction and then swings back. When George W. Bush started sketching out policy after the shock began to wear off, he spoke of the “enemies of freedom,” referring to the Taliban, al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. When he ordered U.S. troops into Afghanistan, he emphasized that America was protecting not only its own freedom, but the freedom of everyone who wanted to live without fear. He justified the invasion of Iraq with the same words: America’s goal was to end the tyranny not only in Baghdad but all over the face of the earth. Ten years later, all those phrases have practically disappeared from the American political vocabulary. The new doctrine is one of humility.

On the left, Democrats stress that Americans have to learn that in the global orchestra, they can’t always play first violin. On the right, the tendency of neoconservatives to intervene globally has turned decidedly toward isolationism, which is in concert with the long-repressed American desire to detach itself from the rest of the world.

Even Republicans no longer talk about the war on terror, once Bush’s favorite phrase. The battle now being waged is all about the decaying financial situation. Barack Obama, once revered as a global messiah, is now talking about paying bills and economizing. For him, repairs at home have become more important than nation-building in faraway places.

There is little doubt that Americans consider the last ten years a lost decade. The financial crisis of 2008 damaged the superpower’s reputation, as did the debt squabbles during the summer of 2011. Whereas just five years ago, the United States had lectured China on becoming a responsible participant in the global economic system, it is now the Chinese who lecture the United States about impending bankruptcy.

Guantanamo and the espionage clauses of the Patriot Act were surely not the legacy the nation had hoped for in the patriotic idealism that followed the 9/11 attacks. And Obama, who gave in far too easily after his confident promise to close Guantanamo, left too much unchanged.

On the plus side, al-Qaida has been weakened with the symbolic death of its leader, Osama bin Laden. Otherwise, 9/11 marks the end of a decade that everyone would just as soon quickly forget. Whoever wants to see that decade in a positive light might want to recall Winston Churchill’s observation: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.”