The Lesson from Sept. 11

Ten years after the attacks on New York and Washington, America has not lost its leadership. However, it is no longer the unique force of a more uncertain world. Analysis by Christian Makarian, writer of the L’Express editorial.

Looking back ten years, the main effect of Sept. 11 has been to appear as a striking symbol, a historical landmark, an essential turning point. Much like the Sarajevo assassination in 1914, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, or the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the collapse of the Twin Towers and the simultaneous attack on the Pentagon confirm not only that “history is tragic,” but marks above all a historical date which must be patiently deciphered.

It is not that terrorism indeed won a victory that day; this remains certain. Even though terrorism, let alone the general uprising of the Arabic-Muslim world against the West, which wished to provoke al-Qaida, became henceforth a constitutive fact, ineradicable from international relations. Despite the indisputable drawing force exercised by bin Laden, his time has passed and he has gone from life to death, 10 years after having ravaged New York, without showing any great emotion. Even the Arab world has completely changed direction and is searching desperately for another way to represent at last the symbiosis between modernity and Muslim identity — be it the contrary to what Bin Laden aspired.

What remains of Sept. 11 is anything but confrontation. It marks — effectively — the entry into a new world, one which was thought to have been born in 1989. The new world characterizes itself by the end of the superpower, according to the term penned by Hubert Védrine. Far from losing their total supremacy in a number of areas — military, scientific, technological, cultural, and so many others as well — the United States is on the other hand seeing their imperial pretension in its universal and non-argued definition melt away, like wax to a flame. America is not yet going backward, but it is clearly ceasing to advance, or rather, to advance itself as the world’s unique power which all particles revolve around.

The idea of ‘leading from behind,’ driven by Obama, is the result of this historical caesura. It is not a split, it is a breaking of rhythm. On the other side of the USSR, America is not empowered to collapse and disappear as an entity or utopia; but it must now share, compile, and openly compromise. That in itself is a progression; The lesson of Sept. 11. The attack on America’s heart rang like the death knell of this confused and arrogant period — between 1989 and 2011 — during which the planet functioned on a sole cylinder. The motor now runs off several non-synchronized cylinders. The loss of visibility is therefore great and the promising signs are as multiple as are the signals of despair.

But it is certain the ‘leading from behind’ will deeply change international relations, and that the impact of this strategic progression is impossible to measure ‘a priori’ today. For example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many surprises and turnarounds are waiting. Let us take a single example, that of the Arab Spring. While the United States has notoriously failed to impose democracy in Iraq, it is now the democratic aspiration of Arab populations that is going to weaken the regimes and threaten the strategic American positions in the Middle East. The world is more uncertain than ever, but the cultures and the latitudes of the hopes of humanity are also more and more close to each other. The law of ‘the wicked’ has not triumphed; the reign of ‘good’ has not prevailed. Everything is more complex, but also more productive. Ten years after Sept. 11, 2001, the earth is yet to become civilized.