On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists who belonged to the Islamic extremist group al Qaeda kidnapped four airplanes and employed them as platforms for suicidal assaults against American targets. One into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, two into the twin World Trade Center towers in New York City, and one into each of the Pentagon buildings in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. The September 11 terrorist attacks claimed the lives of over 3,000 people and had a profound effect on George W. Bush’s presidency as well as American security efforts. The attacks also altered the Bush administration’s tendency for taking unilateral action, which was another outcome. The government’s disregard for internationalism during its first nine months as president upset many allies. Additionally, a substantial number of overseas treaties were rejected by the government for ratification or endorsement. T.R. In-depth discussion of how the 9/11 attacks changed American foreign policy and the fresh views the country adopted will be covered in this article. Finally, the research will look at the goals and purposes of these methods as well as their practical implementations.
The 9/11
On September 11, 2001, terrorist assaults in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, claimed more than 3,000 people. Americans were forced to watch in utter horror (Hassan & Hammond, 2011). They cried as the country’s military operation in Afghanistan came to an end. It had started less than a month after 9/11 and stopped abruptly and unpredictably almost two decades later. The overwhelming majority of Americans who are old enough to recall the disaster can recall where they were and what they had just finished when they first heard the news, demonstrating that people are still affected by the September 11 attacks to this day. An increasing percentage of Americans no longer need to remember the day because they are too young, have not yet given birth, or both. Initial public support for the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq faded over time (Hassan & Hammond, 2011).
It also sheds light on how Americans perceived the threat of domestic terrorism and how the government dealt with it. Understanding how the U.S. has been perceived internationally over the past twenty years in the post-9/11 era shows how a divided country briefly came united in a spirit of sorrow and nationalism (Hassan & Hammond, 2011). Concerns over American foreign policy and the nation’s image in the international world have intensified as the country adapts to the tumultuous withdrawal of American combat soldiers from Afghanistan. Although the Biden administration’s crisis management has come under fire, it is evident from the public’s early assessment of that objective that the majority of individuals endorse the choice to disengage from Afghanistan.
The attacks caused a minimum of $10 billion in infrastructural and property damage, 2,977 non-hijacker casualties, undetermined injuries, and negative long-term health impacts. With 343 and 72 deaths, respectively, it remains to be the deadliest terrorist assault in human history as well as the world’s deadliest episode for law police and firefighters in American history (Hassan & Hammond, 2011). The collapse of the World Trade Center, which also shook international markets, caused significant economic harm to New York City. Many other nations improved their anti-terrorism laws and boosted the authority of their law enforcement and intelligence organizations. The Pentagon was rebuilt in less than a year, as opposed to the eight months it took to restore the World Trade Center site, which was finished in May 2002. There was an increase in nationalistic enthusiasm following 9/11. After the United States and its allies started conducting airstrikes against the Taliban and al-Qaida soldiers in early October 2001, 79% of individuals reported flying an American flag. In response to the 9/11 attacks, 62% of respondents said that a year later, they still frequently felt patriotic. In addition, the people surmounted most political differences to support the government and top national officials. 60% of individuals said they had faith in the federal government in October 2001, a number that had not been attained in the three decades prior and had only started to approach it in the two that followed.
The Impact on Foreign Policy
Measures after the Attack
Bush gave the CIA additional, broad powers to hold and detain anyone who the agency considers to be a “continuous, dangerous issue” to the United States. Before, there were strict restrictions on the CIA’s power to hold particular people without charge. The instruction creates the first of numerous CIA “black sites,” or covert, secret detention and interrogation centers, which eventually expand into a vast global network. In a statement to a joint meeting of Congress, Bush characterized a global, never-ending “war on terror” and declared the establishment of an Office of Homeland Security to defend the United States from further assaults. Up until Obama formally retired the term, the U.S. government referred to both its extensive military response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and its additional, all-encompassing interior security policies as part of the “global war on terror” (Kennedy-Pipe & Rengger, 2006).
Bush also enacted the Patriot Act to bolster the federal government’s response to terrorism. The broad plan includes proposals that would improve communication between law enforcement agencies, tighten financial controls to halt terrorist threats, define and classify terrorist activities differently, and considerably increase domestic monitoring. The federal Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was established by laws Bush signed, taking over management of airport security from for-profit companies. After a string of foiled airline plots, including Richard Reid’s planned shoe explosion in December 2001, the TSA instituted a number of new traveler regulations and restrictions in the subsequent years (Malley & Finer, 2018). Complete screenings, shoe clearance, mark, drink constraints, more thorough inspections of gadgets, and constraints on the in mobility were a few of the controls implemented.
Domestic security has significantly increased due to the protective measures implemented over the previous 20 years, but these gains come at enormous strategic, financial, and lost potential costs (Leffler, 2003). The U.S. has conducted military and intelligence operations in numerous additional countries and commanded multinational alliances in three major military campaigns, the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan and Iraq. Weighing benefits against costs cannot yield certain conclusions. But it becomes obvious that some of the worst problems are consistently brought on by unintentional mistakes in American policy and unexpected effects of well-intentioned efforts.
The United States is now more secure domestically against terrorist strikes from abroad, despite increased domestic terrorist risks. America’s attempts to spread freedom and democracy abroad were unsuccessful. The global freedom situation has stagnated and deteriorated since 2005, and substantial constraints on America’s internal democratic system have increased significantly in recent years. The strategy ledger for the 20-year effort nevertheless paints a somewhat ambiguous image. There have undoubtedly been improvements and signs of progress, but they were expensive and usually led to new issues. However, there are lessons to be learned as the United States adopts a national security strategy for the ensuing 20 years.
Foreign Policing
Perhaps the most common claim was that 9/11 fundamentally altered the rules by which international politics were conducted. Both onlookers and players in the events have made these claims. After all, on September 11, President Bush declared that “night fell on a different planet.” The guy who famously foretold the end of the world twelve years earlier wrote in an essay published the following year, “It would seem that international politics altered directions dramatically after September 11.” Particularly prominent examples include the relationships between the major figures in international politics. 9/11 is supposed to have had a major effect on world politics, moving it away from its previous track and into a new and perhaps hazardous region. The mobilization of aggressiveness is reportedly the most prominent arena in which this has transpired. Restricting, banning, and even outlawing the use of force to settle global problems has dominated official rhetoric and a sizable chunk of foreign affairs practice ever since the UN was founded (Kennedy-Pipe & Rengger, 2006).
To put this in historical perspective, American foreign policy has since the foundation of the republic cycled between competent internationalism, solo colonialism, and unilateral simplicity. Between 1990 and 2001, the post-Cold war, American foreign policy started to shift in favor of an imperial and global agenda. In light of this, American foreign policy has been more constant following 9/11 than many people know. However, the post-9/11 measures mark a significant change in American stated priorities (Crawford, 2004). Primacy, operational design, prevention, and counter dissemination are four key Bush administration programs that serve as particularly illustrative examples of this.
The basis for these policies is the government’s original assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of globalization—advantages and disadvantages that apply to both the US and other nations around the globe. The Bush administration’s rational assessments of the risks and potential remedies are essential components in its pursuit of total security. First, the vulnerability of the United States has not altered. Because of the ingrained anxiety in American foreign policy, the Bush administration responded to these concerns badly and, in some well-known cases, exaggerated them, even if there are actual threats posed by terrorist organizations and WMD that cannot be ignored.
The administration’s seeming disregard of its constraints on knowledge, invincibility, and omnivorousness was the second problem. The United States had to act on a worldwide scale due to its enormous desire for oil and other natural assets, which in some ways made the situation in other nations worse and fueled resentment toward the nation even though it was claimed to have raised living standards there. Contrasting with the infallible superior morality motivating American efforts to propagate secular democracy, trade liberalization, and prosperity is religious devotion’s equally stubborn moral certainty. Radicals and moderate conservatives both actively opposed them (Crawford, 2004).
In the end, the Pentagon and the White House came to an agreement to concentrate U.S. defense policy on the dual dangers of rogue regimes and nuclear proliferation and to equip the armed forces to concurrently combat two significant conflicts in the region. As a result, during the first Bush administration, the American legal strategy started to become more global. “In a world less driven by an imminent threat to Europe and the danger of global [nuclear] war, the size of our force will increasingly be defined by the necessities of regional conflict and presence in peacetime,” said President George H. W. Bush in a speech announcing the new strategy in August 1990. (Crawford, 2004).
According to the Bush administration, the U.S. military had proven its supremacy in Afghanistan. It was now strong, swift, and productive enough to project throughout the globe and provide the intended effects (Crawford, 2004). The quick overthrow of the Taliban regime proved that the Rumsfeld-Franks strategy, employing the local Northern Alliance along with American Special Forces and airpower, was successful. This fundamentally altered what was thought to be politically feasible and desirable and effectively blocked critics while radically changing how the Bush government understood the strategic situation. It was no longer held that the military was “declining,” a claim made during the 2000 presidential campaign to refute justifications for “nation-building.” In conclusion, the Afghan battle and the swift regime change that resulted enabled the United States to foster and convey the narrative of a new hubris, which permitted the administration to reject the lie that the nation was powerless as a direct result of the Vietnam War (Cox & Stokes, 2018).
After the original campaign, some implications for practice where the Bush administration integrated events into an American isolationist story began to emerge, despite its major emphasis on counterterrorism. The Bush administration claims that the Taliban rule was overthrown in the cause of “freedom.” The Bush administration saw the war as a continuation of America’s purported history of promoting democracy; the story grew to incorporate the events of 2001 into a preferred ancestral past. This complex plan thought that internal politics had a significant bearing on American national defense. Afghanistan was described in this context as only the start of a comprehensive liberal agenda.
The Bush Principles
Additionally, the Bush administration has made a number of adjustments to U.S. military doctrine that reveal its comprehension of both its underlying presumptions and its role and mission in the world. Among them are the theories of preemptive war, counter proliferation, maintaining a long-term state of overwhelming military superiority, and shifting from a threat- to a capabilities-based approach (Weber, 2020).
Military Superiority
Preeminence aimed to promote a range of American interests that were expanding and becoming more diverse. Promoting economic growth, safeguarding the world’s trade, and obtaining access to vital markets and resources were some of these enduring strategic interests (Dolan et al., 2018). The government was willing to use force to impose stability because it was worried that any interruption to the globalized trade would erode internal equilibrium. In a similar way, the US doesn’t have any military foes. The Bush administration also included a warning that even weak governments with limited conventional forces should not be assumed to be stable because they may one day become dominant and vowed to use armed power to further and defend business interests in the United States. Maintaining American economic hegemony and halting the growth of military adversaries remained a top focus for the Bush administration (George, 2019).
Capabilities based Planning
In this Planning, predicting an opponent’s capabilities and fighting style was given greater weight than predicting the opponent’s identity or the location of a potential conflict. This idea reflected that decades from now, the United States could not predict with certainty whether a country, group of countries, or non-state actor would threaten the crucial interests of the United States or those of allies and friends. The U.S. military benefited from the best of both worlds since it did not give up threat-based Planning. It met and exceeded not only all conceivable threats but also the threats offered by some opponents. For instance, the United States must control space because others may one day threaten its hegemony.
Preemptive War
The preemptive-war concept included not only justifiable preemption, in which a state takes action in self-defense to avert an imminent attack, but it also evolved into a preventive offensive war philosophy in the context of the preeminence doctrine. It is a strategy of crushing potential rivals before they can upset the balance of power, which must be in the United States’ favor. Preemption is acceptable and legal when one knows an attack is about to happen. It can also be wise. It is an answer to rational fear based on reliable information. However, because a nation could be mistaken about a threat, this approach lost stability. George W. Bush’s government justified the 2003 Iraq war as a preemptive strike.
Counterproliferation Doctrine
The preeminence and preemptive/preventive-war philosophies were both expanded upon by this concept. Here, preventing the acquisition of WMD involved more than just treaties and other international accords; it also involved going to war to stop acquiring such weapons. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was put into effect in the 1970s, with the current nuclear weapon nations promising to first reduce and then eventually destroy their nuclear arsenals. The large nations have not advanced toward nuclear abolition despite possessing lower nuclear arsenals. In fact, the United States was unwilling to rule out the possibility of using nuclear bombs first and discussed using them competitively in the most latest Nuclear Posture Review.
The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had been a mainstay of nuclear security between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, was also cancelled by President Bush on December 13, 2001. According to Bush, the ABM pact renders it more challenging for the national government to develop plans to protect its population against potential missile strikes by terrorist groups or rogue governments. According to the statement, the disengagement would become effective 6 months after that day. A nationwide defense system was pursued by the Bush presidency. The goal of Clinton and Bush’s national missile defense effort was to track down intercontinental missiles and strike them down while they were in the air. The Pentagon’s government’s budget single greatest line item, the initiative was condemned as being difficult to accomplish and predicted to cost US$53 billion between 2004 and 2009 (George, 2019).
When George W. Bush’s administration was in power, nation-building in fragile states gained more traction since it was believed that lawless regions and impoverished populations encouraged establishment of terrorist organizations. But the larger nation-states anticipated due to the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did not materialize. The Obama administration emphasized the disengagement from Iraq while shifting its focus to Afghanistan. US T was lured back in immediately after the Islamic State manifested itself. A few countries become more dysfunctional under both governments. President Donald Trump ended the “war on terror,” but neither he nor President Joe Biden put up a substitute plan to combat terrorism apart from targeted drone kills. Presidents of the United States have given up on their maybe naive belief that they can democratize autocratic and violent nations. Since President George W. Bush, every leader has made an effort to end these wars, leave the Middle East, and concentrate on China’s growth. Biden is the first to be successful in his effort to leave Afghanistan. Analysts have started to question whether maintaining a limited U.S. presence would have better served American and Afghan objectives because it has turned out to be such a blatant humanitarian catastrophe.
References
Hassan, O. and Hammond, A., 2011. The rise and fall of American’s freedom agenda in Afghanistan: counter-terrorism, nation-building and democracy. The international journal of human rights, 15(4), pp.532-551. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2011.561986
Kennedy-Pipe, C. and Rengger, N., 2006. Apocalypse now? Continuities or disjunctions in world politics after 9/11. International Affairs, 82(3), pp.539-552. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2346.2006.00550.x
Crawford, N., 2004. The road to global empire: The logic of U.S. foreign policy after 9/11. https://policycommons.net/artifacts/1342936/the-road-to-global-empire/1955059/
Cox, M. and Stokes, D. eds., 2018. U.S. foreign policy. Oxford University Press.
Weber, C., 2020. Imagining America at war: Morality, politics, and film. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003060529
Haynes, J., 2019. Introduction: The “clash of civilizations” and relations between the West and the Muslim world. The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 17(1), pp.1-10. https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2019.1570756
Dolan, C.J., Lansford, T. and Hayden, P., 2018. In war we trust: the Bush doctrine and the pursuit of just war. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351155762
Kattan, V., 2018. Furthering the ‘war on terrorism’through international law: How the United States and the United Kingdom resurrected the Bush doctrine on using preventive military force to combat terrorism. Journal on the Use of Force and International Law, 5(1), pp.97-144. https://doi.org/10.1080/20531702.2017.1376929
Son, D.D., 2020. The Bush Doctrine Post-Bush: Unilateralism and Pre-Emption in U.S. Foreign Policy, 2009-2020. https://dspace.spbu.ru/bitstream/11701/31842/2/reviewSV_Otzyv_Donovan_ENG.pdf
Dolan, C.J., 2019. Moralizing Violence or a Just Response: The Dimensions and Limitations of the Bush Doctrine. In Justice and Violence (pp. 21-38). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351154642-3/moralizing-violence-response-chris-dolan
George, A.L., 2019. Domestic constraints on regime change in U.S. foreign policy: The need for policy legitimacy. In Change in the international system (pp. 233-262). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429052187-10/domestic-constraints-regime-change-foreign-policy-need-policy-legitimacy-alexander-george
Leffler, M.P., 2003. 9/11 and the past and future of American foreign policy. International Affairs, 79(5), pp.1045-1063. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1468-2346.2003.00354.x
Malley, R. and Finer, J., 2018. The long shadow of 9/11: How counter-terrorism warps U.S. foreign policy. Foreign Aff., 97, p.58. Available at: https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/fora97&div=81&id=&page=
write