Endgames and openings: turning a page in history | thearticle

I‘m afraid it’s time for one of those obligatory homilies on how the New Year marks the beginning of something fresh and perhaps historic. Unfortunately, I don’t have the vision to make any

such claim but what I can see — along with even the most casual observer — is that 2021 marked the end of something of real historical significance: the flawed strategic adventure of the

Wars of 9/11. We know that a new strategic epoch opened at 8:46 AM Eastern Daylight Time on the 11th of September 2001, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the

World Trade Centre in New York. In the popular imagination, the same epoch ended with the grotesque events that accompanied the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the last US aircraft

leaving Kabul at 11:59 PM local time on the 31st of August 2021. It was, though, a debacle long foretold, with the Doha Agreement between the Trump Administration and the Taliban signed in

February 2020 giving form to the policy first laid out with the publication of the Pentagon’s quadrennial National Defense Strategy of the United States on the 16th January 2018. The latter

document was a tract which made crystal clear that America would quit the onerous responsibilities of counter-insurgency in dusty places and turn its attention again to great power

competition. And so after less than 17 years an historical epoch ended, not with a culminating battle, the fall of an enemy capital or the signing of instruments of surrender, but with the

publication of a departmental memo. The Wars of 9/11 came in with a bang and went out with a whimper. It all seems so ahistorical. Where are the long rhythms and great events we associate

with Byzantine or Habsburg power, the Baghdad caliphates or even the short 20th century that started with German aggression in 1914 and ended with Soviet exhaustion in 1989? The Wars of 9/11

seem entirely separate from what came before and leave an uncertain legacy for what will come after. We don’t like history to be so disembodied; we like to join the dots. Yet there is a

passing resemblance to events 200 years ago which may provide some context. The French Revolution did not come out of quite the same clear blue sky as Flight 11 but it caused an equally

unforeseen and profound strategic shock. It provoked decades of convulsive war in Europe which, in this case and at Waterloo, did end with a culminating battle and the occupation of the

enemy capital. The Napoleonic era came in with a bang and went out with one too, but it had that same self-contained feel as the times we have just lived through — unconnected with the

immediate past and with no obvious shaping effect on the immediate future. At least that’s how it probably felt in 1815, as the Bourbon Restoration re-established the ancient regime and

Europe could consider a return to historical business as usual, much as today we contemplate a world again shaped by great power politics. But _liberté_ and _égalité_ could not be so easily

put back in the bottle, as the events of 1848 and the rise of revolutionary doctrines throughout the 19th century illustrate. None of that was clear as the Congress of Vienna convened and

the trick today for the authors of future policy is not to dismiss the Wars of 9/11 as just a fleeting aberration, but to spot the strategic residue that will shape events in a generation’s

time. Did a great power ever spend so much of its financial, human and strategic capital in pursuit of so little as the United States did in the Wars of 9/11? Probably not, but it’s much

worse than that: America spent its power against an enemy that posed no strategic threat. Jihadist terrorism was never going to bring down the United States; neither was the US Supreme Court

ever going to debate the finer points of Sharia jurisprudence. The most that it could have done is invite an illiberal response from government that might have limited cherished freedoms

and provoked a popular response; in itself, it could never be more than a strategic irritant. America, with its robust constitution, favourable geography and — when they’re paying attention

— efficient intelligence and investigative agencies could have responded to 9/11 with considered maturity and treated the attack as a criminal act, demanding a civil response. Instead,

animated first by revenge and later by hubris, it treated 9/11 as a casus belli and embarked on a campaign in Afghanistan that had some strategic coherence and a campaign in Iraq that had

none. By the middle of 2003, America was fighting a war largely unrelated to the attack on New York, for purposes that became increasingly ill-defined and elusive, leading ineluctably to the

fiasco of the exit from Kabul. Taken in aggregate, the American handling of the Wars of 9/11 counts as one of the most egregious examples of strategic self-harm available to history. So

much for the page marked 2021; what about the one marked 2022? Again, I claim no powers of prediction but I am willing to chance a few observations. The first is that a conventional wisdom

has arisen that, given the profligacy with which the West has spent its power since 1989, no assumptions of automatic primacy can any longer attach to Western military power or the liberal

democratic political model. As far as military power is concerned, both China and Russia have recognised it’s a mug’s game to take on America on a conventional battlefield that plays to all

its strengths. Informed by the strategic confusion of America during the Wars of 9/11, both have abandoned the idea of warfare as a formal condition bound by certain protocols, the

reciprocal exchange of lethal violence and conducted on a piece of geography recognisable as a battlefield. In its place, they have created a concept of competition where the quest for

marginal advantage is constant, ubiquitous and conducted wherever possible short of the threshold of war by instruments that range from cyber operations to the theft of intellectual

property. To facilitate this, both have created vertically integrated national capabilities that link localised information operations at the bottom to nuclear release at the top, providing

an intellectually coherent framework within which to escalate and de-escalate with far greater agility than traditional strategic models permit. In comparison, America looks ponderous and

over-reliant on the military instrument of national strategy; Nato has its hands full trying to maintain institutional unity; Europe continues to flirt with the vanity project of strategic

autonomy; and Britain has just created a Ranger Regiment that seems designed to fight the Afghan campaign again, but better. As first movers in a fast adapting strategic environment, Russia

and China look to be well ahead of the field. And it doesn’t get any better when we turn to politics. November 2022 will probably see an American system gridlocked by Democratic Party losses

in the mid-term congressional elections. In contrast, in Beijing the perfectly orchestrated theatre of the 20th party congress will showcase the Chinese Communist Party operating at the

height of its slick powers. The juxtaposition of a sclerotic and impotent liberal democratic model with an assured and seamlessly purposive autocracy will be proclaimed by Chinese

propagandists and employed as a weapon in the unceasing search for competitive advantage. All of which implies the deeper truth that America’s internal problems are now more pressing than —

and a distraction from — its external relationships. The bitter divisions over cultural identity are perfectly illustrated by the impact of the pandemic. A major external threat like

Covid-19 would normally be expected to bring US society together but social distancing, mask wearing and vaccinations have become divisive tokens of the affiliations of red and blue

Americans. The Biblical dictum borrowed by Abraham Lincoln — “a house divided against itself cannot stand” — is as apposite now as it was in 1858 and the situation is unlikely to be improved

by any Second Coming of Donald Trump to presidential office. So, a superficial reading of the runes looks pretty grim for the West. Too grim, in fact, and there is the danger of being

trapped in a relativist analysis that simply extrapolates the failures of the 9/11 epoch into a general decline of the West. Russia may have moved beyond purposive autocracy and into tyranny

but it remains masterful in the way that it huffs and puffs to conceal fundamental weaknesses. The Kremlin’s understanding of how to handle the strategic calculus of hybrid engagement gave

it a free run in the Crimea, but it looks in danger of overplaying its hand in its demonstrations on the Ukrainian border. China has every chance of getting old before it gets rich and it

will not be able to ignore forever debt that now stands at 300 per cent of GDP. It talks a good fight in the South China Sea but what is now the world’s largest navy is still hopelessly

ill-equipped to guarantee the sea lines of communication upon which its economy is totally dependent. Neither country has the mix of power projection plus economic and political influence on

a global scale that alone confers superpower status. By those criteria, America still stands alone. It also enjoys energy and food security, healthy demographics, the world’s finest higher

education system and possession of the world’s reserve currency. With the trilateral AUKUS security pact it has linked the two separate alliance systems that fought the Pacific and European

campaigns in the Second World War into a global instrument, while the Quad alliance of India, Japan, Australia and America met for its first plenary session in September. Quite simply,

America’s national vocation is to think big and it is far better equipped to address the next strategic epoch than the last. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of its strategic demise are

greatly exaggerated. At one level, I might congratulate myself that this article has a crack at some of the big issues of the day. At another level, I am bound to be disappointed that my

imagination is trapped in the speculative trivia of an international system that has no mechanisms to take on the really big stuff, like decarbonisation of the global economy, disease

control or the advent of novel technologies like artificial intelligence. By itself, artificial intelligence could have the civilisational impact of another Renaissance, the wealth creating

impact of another industrial revolution and a strategic impact that might render nuclear weapons obsolete. Now that would really turn a page in history — next year, perhaps.