A unilateral America in a post-unipolar world

When the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks took place, the United States was at the pinnacle of its power. A decade earlier, its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, had disintegrated. Russia was still struggling to emerge from the post-Soviet chaos while China remained a close economic partner of the U.S. In eastern Europe, Washington had successfully undertaken military interventions, while the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had completed its first round of expansion into Russia’s neighbourhood. The U.S. also maintained a formidable military presence in West Asia. Then came 9/11.The U.S., then the world’s sole superpower, was understandably angry and anguished. It launched “a global war on terrorism”, with Taliban-run Afghanistan, which had hosted al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, as its first target. But the war that then U.S. President George W. Bush launched went far beyond the remit of a fight against terrorism. Twenty-five years later, the U.S. remains bogged down in West Asia, its rivals are more assertive elsewhere, while the threat of terrorism has become more dispersed across West and South Asia and Africa.Even though it was conceived as a transborder fight against terrorist organisations, primarily al-Qaeda, the war eventually evolved into a series of regime-change wars, driven by the goal of reshaping Afghanistan, West Asia and North Africa in accordance with American interests and worldview. Mr. Bush and his neoconservative allies believed that a “deficit of democracy” bred terrorism, and hence, the spread of democracy became a theoretical imperative of the war on terror. In Afghanistan, U.S. forces toppled the Taliban regime and established a new state — the Islamic Republic. The war forced al-Qaeda to disperse into autonomous cells and retreat, but it did not defeat the organisation.Three consequencesIn less than two years, the U.S. invaded Iraq. Besides the disastrous humanitarian cost of the war, the invasion had three lasting consequences. First, it diverted U.S. attention from Afghanistan and al-Qaeda, giving the Taliban space to regroup and lay the foundations for an insurgency that would eventually defeat the U.S. — 20 years after the 9/11 attacks.Second, the destruction of the state of Iraq and the chaos that followed offered a new haven for al-Qaeda, which was also seeking to regroup. Before 9/11, Afghanistan had hosted Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. After the Iraq war, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi built the deadliest branch of the jihadist organisation in Iraq. The al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) would outlive Zarqawi, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006, and transform itself into the deadly Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the early 2010s, after Syria, too, plunged into civil war.Third, the collapse of the Saddam regime in Iraq removed a historical buffer between Iran and the U.S.-backed Persian Gulf monarchies. Saddam had fought Iran for eight years in the 1980s. True, he had later become an outcast in the U.S.-Sunni axis, but he remained a staunch enemy of Tehran. After Saddam fell, Iraq’s Shia movements, which had deep historical ties with Tehran but had been suppressed under Saddam, emerged as the new centres of power in Baghdad. Iran steadily expanded its influence in Iraq, strengthening its regional position while also trapping the U.S. in the morass of Iraq.The regime-change wars did not end with Iraq. In 2011, amid the Arab Spring protests, NATO launched an extensive bombing campaign in Libya aimed at “protecting the Libyan people” from Muammar Qaddafi’s forces. The war, which then U.S. President Barack Obama later said he had “led from behind”, brought down the Qaddafi regime but effectively destabilised Libya, once one of the most stable states in Africa. The collapse of the Libyan state opened the floodgates to terrorism across Africa, as weapons were smuggled across borders and fell into the hands of various militias and terrorist groups. Over the past 15 years, jihadist groups have spread their influence across the Sahel, while western influence has continued to diminish on the continent.Cutting the losses, geopolitical chain effectsBy the time Mr. Obama had left the White House, war weariness had set in across Washington. Iraq remained unstable, with growing Iranian influence. In Afghanistan, the Taliban were gaining strength with each passing day, putting American troops under enormous pressure. Libya was divided between rival governments and armed militias. In Syria, a Russian military intervention seemed to have turned the tide, though briefly, in favour of the Assad regime. While the U.S. was struggling to manage its wars in Afghanistan, West Asia and North Africa, China, America’s key systemic rival, continued to rise economically and militarily. Having become bogged down in a strategic maze, the U.S. started cutting its losses and repositioning itself across the wider region.The first move was to accept the fact that the U.S. had lost the war in Afghanistan, the first of its post-9/11 regime-change wars. Donald Trump’s first administration began direct talks with the Taliban, and in February 2020, the U.S. signed an agreement with the Islamist insurgency, committing to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan. On August 15, 2021, two weeks ahead of the deadline, the Taliban entered Kabul.The paradox of the post-9/11 era is that America emerged from the Cold War as the world’s unrivalled power, but its attempts to consolidate that primacy through military interventions gradually eroded the very strategic freedom that unipolarity had given it. Take the case of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The U.S. saw the withdrawal as the swallowing of an inevitable bitter pill: Washington needed to trim its strategic overreach and prepare for the looming contest with China. But two developments since the withdrawal have erected obstacles to America’s strategic repositioning.First, the U.S. pullback from Afghanistan was interpreted as a sign of weakness by its rivals, particularly Russia, which had long sought to alter the post-Soviet security architecture in its rimland. Call it a geopolitical butterfly effect: in February 2022, less than a year after America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia invaded Ukraine, testing the U.S. commitment to Europe.Second, the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel shook the whole of West Asia. A furious Israel announced its own “war on terror”, launching a full-scale attack on Palestinians in Gaza and extending it into a mini-regional war in West Asia, setting off a chain of developments that led to the February 2026 U.S.-Israeli bombing of Iran. America’s failure to learn the lessons of its failed regime-change wars, its inability to strategically decouple itself from Israel, and its hubris, coupled with a refusal to accept the reality that the world has changed, have all contributed to this folly. The American-Israel axis sought to topple the Islamic Republic and reshape the region. But the war has trapped the U.S. in another quicksand in West Asia.The changing global orderSo, 25 years after the 9/11 attacks, terrorist groups have not only survived the war on terror but have also evolved into localised tentacles of a transnational jihadist project spanning multiple geographies. Despite America’s commitment to Europe through NATO, there is a widening chasm in the transatlantic alliance. As traditional U.S. allies grow increasingly frustrated with Washington’s newfound transactionalism, Israel, America’s closest ally in West Asia, is dragging Washington deeper into a regional vortex. While the U.S. remains bogged down in West Asia, China has risen as the second pole of an increasingly fluid multipolar order, while Russia is violently challenging the U.S.-led security architecture in Europe. The U.S., as its ill-conceived Iran war would suggest, continues to act like a unilateral hegemon. But its unilateralism is increasingly at odds with the emerging realities of the post-unipolar world.