While the attacks of 11 September 2001 galvanised the world against a new enemy, terrorism, it also united old adversaries and redrew the outlines of world order, writes Amin Shalabi /p With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had played a central role in defining the shape of the global order and the rules of international relations for nearly half a century, analysts proclaimed the dawn of a new age in international relations. From the early 1990s, they began to speak of the "post-Cold War era" and to draw up prognoses on the nature and features of the new global order. Despite the remarkable differences between the disappearance of a superpower from the international stage and the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US, international affairs experts regarded the latter event as another major historical turning point. Such was the challenge it presented to the world's sole superpower and the entire essence of the monopolar order that the bases of the global order and the priorities of international relations could not remain the same as they had been before 9/11. Remarking on the magnitude of the change, late Harvard professor Ernest May, an eminent historian of international relations, observed that no one could ever have imagined that a terrorist attack against the US would precipitate a totally different type of superpower relations and cast such major powers as the US, Russia and China back to virtually the same positions they had assumed in the immediate aftermath of World War II. This article aims to review the most important changes in regional and international relations that were a direct consequence of the events of 11 September. In addition to noting their repercussions on the conventional attitudes and positions of various governments, it will examine their impact on culture and civilisation and, specifically, certain already existing phenomena that these events threw into relief or compounded. It is perhaps best to begin with the US, which was the target of the attacks and which was the most immediately affected in terms of its perception of itself and the world. Without a doubt one of the most profound effects of these events was that it rocked the conventional American concept and sense of security. Suddenly, the threat had shifted from overseas to the homeland and from identifiable powers to a nebulous force that could not be geographically pinned down and that moved and spread throughout the world. It is little wonder that the common impression was that the world had changed, that the US had changed and that its president had become "another person," as a senior US official put it at the time. The immediate response of the US president to the post-11 September world was unequivocal. Other countries had to chose: either they sided with the US or they sided with terrorism. There could be no in-between. Under Bush, "either you're with us or you're against us" became the foremost American criterion for friendship and enmity. In tandem with this major shift in the US foreign policy outlook was a no less significant shift in attitude towards what had been seen as the very essence of the American system and way of life. In a country that once prided itself for a broad range of constitutional guarantees for individual, political and civic freedoms, a rush of emergency laws and security measures began to chip away at these liberties. Not only did government authorities acquire increasing powers to search, eavesdrop, detain and arrest without warrant, military tribunals were created to try civilians suspected of terrorist activities and intelligence agencies were authorised to carry out secret assassinations. All such measures worked to support the FBI, CIA and other security agencies and to bolster the military-industrial complex that had been facing the spectre of declining power and influence since the end of the Cold War. At the same time, security measures and their consequences provoked widespread protests from human rights agencies and, indeed, from US legislators who feared that the US was verging on a civic liberties catastrophe of a scale unprecedented since the McCarthyist era in the 1950s. With respect to foreign policy, the aftermath of 11 September brought a range of negotiations and compromises on various bilateral issues between Washington and other powers, and it also occasioned outbursts of tensions. Moscow was the most accommodating to Bush's demand for cooperation and declared its support for the US war against terror from the outset, backing this declaration with the provision of airspace, intelligence and other forms of material and logistic support for the NATO campaign in Afghanistan. To complete this historic policy shift towards NATO, the Russian president announced that his country was even prepared to go beyond cooperation to membership. The NATO leadership, in turn, responded that it was ready to include Russia in decision-making processes on a number of issues of joint concern, such as the war on terror and halting the spread of WMD (weapons of mass destruction). China, too, departed from longstanding policies. Above all, it assented to Japanese legislation sanctioning the provision of logistic aid to the US in an overseas conflict, whereas until this Beijing had always opposed Japanese attempts to enhance its security ties with the US. The Japanese prime minister reciprocated with an equally historic shift that took the form of a state visit to China during which he offered an apology for Japanese behaviour towards China during World War II. The aftermath of 9/11 also reopened the debate in Japan over the constitutionality of Japanese forces taking part in the war against terror. Article 9 of the Japanese constitution prohibits the engagement of Japan's National Defence Forces in overseas wars, though one camp argued that the fight against terror falls outside of that and the argument eventually prevailed. This was mirrored by a similar development in Germany. Pressured by the effects and demands of the post-9/11 period, German Chancellor Schroeder ushered in a significant departure from the long-held policy of not engaging in military operations outside the scope of NATO. Under Schroeder it became possible for Germany to commit forces for the purposes of armed interventions abroad, causing observers to speculate whether this shift stemmed from a sense of loyalty to the US or whether it reflected a latent desire to revive Germany's international political role which, for decades, lagged behind its economic might and status. More generally, the shifts in relations between the US and Russia and China, in particular, raised the question as to whether they changes were solid and lasting or merely tactical and a response to the temporary exigencies of the war on terror. Although one can argue that no substantial change occurred in American attitudes, it is clear that the US grew closer to the rest of the world and more prepared to cooperate with it. In the Middle East, the events of 9/11 increased American awareness of the urgency of solving this conflict. Likewise, after years of relative indifference to Southeast Asia, as exemplified by its sluggish response to the financial crisis there, Washington began to look at that region, which is home to millions of Muslims, in a new light and to acquire a new sense of its strategic importance. The 11 September challenge galvanised the US into overhauling its budgetary priorities, its military thinking and strategies for the deployment of its armed forces, and its way of conducting diplomacy abroad. For example, greater priority was given to the creation of a more mobile, rapidly deployable and more appropriately equipped armed forces and the focus on maintaining a US military presence in stable Europe was transferred to a less stable Asia. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell held that these changes constituted a new benchmark for US diplomacy and the exercise of its peacekeeping responsibilities. The significance of these developments was reflected in Russia's declining opposition to NATO's expansion to include Baltic States. At the time, Putin remarked that if Russia's relationship with NATO improved sufficiently then its anxieties over NATO's expansion would diminish considerably. Nevertheless, we should bear in mind that the development in the Russian-NATO relationship is one part of the larger picture of Russia's relationship with Washington, especially when it came to the deployment of the US missile defence shield. In their summit of 13 November 2002, Washington and Moscow failed to reach an agreement over the missile shield and its connection with the anti-ballistic treaty of 1972 and shortly afterwards Washington unilaterally withdrew from this treaty. Nevertheless, the negotiations that were then in progress over radical reductions in the two powers' stocks of nuclear warheads helped minimise the effect of the US withdrawal from that treaty and to mollify the Russian reaction. In response to the American offer to reduce its arsenal by 1,700-2,200 warheads the Russians offered to trim theirs by two-thirds. The agreement would come to fruition under the Obama administration. Still, in spite of the new US-Russian rapprochement, Moscow was not without certain misgivings. As much as it supported US anti-terrorist efforts, it did not conceal its determination to retain control over Chechnya and Georgia and, especially, over the petroleum pipelines linking the oil and gas fields of the Caspian with European markets. Therefore, Russian officials continuously stressed that cooperation between the countries of Central Asia and the US would be restricted to the campaign against terror and would be conducted in a manner that would not affect Russia's traditional sphere of influence in that region. The development of US-Chinese relations in the post-9/11 period is much less pronounced if only because the differences between the two countries over Taiwan and China's ambitions in the South China Sea are less open to negotiation and compromise. Even so, it is indisputable that Chinese officials approved the US-led campaign in Afghanistan, whereas previously they would have condemned such behaviour as an intervention in the domestic affairs of another nation. Still, some observers will disagree with the foregoing assessment and maintain that the events of 9/11 have changed the Americans permanently because the have lost their sense of security at home and their worldview has changed as a result. Other analysts would counter that the abovementioned developments can take hold and deepen as a product of new global realities. Above all, they argue, Russian and Chinese leaders have come to realise how important it is to maintain stable cooperative relations with the US and the West in general. They further appreciate the necessity of assimilating into the global political and economic order, which has become essential for the economic development of their countries. At the same time, the ideological factor no longer carries the same weight in international relations as it did in the wake of World War II while the process of globalisation increasingly propels all towards stronger and broader realms of mutual interests in trade, investment and technology. Of course, this does not obviate the prospect of rivalry; however, it ensures that rivalries will generally be governed by the demands of cooperation. As important as they are, the abovementioned transformations in the scheme of international relations between the world's major powers should not blind us to a concurrent development. Another major effect of the events of 9/11 and the subsequent US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq has been to hasten and exacerbate Western-Eastern cultural tensions to the degree that we can no longer exclude the possibility of a clash of civilisations. There has been a strong tendency among some quarters in the West to cast Islam as the new enemy of modernity and civilisation and as the root of the problem of terrorism. Not only has this trend disseminated an offensive image of Muslim peoples and their societies, it has turned the glare of suspicion and mistrust against Muslim communities abroad, which had until recently felt as though they had become part of the fabric of their societies in the US and the West. In addition, it has aggravated the polarisation inside Muslim societies between secularists and Islamist forces. As we mark the tenth decade since the events of 9/11, the US and the rest of the world are still contending with the immediate fallout that these events precipitated in international relations and the patterns of global interplay. Developments over the past decade have brought numerous elements of change, but the precise direction remains unclear. The world appears to be moving to a new order; however, political science experts are still at odds over whether it will be a multi-polar order or a "non-polar" one. Most likely, the situation will remain in flux for some time, perhaps for several decades to come. The writer is managing director of Egyptian Council of Foreign Affairs.
