WIREDGOV

One mystery about 9/11 is why no attack of comparable scale has followed. With new motivations, enhanced delivery and AI-devised weapons, there should be no complacency.

9/11 changed everything. It led to two decades when the US and much of Europe became fixated on Islamism. Western strategists became fluent in half-absorbed subjects such as Wahhabism, Pashtun tribal customs, Frontier Crimes Regulations and the Anbar Awakening while giving insufficient attention to Chinese economic dominance and Russian military rearmament. Who knows what that diversion of strategic and intellectual resources (and the chaos it left behind in the region) has cost the West?

9/11 also bookends that remarkable period from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/90 when peace and reconciliation seemed to break out everywhere. The Oslo Accords of 1993 appeared to chart a trajectory towards a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. One year later the peaceful multiparty elections in South Africa were nothing short of a miracle. For years Afrikaners had insisted they would fight black rule until the last drop of white blood. This was the brief ‘unipolar moment’ under the then-still largely benign supervision of Washington.

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