9/11 and US Foreign Policy

Andrew Bacevich notes in his The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War that 9/11 did little to shift American foreign policy: “The shattered events of September 2001 challenged the Bush administration to build . . . a new world order, and it turned instinctively to Wilson. Indeed, the administration response demonstrates how little the unprecedented attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon affected the assumptions underlying U.S. foreign policy; the terrorists succeeded only in reinvigorating the conviction that destiny summones the United States, the one true universal nation, to raise up a univrsal civilization on American norms.”

Bacevich agrees with Robert Kagan’s assessment that after 9/11, America “only became more itself.”