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The Houthi leaders who’ve overrun the Yemeni coast of the Bab el-Mandeb are a piece of work. Within hours of their takeover, they promised $500 payments to local residents in exchange for their bay’ah, or allegiance. The Houthis called it “dividends,” calculated against future fees to be extracted from tankers transiting the narrow waterway — only vessels from “approved” countries need apply, of course. And as they continue to escalate against the Saudi government, the Houthis are also renaming towns, governorates, islands, and other key geographic features inside the kingdom, one more way to stick it to the House of Saud.
I kid, I kid. Not about the Houthi takeover, which is all too real, but the “dividend” payments and the geographic renaming. Those are the kinds of things a ragtag group of Yemeni militants might be expected to do. But these days, they are more readily identified with President Trump’s administration in the United States — an astonishing and dismaying turn for the nation as it marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
For all their horror and wickedness, the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks took place amid deep American confidence, as well as a kind of epistemic simplicity. A decade earlier, one version of Enlightenment modernity, market liberalism, had bested its chief and last serious rival, communism. All that was left to do was expanding the system into the farthest reaches of the Earth and maintaining its smooth operations.
Sure, a few backward holdouts remained — Serbian ultra-nationalists here, Islamist kooks and African warlords there — but none could really threaten the system. And even if they managed serious damage, as they did on that fateful day, American power could always clean their clocks and remake their societies; the universalist logic of the system demanded nothing less.
Yet 25 years later, that blessed simplicity is lost. And worse, a quarter-century of remaking other societies has left the United States looking like one of the holdout rogues: paranoid, warlike for its own sake, socially balkanized, psychologically fragile, given to leader worship, and incapable of articulating a universal idea.
How the Middle East remade America
To understand the dismal change, we have to first examine the decision structure that led to it.
It’s a banal truism that what took place after 9/11 was the product of neoconservative hubris. Yet lodging that ancient charge isn’t enough. If George W. Bush and the neocon cohort around him succumbed to hubris, well, so did a lot of others. So did the Clintons and Joe Biden. So did The Economist and The New York Times. So did Fareed Zakaria and Christopher Hitchens and the Leftist writer Paul Berman. So did I, beginning in the late aughts, as an ex-Leftist-turned-hawk.
Yet there were many more reasonable courses of action than the one they — we — settled on. Washington and its allies could have carpet-bombed the Taliban’s strongholds and used special operators to chase down the perpetrators of 9/11 (which was, indeed, how Osama bin Laden was eventually brought to justice). In retrospect, there was no obvious reason why the Afghan effort should have also included teaching their women about Marcel Duchamp and Dada before the Taliban retook the whole country.
Iraq, meanwhile, wasn’t even developing weapons of mass destruction, and old-school balance-of-power calculation should have underscored Saddam Hussein’s value as a check on the Iranians. The Libya and Syria interventions were even more unwise, carving out ungoverned spaces across vast swaths of the region that radiated terror and sent more than a million migrants to Europe’s shores. Libya now features open slave markets; Syria has settled into rule by a newly besuited Al Qaeda warlord.
So how did things get so out of hand? Why go so far? The decision tree, it now seems to me, was predetermined by both material and ideological factors. On the material side, there was the sheer asymmetry between the relative power of the United States and everyone else’s in the 1990s and aughts. Back then, Russia was humiliated and the Chinese economy barely factored as a rival. This led all but a very few US strategists to conclude, maybe we can — why not try?
This unusual correlation of forces gave the Western mind a bad sugar high. Already, a few years before 9/11, the political theorist Benjamin Barber predicted that the early 21st century would be contested by capitalist globalism, which he called “McWorld,” and traditional and identitarian reaction, which he designated by the shorthand “Jihad.”
Barber himself, to be clear, deplored both of these poles as reductive and deleterious to authentic human happiness. But many others were happy to plant the flag of McWorld in the heartlands of Jihad, an ambition made concrete in the famous Burger King inside Baghdad’s Green Zone. Then, too, the idea of a monolithic Islamist enemy — rather than a reality of an Islamic world fragmented along numerous national and sectarian lines — lent global liberalism the sort of singular ideological adversary it had been missing since the demise of the Soviet Union.
This was always an illusion, of course. Islamism was no real competitor to McWorld. It was savage and exhausting; within a decade or two, the Arab Street decided it prefers its own gleaming McWorld than a restored transnational ummah under a caliph.
Even so, the illusion of a total adversary, akin to those that menaced freedom in the 1930s, galvanized the intellectuals. The likes of Berman wore “Enlightenment fundamentalism” as a badge of honor. The New Atheism of Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al., celebrated the post-9/11 wars for casting the cold light of reason upon the dark and terrible gods that still kept billions in thrall. If Islamism — or Islam itself — could give way, the thinking went, then so might the cornpone Christianity of the average Bush voter (never mind that it was just such red-state believers who’d be called to carry out regime change).
Which brings us to the consequences. Nations have only limited resources and attention in a world still characterized by scarcity. All along, as they set about remaking the Middle East and North Africa, the United States and many of its European allies neglected the domestic foundations of their power. Manufacturing withered, because McWorld ideology taught that growth is growth; and it doesn’t matter whether GDP is generated by tangible, tradable goods or by software and services (whether high-end or low).
All along, Wall Street was permitted to swallow large chunks of the real economy, disgorging pink slips and precarity for the working and middle classes. A corrosive ultra-liberalism filled the resulting void with porn, legalized weed, and online gambling.
All along, employers’ hunger for low wages — and urban professionals’ desire for cheap nannies, gardeners, and dry cleaners — were allowed to dictate immigration policy, welfare nets and cultural cohesion be damned. Impressive new social technologies were allowed to rip through communities and individual minds, without regard for attention spans and mental health.
Meanwhile, the predictably lousy outcome of the regime-change wars themselves sapped national confidence and bred distrust for institutional authority. If “they” lied about Iraq’s WMD, what else did “they” lie about? Military families, especially, witnessed firsthand the wide gap between the rhetoric of the hawks and the grim realities of these conflicts. Democracy itself was cast into doubt; no matter which party you voted for, D or R, you got more regime-change wars.
One grave consequence of all this was a general degradation of American human capital. Writers, such as UnHerd columnist Richard Hanania, who identify the human-capital decline as the crisis of our time aren’t wrong. But they too often overlook the social and material conditions needed to foster high-grade human capital. The post-9/11 wars undermined those necessary conditions in the United States (and, to some extent, in Europe).
Is it any wonder, then, that American politics is characterized by open demagogic bribery, such as Trump’s recent vow to reward every adult with a $5,000 “dividend” drawn from tariff revenue? (The latter, to be clear, wouldn’t begin to cover the full cost.) Or that American political discourse is warped by a kind of dual conspiracism, in which the masses suspect a hidden foreign (often Jewish) hand in the course of events, while elites themselves ascribe the feelings of the masses to foreign (often Russian) interference?
Is it any wonder that the icon of the late Trump era is the so-called MAGA-tard — a single-toothed gnomic creature who tells himself that $6 diesel is worth the price of liberating Iran? Or that the administration has demanded “academic receivership” to ensure that university history and regional-studies curricula accord with Trumpian ideology? Or that Trump’s “faith adviser,” Paula White-Cain, has issued a fatwa that “to say no to President Trump would be saying no to God”?
All this — political handouts, pervasive conspiracy theories, leader worship, surveillance of intellectual life, and so on — were characteristic of the Middle East where I was born. Right down to the frenzy for ideological renaming of landmarks and places. The post-9/11 wars thus didn’t fail to achieve anything, as is commonly believed. They remade America in the image of the Middle East.
Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It
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