A decade has passed since the world came face to face with Islamic terrorism. Most remember vividly what they saw on their television screens on September 9, 2001 or experienced. But aside from this lasting global sense of involvement, it is far from clear whether the event in itself really changed the world or whether, more realistically, it was the point at which a new reality dawned about globalisation and the inability of sovereign nations to contain economic, political or security threats within their borders.
That day I was in London with the then Director General of the Caribbean Hotels and Tourism Association, John Bell. We had just finished speaking to investors about the opportunities in the Caribbean tourism sector when we first learnt what had occurred. Later we stood among a large group of silent and shocked passengers waiting for the high speed train to Brussels, watching as the twin towers fell to the ground.
Looking back at what I wrote at the time I suggested that although the chances of being touched by terrorism were remote, the quality of life would deteriorate. Our lives would be more constrained by concerns about security. We would lose our sense of freedom. Travel within the region and beyond would be subject to ever increasing layers of security and time consuming procedures and these matters would come to lead what was left of external policy towards the region.
I also forecast that transactional costs would increase dramatically. The security industry would flourish. Caribbean governments, companies and carriers would be forced to absorb the expense of heightened security to ensure that the region was not used as a location from which to launch, fund or plan a terrorist attack on the US or some other location. Tourism arrivals would decline but then recover as the fear of flying and terrorism abated, and individuals accepted that as long as the risks were minimised travel to and from small islands would remain desirable.
It seemed likely too that the US would retaliate and would launch a war against Afghanistan’s Taliban government and there would be a global policy of retribution against those who acted or thought in the same ways as those who supported the crime.
What however, could not be imagined that September day was the subsequent squandering of the near global sympathy that Washington enjoyed after the attack, as US politicians set about demonising Islam, declaring a war on terrorism and deciding to move against Iraq. Nor did it seem possible then that other nations like the United Kingdom would see their credibility deteriorate dramatically in the Caribbean and elsewhere as they followed the US into Iraq.
With hindsight for these and other reasons it seems possible to argue that September 2001 was the point at which the world’s leading powers became distracted to the extent that the US and a number of European nations resigned economic direction to the market while placing an ever greater emphasis on pursuing ideas associated with promoting the supremacy of their thinking.
It led the US to embark on a policy of unilateralism just as the fundamentals in the global economic structure were changing and finding multilateral solutions to common problems became more important. So much so that history may come to show that al Qaeda’s attacks came at the highest point of US power and that since then, Washington’s influence in the world has been in a slow and partly self induced decline. This is not to suggest that the United States is no longer powerful but to argue that just at the moment the US responded to the terrorist attacks by asserting militarily its role as the sole global super power, it became disengaged from the more potent and silent war for economic supremacy that has now made real a multipolar world.
Since 2001 much of what had seemed a certainty to many in the West has been turned upside down. Then oil stood at US$28 a barrel and the US was running a budgetary surplus. Today oil is at US$115 a barrel and the US has a deficit of US$1,580billion. During the intervening years, loose market regulation, rampant materialism and greed were allowed to take the world’s financial system close to collapse, resulting in enormous rescue packages, the cost of which has been recession and the livelihoods of many previously in employment.
Today as much of the developing world is teetering on the edge of a second recession, any thought of multilateral trade liberalisation on a global basis is at an end and currency wars and a subsequent trade war seem possible.
I for one have the sense that what happened ten years ago and the ultimate response in Iraq, after the then widely accepted invasion of Afghanistan, has helped facilitate the rise of China, Brazil, India, South Africa and Russia. In particular it made more straightforward China’s financing of an ever increasing US current account deficit by recycling its own current account surpluses into US bonds and investments. This is because China was able to act at just the moment when the US was expending ever greater resources on discretionary wars in the mistaken belief that economic growth largely fuelled by speculation would continue to support its budget deficit for ever.
Although there is no clear linear interrelationship with what happened a decade ago, the terrorists were in a sense abetted in lessening the hegemonic role of the US by the unstoppable forces of globalisation, acting as they did at the moment when the world was already on its way to a new global order.
Others will no doubt disagree, but for me it was not the events of September 2001 that changed the world. Rather it was the ideologically led over-reach it subsequently provoked in the Bush administration and a belief that it alone was the world’s arbiter and that worse was to come. What happened in New York, Washington and a field in Pennsylvania a decade ago hastened the end of US supremacy and led to the present economic uncertainties that will last until a new global equilibrium emerges.
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