20 years after 9/11 – patriotic pomp is a thing of the past

Three days after the 9/11 attacks, the then incumbent US President George W. Bush visited Ground Zero in New York. There the retired firefighter Bob Beckwith had just found a fire engine under the rubble when Bush climbed it shortly afterwards and put his left arm around him. The President improvised into the megaphone he held in his right hand a poignant speechwhich was bursting with self-confidence and drove the assembled rescue workers to euphoria.

It started with several empty phrases, and the weak megaphone didn’t help much in transporting them into the distance. “We can’t hear you,” interrupted some of the rescue workers, whereupon Bush replied loudly: “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you – and the people who tore down these buildings will soon hear from us all. ”With the clever one-liner, Bush then harvested testosterone-soaked“ USA! USA “calls and Record pollswhich at the end of the same month led to a maximum of 90 percent approval for his office.

Bush quickly gambled away the goodwill

In some ways, these approval ratings were predictable. When, if not in the course of a military attack on home soil, does a nation gather around its head of state in solidarity? But why then does it suggest that if the Americans were the victims of a similar attack today, they would not be able to reunite?

Many of the answers to this last question have to be sought from Bush himself. He quickly gambled away the benevolence that was shown to him when he opened a second front in the so-called “war on terror” alongside the popular invasion of Afghanistan. His government quickly lost control on both fronts. The result was the bloodiest war effort by the United States since Vietnam, and the exorbitantly expensive two-front war thwarted the ambitious government plans of all his successors in office.

Effective warfare was underestimated

It also soon became clear that the Bush administration was underestimating the amount of effort that would have been needed to conduct war effectively. In one infamous moment in 2004 the National Guard Thomas Wilson confronted then Foreign Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that soldiers were being sent to Iraq without the necessary equipment to protect themselves from booby traps. The soldiers literally searched landfills to find armor on their own. Rumsfeld could only counter that one goes to war “with the army that one has, not with the army that one would like to have”.

The recently deceased Rumsfeld came under the media magnifying glass again in 2019 when the Washington Post published the so-called “Afghanistan Papers”, a treasure trove of internal government documents, which showed that in Washington no one believed in the victory in the Hindu Kush for a long time – or even knew what the war aims were actually. The internals are peppered with Rumsfeld’s confessions that he “had no insight” into who “the good and the bad” were there. “Help!” He wrote in another memorandum.

On the one hand slogans, on the other hand reality

In public, however, President was confident of victory after President. But these slogans clashed with the reality, which was visible to all, of a foreign deployment that had fallen apart, which was not particularly conducive to trust in one’s own government. Meanwhile has only a quarter of all Americans have a general confidence in the competence of their own government.

The only way to keep the economy going abroad and on the home front was that it was financed on credit. This endangers national sovereignty, especially with regard to America’s major system competitor China. The Far Eastern superpower is the second largest US lender behind Japan after it started to invest heavily in US government bonds.

China’s entry into the WTO

That is why another 20th anniversary is much more decisive for the current geopolitical situation than the anniversary of September 11th. Exactly three months to the day after the attacks, China officially joined the World Trade Organization. This had the Accelerating the de-industrialization of America result – and carries considerable risks for the defense capability of the USA, because even important components of the B-1 bomber as well as the F-16 and F-35 fighter jets are imported from China. The corona pandemic only crowned this reality when it was quickly realized that central supply chains for penicillin and other medical supplies originated in China.

This seemingly unstoppable advance of China was the basis that sparked Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” so much among the formerly democratic voters of the de-industrialized American Midwest. Trump’s impetuous manner, on the other hand, resulted in a striking dynamic that has dominated the US discourse ever since: when he took a stand on something, progressive elites immediately took the opposite position. Since Trump said “Make America Great Again”, countered then-New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2018that “America has never been great”.

“Worst attack on our democracy”

It seemed that an important threshold had been crossed: once US politicians could only dream of winning elections by outdoing each other with patriotic pomp. Suddenly one feels far removed from the unconditional solidarity that united American society after the 9/11 attacks. A new wound has long since replaced the meaningful function of 9/11: Joe Biden called the storm on the Capitol on January 6th of this year the “worst attack on our democracy since the civil war“. And according to surveys, American citizens fear each other much more than the forgotten Islamist terrorists.

So can you imagine that Biden could ever give a speech that was as unifying as George W. Bush did 20 years ago? It would be much more likely that an attack on the US would only result in Republicans and Democrats falling into mutually irreconcilable explanations – and that the current president would be insulted by its own citizensbefore he could even speak.

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