9/11 and US foreign policy
Ian Boyne, Contributor
It's 10 years after those fateful September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America which claimed just under 3,000 lives and which traumatised and horrified Americans and outraged the civilised world. Ten years on, the US Congressional Research Service estimates that the subsequent Afghanistan and Iraq wars have cost the US$1.3 trillion.
A cost-of-war project at Brown University estimates, "conservatively", that 137,000 persons have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan and that the wars there have created more than 7.8 million refugees in these states. Brown University actually feels that the actual cost-of-the-war projects, including interest payments and veterans' care, is actually closer to US$4 trillion. Defence spending has climbed from US$304 billion in 2011 to US$616 million in 2008, and the US budget went from a surplus of US$128 billion to a deficit of US$458 billion. Also, US debt held by foreign governments has moved from approximately 13 per cent of GDP at the end of the Cold War to nearly 30 per cent at the end of the Bush era.
Foreign debt
US trade deficit with China moved from US$83 billion in 2001 to US$273 billion last year, and total US indebtedness to China jumped from US$78 billion in 2011 to US$1.1 trillion in 2011. Foreign debt, as a percentage of GDP, increased from 32.4 per cent in 2001 to 53.5 per cent in 2009. Much, indeed, has changed since September 11, 2001. But scholars dispute whether 9/11 was decisive in terms of foreign-policy action, or that it was a historical turning point.
Richard Haas, president of the highly influential Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and former director of policy planning under Bush, wrote in Project Syndicate last week that, "September 11, 2001 was a terrible tragedy by any measure, but it was not a historical turning point. It did not herald a new era of international relations in which terrorists with a global agenda prevailed. On the contrary, 9/11 has not been replicated.
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In an issue devoted to analysis of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs, Professor of History Melvyn Leffler says, "There was and there remains a natural tendency to say that the (9/11) attacks changed
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Coming into the presidency at a moment of crisis and “maximum danger,” John F. Kennedy spoke of the trumpet summoning the American people again. Kennedy referred to past periods of significant danger to the Constitution and the American way of life. The inauguration of John F. Kennedy ranks as one of the three most important, beginning with Abraham Lincoln in 1861 and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. All three men faced tremendous obstacles that threatened the very nature of the democratic system, and all three men prevailed.
Abraham Lincoln in 1861At the time Abraham Lincoln gave his Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861, seven Southern states had already left the Union to form a new nation, the Confederate States of America. With its own Constitution and government under the leadership of Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy provided President Lincoln with a threat no other president had ever had to face. The nation was split and Lincoln was keenly aware that other states might still bolt the Union.
The 1850s had been a decade of non-ending sectional strife over the issue of the expansion of slavery into the new territories. From the Compromise of 1850 to John Brown’s 1859 raid, the nation was both riveted and torn by violence. As Lincoln himself noted, “I enter upon the task…[of the Presidency]…under great and peculiar difficulty.”
Lincoln sought to calm the nation and reassure the South particularly that the new administration would not “endanger” the “peace and security” of that section. Further, he affirmed the right of slavery in the South. But the seeds of civil war were sown and President Lincoln would spend the rest of his presidency ending that Civil War.
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933Perhaps the greatest national crisis since the Civil War, the Great Depression signaled universal hopelessness. FDR, however, began his presidency saying on March 4, 1933, that the American people had nothing to fear but fear itself. “Our Constitution is so simple and practical,” FDR continued, “that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and government without loss of essential form.
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