20 years ago, the world was shocked by images of two planes flying into the Twin Towers in New York. America was injured, but its response would go on to inflict worse wounds on the country’s image and influence, culminating with the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan. That was just the latest chapter in a series of damaging moral crusades, attempting (and failing) to get other countries to conform to America’s values. As a result, America has lost the pre-eminence it once enjoyed, and needs to learn to accept the world as it is, writes Michael Pembroke.

The world of the twenty-first century is changing with unforeseen rapidity. Twenty years ago in September 2001, 19 men who belonged to a terrorist organisation called Al-Qaeda attacked the United States. Fifteen of the men were from Saudi Arabia. The Taliban did not attack the United States; nor did Afghanistan. Just over a week ago, after 20 years of bombing and almost $3 trillion in expenditure, the American invasion of Afghanistan ended in ignominy, defeat and withdrawal. The bombing caused death to the people of Afghanistan and the destruction and dislocation of its civil society. Approximately half of those killed were women and children.

The tragedy of Afghanistan is the latest chapter in a long history of American interventions. We will look back on the past 75 years since the end of World War II as a period of unparalleled American power and hegemony. Yet history will record this era as one characterised by intervention and interference by the United States in many sovereign countries, in a mostly futile attempt to make other regimes, foreign cultures and different civilisations conform to Washington’s own particular world view. The American credo is, or was - ‘to lead, save, liberate and ultimately transform the world’. It was pursued under the guise of spreading or imposing democracy - sometimes dressed up as nation-building - masquerading as a force for common good. But it never was, and never could be justified. Most of the world understands that now, except perhaps in Washington.

For a long time, the United States enjoyed the trust of most of the world. But history will record the past two decades as the time when America’s once-shining star commenced to dim - imperceptibly at first, then with a suddenness that no one foresaw.

With only few exceptions, America’s interventions were a mistake. The attempt to transform Afghanistan failed. In 2019, as the United States negotiated with the Taliban, the number of bombs and other munitions dropped by US warplanes on Afghanistan surged to an eightfold increase over that in 2015. It was the consequence of the same American policy that had been pursued in Japan (1945), Vietnam (1968-73) and Korea (1951-53) – a policy that insists the other side will agree to US peace terms ‘if only they are bombed enough’. America’s nation-building in Afghanistan was more akin to nation-destroying.

The humiliating withdrawal was a resounding defeat for America’s objectives, which conforms to a familiar pattern of failure. Who will forget the television footage of the scrambled helicopter evacuation from the United States embassy in Saigon in April 1975? And twenty-five years earlier, there was the frenzied but little-known pre-television abandonment of Pyongyang in December 1950 – accompanied by the shredding of records and the burning of documents - as China routed the US Eighth Army, sending it on the longest retreat in American military history.