We can’t say that we were not warned. In January 2002, at the start of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, British historian and former soldier Sir Michael Howard published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled, “What’s In A Name? How to Fight Terrorism.” In it, he warned that defining the U.S. response to 9/11 as a “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) would shape U.S. policies in profoundly negative ways. As he wrote,

[T]o use, or rather to misuse, the term “war” is not simply a matter of legality or pedantic semantics. It has deeper and more dangerous consequences. To declare that one is at war is immediately to create a war psychosis that may be totally counterproductive for the objective being sought.

Like others, Howard pinpointed the risk that declaring war on such a nebulous enemy as “terror” would make that war unending; that war would only drive populations into support for the terrorists and create a “with us or against us” attitude that would make it impossible to win over people from the other side; and that the longer wars continued the greater these tendencies would become.

He argued instead for the use of intelligence actions, diplomatic pressure, and limited force (of the kind that eventually killed Osama bin Laden and persuaded Pakistani intelligence to help in the capture of other Al Qaeda leaders). The wisdom of Howard’s words has been amply demonstrated by the disastrous outcomes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Today, Howard’s allocutions about the GWOT should also be placed in a wider context of U.S. foreign and security policy in the past and future: the creation of “meta-narratives,” all-encompassing frameworks of thought and analysis into which a wide range of quite different issues are fitted. These narratives are focused on one supposedly monolithic, universal, and overwhelmingly powerful enemy, which it is necessary to confront everywhere. They are fed by American exceptionalist nationalism, with its conviction of America’s duty to lead the world to the inevitable triumph of democracy.

This enemy is cast not only as a military and ideological adversary but a force of evil, with the United States of America representing not only freedom and democracy, but good itself. This is how most Americans understood the Cold War; and amid the rain of condemnation that is falling on President Joe Biden over Afghanistan, it is vital to remember that not just the disaster of Iraq, but that of Afghanistan too, had their origins in how the George W. Bush administration turned the pursuit of the small terrorist group actually responsible for 9/11 into a global struggle for freedom and against “evil.”

In the case of Afghanistan, this led to the refusal to negotiate with the “terrorist” Taliban either before or after their initial defeat, and the U.S. commitment to democratic nation-building in one of the most inhospitable countries on Earth for such an effort. The GWOT was, however, a bipartisan delusion. A Democratic senator told me in 2002 that the United States should “turn Afghanistan into a beachhead of democracy and progress in the Muslim world.” It goes without saying that her knowledge of the terrain of this beachhead was precisely nil.

 Key passages of Bush’s speech to Congress on September 20, 2001, read as follows:

…they [the Islamist extremists] follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism … How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command — every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war — to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network. … Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

…[I]n our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom — the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time — now depends on us. ... We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.

The GWOT has failed; but failure, they say, is a better teacher than success, and if the United States can learn from this failure and how it was generated, it may be able to avoid more disasters in the future. For U.S. strategy towards China is also beginning to be portrayed in Washington, by both parties, as an apocalyptic global struggle between good and evil, with consequences that may dwarf those of the GWOT.

EVERY SIGNIFICANT country in the world has its own variant of a foreign and security establishment (or “Blob” in Ben Rhodes’ colloquial phrase); and these establishments operate in accordance with certain informal but strict doctrines. These are deeply rooted in geographical location, in specific nationalisms, and in the histories and cultures of the nations concerned. They are to a considerable extent impervious to evidence and argument, and barring defeat in war or revolutionary upheaval at home, they change only very slowly.

The Chinese, Indians, Russians, British, and Germans all have their own variants. These doctrines are sometimes defined by the identification of a particular enemy. Thus, the Polish establishment believes that Russia is the eternal and implacable enemy of Poland, and this belief is the most important element shaping Polish policy.

The doctrine of the current U.S. establishment stands out in certain key respects. The first is the scale of its ambition: the belief that the United States must seek primacy across the entire face of the globe. The second is its ideological content: the belief that the United States has a mission to spread democracy and “freedom” in the world. American religious traditions in turn help to cast this mission as a crusade for good against evil.

There is, however, one additional and paradoxical feature of U.S. foreign policy doctrine: that is, the profound and justified doubts of the U.S. establishment about how far it is really shared by the U.S. population at large. Living in what is in effect a giant island, protected by the oceans and with friendly or weak states to north and south, U.S. citizens are subject to periodic doubts about whether outside forces are really so dangerous to them, and, therefore, whether the expenditure of U.S. blood and treasure on defeating them is really justified. U.S. meta-narratives are, therefore, also heavily shaped with an eye to terrifying ordinary Americans. 

THE U.S. meta-narrative of the Cold War, like the GWOT, began in response to a genuine threat: that Stalinist Communism, backed by the Red Army, would take over Western Europe and leave the United States isolated as the only large democratic and capitalist state on Earth. By the 1960s, however, Soviet communism in Europe (the critical area of contest) was on the ideological defensive. In the United States, of course, there never had been any chance of communist success.

The disastrous aspect of the U.S. Cold War meta-narrative lay largely in the fact that it was based all too closely on Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s famous advice to Dean Acheson that to get Congress and the U.S. public to accept the commitments and sacrifices necessary to resist Soviet Communism, the Truman administration needed to “scare the hell out of the American people.” Acheson commented later that to do this he helped create a portrayal “clearer than truth” of the Soviet menace to the United States.

The growth of the Cold War meta-narrative can be clearly seen in the change between George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and “Mr. X” essay of 1946–47, and the National Security Council Paper 68 (NSC-68) of 1950, drafted chiefly by Paul Nitze. Kennan’s documents, which laid the foundation for the U.S. strategy of “containment” of the USSR, stress the hostility of Soviet Communism to all capitalist and democratic systems as well as to U.S. national interests, and say that the United States must contain Soviet ambitions through military readiness as well as economic and political means. However, at no point does Kennan say that the USSR poses a direct threat to the United States itself, or call for greatly increased U.S. military spending.

Kennan warns against U.S. “threats, blustering and superfluous gestures of outward toughness,” and to avoid threatening Soviet prestige in ways that might trap the Soviet leadership into a dangerous response. He emphasizes Soviet fears as well as ambitions, and remarks with great prescience on the underlying fragility and weakness of Soviet society; meaning that in the long run, the Communist system would likely collapse of its own accord.

NSC-68 is very different. It speaks of a “mortal threat” of the Soviet system to the United States itself, and calls for a massive military build-up in response. NSC-68 may well, therefore, be regarded as the birth certificate of the military-industrial complex. The document speaks repeatedly of America’s global ideological mission, how global leadership has been “imposed” on the United States, and how the USSR is a menace across the whole face of the world which America must meet everywhere. Kennan himself strongly criticized NSC-68, and saw it in retrospect as helping to lay the groundwork for the paranoid and militarized tendencies that helped lead the United States into the Vietnam War.

Some historians have averred that the North Korean invasion of South Korea, which occurred two months after NSC-68 was written, proved the validity of its arguments. This, however, can also be seen the other way around: that the U.S. meta-narrative of the Cold War made Americans see what was in fact a Korean civil war initiated by the Korean Communists as part of Soviet grand strategy planned in Moscow; and see the Chinese military intervention to stop an American army appearing on China’s land border as another carefully-planned part of that strategy.

Three decades later, the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan was seen throughout the U.S. political and media establishments not for what it clearly was and has been revealed to be by Soviet documents—a defensive attempt to save a crumbling client state, with close similarities to the U.S. intervention in Vietnam—but as part of a Soviet plan to march to the Indian Ocean and eventually conquer the world. The result was to justify massive U.S. aid to the Afghan Mujahideen. To fit the Mujaheddin into the U.S. meta-narrative of democratic resistance required amazing mental contortions, but U.S. officials, politicians, and many journalists contorted themselves accordingly. The eventual result was 9/11.

Because the false beliefs underlying the Cold War meta-narrative were never adequately examined and critiqued after it ended, these features of U.S. thought replicated themselves disastrously in the GWOT. In the Cold War, they consisted chiefly of the following assumptions: that the Soviet Union possessed overwhelming military and economic power; that Soviet policy was inherently and permanently aggressive, not in any way rooted in genuine Soviet fears; that the Soviet menace to the United States was existential; that the Communist menace was monolithic, and every left-wing nationalist force in the world was simply a local agent of Soviet communism; that the Soviet menace was permanent and essentially unchanging; and that a clear line distinguished Soviet “totalitarianism” from the (often just as savage) authoritarianism of key U.S. allies.

Some of the terrible consequences of this meta-narrative should have been apparent long before the Cold War ended. These included the dreadful crimes committed by the United States and its allies against governments and peoples portrayed as “Communist,” and U.S. support for a range of regimes that were not only wicked in themselves but in some cases hostile to real American interests.

Most importantly of all, the casting of world politics as a universal struggle between “Communism” and “The Free World” blinded the American establishment to the power of local nationalisms. The U.S. overthrow of the secular nationalist government of the (supposedly “pro-communist”) Iranian Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 contributed directly to the Islamic revolution a generation later and, therefore, haunts the United States to this day. 

Despite ample evidence from the junior ranks of the CIA, the reality and importance of the Sino-Soviet split went unrecognized for years. This contributed directly to the U.S. decision to intervene against “Communism” in Vietnam, and delayed by more than a decade the U.S. strategy of playing the USSR and Communist Vietnam off against China—which would have removed any rationale for U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

The “Domino Theory”—the absurd assumption that one state after another would automatically fall to Soviet domination irrespective of national tensions between them—came to dominate U.S. analysis. And the obsession with Vietnamese Communism blinded U.S. analysts to Vietnamese nationalism and led America to step into the hated and defeated shoes of French colonialism in Indochina.

As is now apparent, 9/11 was not the result of a global movement that posed a mortal threat to the United States and its values. It was the work of a few terrorists who managed to stage a malignantly brilliant one-off, which was only possible because of extreme carelessness on the part of the relevant U.S. authorities. Since then, U.S. institutions acting in concert and with allied services have been able to prevent any new major attack on the continental United States itself. The really effective measures taken were all simple and low cost, like better airport security and strict controls on the sale of nitrate fertilizer (the most common material for terrorist bombs).

Instead, the George W. Bush administration framed the U.S. campaign as the GWOT and extended it vastly beyond Al Qaeda. The designation of mutually hostile elements (Al Qaeda’s Sunni Salafism, Iran’s Shiism, Saddam Hussein’s secular Arab nationalism) as one homogenous enemy of the United States served U.S. geopolitical ambitions and hatreds, but violated a fundamental rule of strategy: you should seek to divide, not unite, your enemies. The casting of the GWOT as a universal struggle for freedom and democracy gained support for the invasion of Iraq from liberal intellectuals, journalists, and analysts who might otherwise have remembered the terrible lessons of Vietnam.

In the case of Afghanistan, for years on end those experts who argued that the Taliban had real and enduring mass support and legitimacy, and that sooner or later the United States would have to negotiate with them, were brushed aside and ostracized on the grounds that “the Taliban are evil” or “we don’t talk to terrorists.” The result was to delay these negotiations for more than a decade, allow the Taliban to recover its strength, and lose any chance that the Taliban could be brought to accept a compromise with the Afghan government in Kabul.

At the same time, the narrative of the struggle for democracy (as opposed to the hunt for Al Qaeda) trapped the United States into an attempt at democratic state-building in Afghanistan that soon degenerated into a horribly corrupt sham—a sham, however, that was disguised by ideologically-driven U.S. journalists. Both journalists and officials also engaged in colossal exaggeration of the degree of mass support for the post-2001 Kabul government (for example, the hailing of the hopelessly flawed 2014 elections as “a triumph of democracy”).

The GWOT meta-narrative of the fight for democracy could have had far more catastrophic results in the case of Pakistan; for it contributed to a gross underestimation of the hostility of the Pakistani population to the United States and the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and, therefore, to an underestimation of the consequences of putting extreme pressure on Pakistan. The fact that a democratic majority in a country detests the United States can in a certain sense simply not be recognized by believers in American “leadership of the free world.”

The case of Afghanistan illustrates another important defect of the U.S. policy scene that has been worsened by the dominance of meta-narratives: indifference to specific local expertise. Unlike in planning for the occupation of Japan after World War II, by the time of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, as Daniel Ellsberg famously remarked, there was not a single middle-ranking U.S. official who could have passed a freshman exam in Vietnamese history, society or culture. As for the American officials sent out to Afghanistan and Iraq, their ignorance and arrogance have become proverbial.

Much of the reason for this is sheer laziness and negligence, compounded in recent years by the decline of area studies and the rise of universal theoretical approaches in academia. However, U.S. meta-narratives also play a part. If the adversaries are not a specific movement of Vietnamese or Iraqis with their own specific cultures and beliefs but “Communism” or “Terrorism”; and if the goal is not to draw up a specific set of changes for a specific society but to spread “democracy” and “the free market,” then there is really not much need for regional experts—least of all, of course, those who might question the appropriateness of U.S. goals. As the distinguished historian Tony Judt wrote of two prominent liberal supporters of the Iraq War and Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” in the Middle East,

Thus Paul Berman, until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art) … Peter Beinart followed in his wake with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War on Terror and the early Cold War. Neither author had previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East, much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on which they pronounce with such confidence.

The aftermath of 9/11 saw the frenetic spawning of enormous shoals of instant experts and institutes on “terrorism” and “extremism,” who immediately gained access to official jobs and money—while genuine experts on Afghanistan were ignored and, in some cases, deliberately ostracized if they criticized U.S. plans.

And as we know from the malignant example of Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq and a number of baby Chalabis from Pakistan and elsewhere, opportunist local figures desirous of American money and support can also receive it by mastering the language of the U.S. meta-narrative of the “fight for freedom” against the designated evil of the time.

Two other effects of the GWOT and Cold War meta-narratives have both deep roots in U.S. political culture and destructive effects on U.S. policymaking and public debate. The first is the creation of overwhelming establishment consensuses on given issues that embrace politicians, the media, the bureaucracy, the military, the intelligence community, and large parts of academia. The result is to exclude and banish to the fringes dissenting voices and evidence; as witnessed in the case of Afghanistan the long refusal to examine either the roots of Taliban popular support or the real nature of Afghan “democracy.”

This feature of the United States has been made much worse by the U.S. system of political appointments to a wide range of official positions, on a far greater scale than in almost any other leading democracy. This reduces still further any possibility of independent advice from the permanent bureaucracy (insofar as that possibility ever existed). It also means that desire for future office (with the greatly increased private consultancy fees that result from this) leads members of think tanks and academia to carefully tailor their views to the dominant bipartisan consensus.

WE ARE now deep into the creation of a new bipartisan U.S. meta-narrative, that of global struggle with China. Its central theme is very familiar: that this is a fight to the death for the preservation of freedom and democracy in the world as a whole, in which U.S. leadership is essential. The sub-narratives built into the overall framework are also familiar: the exaggeration of the enemy’s ideological threat, global reach, geopolitical ambition, military strength, and moral evil. This exaggeration goes to serve the argument that the enemy threat requires the mobilization of U.S. resources, higher military spending, U.S. leadership, and U.S. presence across the globe, and alliances with enemies of China, however foul their regimes may be.

But because of its economic strength and dynamism as well as its ancient civilization and powerful nationalism, China cannot be worn down and defeated as the USSR was defeated. For one thing, the Chinese ideological threat does not really resemble that of Soviet Communism either in nature or in scale. China is not a revolutionary state and does not seek to create revolutions elsewhere. Its alternative example of authoritarian state-led capitalism can only be met by better performance of the U.S. state and economy at home—not as in the Cold War by support for “anti-communist forces” abroad. 

In addition, a great many of the social and cultural problems now facing China—atomization of society, crass materialism, decline of the family, cultural decay, rampant socio-economic inequality, ruthless corporate power—closely resemble those affecting the United States; and some at least of the remedies being proposed in China also resemble those of U.S. conservatives (in the field of cultural values) and progressives (curbing corporate power and financial speculation). China as a culture, economy, and society is, therefore, more complex and less alien than the new Washington consensus would have it.

Moreover, China is with us for this age of the world (until perhaps climate change renders all geopolitical rivalries irrelevant). If the U.S. establishment locks itself into a dominant meta-narrative of fear and hatred of China, then it will be stuck with this for generations to come, together with its corrupting effects on American culture and democracy. If we wish to avert or at least mitigate this danger, a good place to begin is by examining how framing the U.S. response to 9/11 as the “Global War on Terror” contributed to the disasters that ensued.

Anatol Lieven is a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. His website is Anatollieven.com. His latest book, Climate Change and the Nation State, appeared in an updated paperback edition in September.

Image: Reuters.