This episode unpacks how the September 11 attacks reshaped the U.S. approach to global threats and internal security.

Host:

James M. Lindsay, Mary and David Boies Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy, CFR

Guest:

Walter Russell Mead, Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship, Hudson Institute

We Discuss:

• Why the September 11 attacks were such a pivotal moment in the history of U.S. foreign policy, and how they are understood by those who lived through them in comparison to younger Americans.
• How the attacks shattered a post-Cold War sense in the United States that “history had ended,” with the world moving inevitably toward greater freedom and prosperity.
• Whether the "Global War on Terrorism" reflected the idiosyncrasies of the Bush administration, or something more fundamental about how the United States responds to attacks.
• How the Bush response to 9/11 compares to Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to Pearl Harbor.
• Why the United States found it so hard to leave Afghanistan and Iraq, and how mission creep turned those military campaigns into open-ended nation-building projects.
• How "liberal fundamentalism" shaped an overconfident belief that American values could be easily applied to other, complicated societies.
• Why Americans tend to treat foreign policy as a solvable problem rather than a set of chronic issues to be managed.
• The fate of the Jeffersonian impulse in American foreign policy, and what lessons Mead hopes 2028 presidential candidates will take from the legacy of September 11.

Mentioned on the Episode:

Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, Knopf

Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk, Knopf

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Harper & Row

Walter Russell Mead, “The Return of Geopolitics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers,” Foreign Affairs

George F. Kennan (“X”), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs

“The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 2002),” The White House

For an episode transcript and show notes, visit The President’s Inbox at: https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/presidents-inbox/what-the-us-got-wrong-in-the-war-on-terror

Opinions expressed on The President’s Inbox are solely those of the host or guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.