When 9/11 happened, America was at its pinnacle. The USSR had collapsed, Russia was in chaos, China was a partner, NATO was expanding into Russia’s neighbourhood. Then came the “war on terror” — and, as Stanly Johny argues in this sharp 25-year audit, a series of regime-change wars that unwound that very primacy.
The three consequences of Iraq were fatal. First, it diverted focus from Afghanistan, allowing Taliban to regroup and eventually defeat the US 20 years later. Second, it birthed ISIS — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq became Islamic State after state collapse. Third, removing Saddam removed the buffer between Iran and US-backed Gulf monarchies, empowering Iran in Baghdad and trapping US in Iraq’s Shia politics. The same logic repeated in Libya in 2011 — NATO’s “led from behind” war toppled Gaddafi, opened arms floodgates across Africa, and fuelled jihadism in Sahel.
By the time Obama left, war weariness had set in. Trump’s first move was acceptance: US lost in Afghanistan. The Doha deal in February 2020 and Kabul’s fall on August 15, 2021 ended the first post-9/11 regime change war. The paradox, Johny writes, is that America emerged unchallenged after Cold War, but its military interventions eroded its strategic freedom.
Two events blocked its pivot to China. The 2021 Afghan pullback, seen as weakness, emboldened Russia to invade Ukraine in Feb 2022. The Oct 7, 2023 Hamas attack triggered America’s unconditional embrace of Israel’s war on Gaza and the Feb 2026 US-Israeli bombing of Iran. America failed to learn from regime-change failure, failed to decouple from Israel, and refused to accept the world changed.
Result: 25 years on, terror groups survived as localised tentacles, US is stuck in West Asia, allies chafe at its transactional unilateralism, and China has risen as second pole. The US behaves like an ill-conceived Iran war suggests, like a unilateral hegemon. But its unilateralism now clashes with a post-unipolar world.