From their circle, Donald Rumsfeld – the architect of the war on terror – is no longer alive, but his comrades, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle are heading towards their late eighties. On the other end, public enemy number one behind the barricades of terror, Osama bin Laden was taken out by the Americans in 2011. His successor, Egyptian Ajman al-Zawahiri, recently faced the same fate as well. But in 2022, does this have any meaning? When barely three dozen remain from the hundreds of Guantanamo Bay prisoners, whom the Americans are eager to pass off to someone else’s hospitality sometime soon.
It is not enough. We are in a different world now. From an American perspective, the asymmetrical war – terrorist groups versus the state – has been replaced by tensions between states. Despite some of the worst nightmares, the Islamic State has proven far less effective than feared. Henry Kissinger, the nearly century-old doyen of American foreign policy, instead fears for the US being on the brink of war with Russia and China; he believes this should be worrying for the whole world as well. Moscow and Beijing held their demonstrative military exercises this past week at Vostok 2022 (East 2022). It is noteworthy that Kissinger believes America should always maintain a better relationship with these countries than they have with each other.
American resentment towards Moscow along with Western sanctions did not favor the latter strategy. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February solved the mainstream US press’ dilemma of who to frame as the number one enemy of the world’s leading – albeit self-proclaimed – democracies.
For instance, the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post vacillated for years on whether the corrupt and aggressive Chinese should be their primary enemy – based on events in Hong Kong in 2019 – or the Russians. The dilemma was solved when Vladimir Putin – who is now staring down his fourth US president over the span of his 20-year rule – crossed every possible line, according to Washington. Yet Bush Jr got a look into Putin’s soul when they locked eyes. But who cares when millions of Americans are demanding their world-famous basketball star charged with drug abuse, Britney Griner, be saved from the “evil empire”?
Most likely, only the George W. Bush Presidential Library archivists would care. Yet it would also be an exaggeration to say the Americans are preoccupied with the world as their own country is burning. The 330 million-strong population is extremely divided, and according to over 40 percent of those interviewed, it is conceivable that a civil war will break out in the coming decade.
From time to time there are attacks from homegrown terrorists but nothing comparable to 9/11 has been repeated; Islamist terrorism has not been able to take root in the USA. To Washington’s credit, external terrorist threats were mitigated with strict entry and visa policies. In the decade since Bin Laden died, he has been replaced with a more clean-shaven public enemy number one in the mainstream American media: Putin. According to domestic media, Donald Trump was right alongside him, colluding. In fact, according to them, he will not be able to resist trying to take back the White House from Joe Biden in 2025. But Trump is currently under heavy fire: from the January 6, 2021 siege on the capitol (incitement) to the boxes he took home to Florida from the Oval Office (violation of state secrets). Too bad Trump looks like an older American and not an Arab terrorist… nothing is perfect.
