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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our series what 9/11 changed. Today what 9/11 changed about America's place in the world? Of course, this isn't just a history lesson that deadly and complicated withdraw from Afghanistan makes it front and center news that raises as many questions for this country's future, as it does about the past. Our guest for this is new Yorker economist, Robin Wright.

She's also a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for scholars and the author of many books on world affairs, including notably for this conversation, Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World, which was framed in part around the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that came out around back then. One of her recent new Yorker articles is called, "Does the great retreat from Afghanistan mark the end of an American era." Robin always good to tap your vast knowledge. Welcome back to WNYC.

Robin Wright: Good morning, Brian. It's always great to be with you. I'm sad as we mark the 20th anniversary.

Brian Lehrer: Indeed, and you're right, that the retreat from Afghanistan isn't just an epic defeat for the United States. The fall of Kabul may serve as a bookend for the era of US global power that began way back in 1941 now ending in 2021, what's the most basic outline of the 80-year arc that you see there?

Robin Wright: Well, we begin that arc with the US taking on the sophisticated Nazi war machine and the Japanese empire, the United States per day it was a global superpower with its vast military arsenal and its skilled army, navy, air force, and Coast Guard. 80 years later, we have retreated after a 20-year war, America's longest a trillion dollars, at least just in past expenditures.

The deaths of a quarter of a million people. We had to scurry out of Afghanistan when we faced a ragtag militia that had no air power, no significant arsenal, only armored vehicles were those confiscated from the Afghan army. It had a force only 60 to 70,000 strong in a country that was the size of Texas. Our retreat comes as a real blow at a lot of levels to our prestige, to our ability, to prove that a great democracy with one of the most powerful militaries can beat people who are trying to take a country in a society back to the dark ages.

Brian Lehrer: You're right, that this retreat is part of an unnerving American pattern that dates back to the 1970s and not just the retreat from Vietnam in 1975, the comparison that's being made a lot right now, but more than that, including President Reagan and President Obama, can you describe that pattern?

Robin Wright: Absolutely. I actually lived in Lebanon when America retreated from Beirut. The Reagan administration had deployed peacekeepers to divide the Israelis and the Palestinians who had been fighting a three-month war in Lebanon. The United States was trying to create an alternative, help broker a peace agreement, help stabilize Lebanon with implications for the whole region.

Instead after the very first suicide bomb against the military, the Marines first went underground, became defensive in their deployment, and then eventually just moved to ships and sailed off. This was a peacekeeping mission and we failed at that. Of course, in 2011, President Obama opted to withdraw from Iraq, which opened the way ultimately for the emergence of ISIS, which for the next five years redrew the map of the Middle East by taking huge chunks of Syria and Iraq. It forced the United States to go back to fight yet a whole different kind of war in Iraq.

Brian Lehrer: I don't want to over romanticize US foreign policy during the Cold War period as simply defending freedom from Soviet totalitarianism. We backed dictators and other bad governments if they backed us, including being slow to split from the apartheid regime in South Africa to Mubarak in Egypt, Saddam Hussein, when he was at war with Iran and others, and of course the complex millions of deaths, tragedy of Vietnam. How does that complexity fit into these arcs that you're talking about?

Robin Wright: Well, it was a bipolar world and countries basically had to take sides if they wanted to get aid or political support diplomatic engagement with either the United States or the Soviet Union. The world is divided again, but in a much more complex way. We have, whether it's the US-China competition, the US-Russia competition, those are the kinds of old cold war divisions, but we also have a whole array of non-state actors that have proliferated around the world.

When we went to war in Afghanistan, there was one Al-Qaida group that had found a base, a safe haven in Afghanistan. Today Al-Qaeda has six other franchises around the world. It decided that to survive, it needed to create cells that then became larger operations in other countries on other continents. ISIS, the Islamic state for Syria and Iraq actually now is in the same position. It has created franchises. It has a network that you can count up to 20 different types of franchises around the world.

I was in Mozambique for independence in 1975. This is a country in Southern Africa with a 60% Christian population. Last month, the US sanctioned the ISIS branch in Mozambique. ISIS has made headway and a lot of these Islamic extremist movements have made headway far beyond their original borders, far from places you might ever envision with an impact that will affect local security, regional security, and potentially the threats that Americans or American interests will face for years to come.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is Robin Wright, New Yorker foreign affairs columnist, as we talk about what 9/11 changed with respect to America's place in the world as we, of course mark the 20th anniversary of the attacks this week. Robin, let me play some brief soundbites of each president since 9/11 on US foreign policy and get your take on the arc of rhetoric and events and this pendulum almost whiplash like swinging back and forth from one to the next to the next. Here's George W. Bush just after 9/11, announcing the invasion of Afghanistan, but promising much more.

George W. Bush: The name of today's military operation is enduring freedom. We defend it, not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear.

Brian Lehrer: He wasn't just rooting out Al Qaeda to protect US national security, to listen to that. He was promising "freedom for people everywhere", but by the end of his term, he and Vice President Cheney were widely seen as purveyors of a unilateral Cowboy War in Iraq at best and purveyors of torture to boot. One of the main reasons Barack Obama was elected over both John McCain and Hillary Clinton was for opposing that war from the start and promising this once Obama was in office.

Barack Obama: The United States is moving forward from a position of strength. The long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year. The transition in Afghanistan is moving forward and our troops are finally coming home.

Brian Lehrer: Obama in 2011, telling the world we were moving on from the Bush-Cheney war machine. He notably gave his first foreign speech in Cairo to help restore US credibility in the region as he saw it but after eight years of Obama, Donald Trump was elected partly on his campaign of portraying Obama and Trump's opponent Hillary Clinton as weak.

Donald Trump: To solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is, or at least say the name. She won't say the name and President Obama won't say the name, but the name is there. It's radical Islamic terror, and before you solve it, you have to say the name.

Brian Lehrer: After four years of Trump leaning toward Putin and other authoritarians as the new US-led Alliance Joe Biden was elected and promptly announced this.

Joe Biden: America is back, diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.

Brian Lehrer: Robin, I know those little sound bites are reductionist, but would you agree there's been this whiplash foreign policy since 9/11 of aggression and retreat with both ways having mixed results.

Robin Wright: Absolutely. Your selection of soundbites is truly chilling. Historians are going to have a field day with the first two decades of the 21st century. I think there are four things that come out of this. First of all, we are often reactive. As a great power, we should be more proactive in both understanding the world and trying to use the variety of tools we have at our disposal, not just our military force.

Military force will never beat an extremist ideology, just not going to happen. The military are among the first to understand that. I think second, the tragedy represented by Afghanistan, but also the sequence of quotes you've illustrated or chosen is that jihadism has beaten democracy in all the arenas where we have chosen to fight and that's pretty electrifying. Democracy at the end of the day is a much stronger ideology, but it is shocking to me that jihadism could win any place against democracy.

The next thing is that the lessons we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the United States for all its good intentions or despite all its wealth and skills, does not know how to effectively either build a nation or establish a military in just a decade or two. Too often we really don't understand local societies for a variety of reasons. I had a former senior administration official say to me just last week that the United States in 20 years never really understood Afghanistan.

That is profoundly true. I can say that because I've been going there since the first round of Taliban rule in the 1990s. I was there in March with General McKenzie who had central command at a time that the Taliban had retaken half the country. We invested 83 million in building the Afghan army. It was four times larger than the Taliban and yet it disappeared. The next thing that strikes me is that the US has in both of its wars organized or mobilized global coalitions.

The one for Afghanistan is the largest in human history. We had over 100 countries participating, more than almost two dozen countries allowing the us to use its soil for military operations or military transit. In Iraq, we managed to pull together a meager pathetic coalition of the willing countries that wanted to curry favor with the United States and really played only token roles.

The question is coming out of both of these wars, when will coalition to be able to be formed again by the United States, tapping into allies who after all many of them are democracies, whose people don't want to see the loss of life, of failed missions, the expenditure of national treasures impact on the economy. How often will they want to allow themselves with dangerous missions on overseas?

I think that's weakened the United States. I think there are a lot of long term repercussions that come out of not just Afghanistan, but are two decades, four presidencies of trying to deal with this phenomena.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is New Yorker columnist Robin Wright. One of her recent articles, Does the great retreat from Afghanistan mark the end of an American era, which we're discussing on this 20th anniversary week of the 911 attacks. Robin, how do you see the 20 year legacy in terms of the US as a so-called "beacon of freedom" for oppressed people? Bush tried to sell the war in Iraq, that way we played that clip with respect to Afghanistan, but he said the same thing leading up to the war in Iraq.

This isn't just about US national security, this is about out leveraging freedom with a few well placed military invasions as he saw it. He tried to sell his wars that way, but I think it wound up mostly just discrediting the us as a beacon of freedom. Biden just now pulled us from Afghanistan because there is no US interest, but leaving the people of that country as we've been discussing back in the hands of a murderous and misogynist theocracy.

Just yesterday they announced their new male only leadership to Taliban largely of the same guys from the 90s. Quite a contrast with the liberation of Europe and World War II from the Nazis to recall your original point at the beginning of this conversation. My question is, what are the options now, if any, for the US being any moral leader?

Robin Wright: At the end of the day, vast majority of people I've met in now more than 140 countries do want freedom. They want the ability to have a say in their life, whether it is politically, economically, socially, they want a sense of dignity and quality in some form. The question is, what is the model? What is the role model? Is the US still a beacon? The United States is still the dominant power in the West, no question, but that's partly by default because there's not a lot of leadership or the creation of alternatives, whether it is politically or even militarily.

We are still the model for the West. I think the level of respect and is in doubt, and I think there's also to a certain degree questions about what are US intentions? Are they honorable? Are they selfish? Are they really out to help us, or are they to better the US position in the world, its influence? There have been pieces written over the past two weeks about the end of the American empire.

This a period where we wanted to have a quasi colonial rule through our flunkies or allies in the countries where we have deployed. I think that one of the great problems in Afghanistan was that the depth of corruption was so profound that the army at the end of the day would rather defect or disappear than fight for a democratically elected government, because government was perceived as so corrupt. That's the danger.

That's the same problem we face in Iraq and in some of our other allies as well, they are either corrupt, or they are increasingly autocratic. You look at where the United States has turned for help in Afghanistan. It is the Gulf Sheik terms taking in or providing the United States access to its military bases. These are not countries that are democratic or whole democratic elections.

The danger is in the Middle East, we find many of our allies, as you mentioned earlier, Mubarak may be gone, but you have the former field marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt that you find autocracies and monarchies now dominating a far cry from the mood we saw 10 years ago with the Arab spring, as one after another dictator across the region began to fall. The question is, so what do we do next?

Not to ramble on, but I will say that we are a country with a lot of different and tools, and whether it's using our economic aid to help countries create jobs, to foster civil society, which is the nascent building block of a democracy. There are a lot of other things we can do and our tendency is too often to throw our military at a problem and think that will solve it because it won't.

Brian Lehrer: The US since Obama has tried to pivot to a foreign policy, more based on our complex relations with China and the Pacific and away from both the Bush war machine of the Iraq and Afghanistan war eras, especially Iraq, and even from the mindset of the cold war, but the Taliban have now announced that China is their most important ally, so even those things are interconnected.

Robin Wright: Absolutely. I think the United States is right to look at the long-term challenge from China, the immediate threat from Russia, but the Middle East will continue to be a thorn. One of the problems is that, in the 21st century, every president has basically wanted to pivot to China and has been sucked back into the Middle East, because of a crisis on the ground or the kind of terrorist threat that actually reached our shores.

Brian Lehrer: If we're going to frame this in part as "we aren't" as "we must" in terms of American Capitalist Neocolonialism, I wonder if you also see the so-called first Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush in 1991, so exactly 10 years before 9/11, as a kind of original sin in this era. Iraq invaded Kuwait, arguably not much of our business except for cheap oil one could argue, and moderate old H.W. Bush got us embroiled, maybe unnecessarily in the Saudi Arabia and Iraq tension just after the Cold War ended.

We thought there was going to be a peace dividend and the US didn't have to play these roles in the world any more. The US involvement in Saudi Arabia especially, through that first Gulf War, became a direct inspiration for the 9/11 attackers of the World Trade Center as a symbol of war-backed American capitalism. I wonder how you see this playing into that. It never gets talked about and, personally, I tend to think the first Gulf War as the good Iraq War is a narrative that's dominant but wrong.

Robin Wright: You're absolutely right. One thing you didn't mention is that Osama bin Laden had been a de facto ally of the United States during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Bin Laden had mobilized the Arab fighters who were armed and trained by Pakistan with aid from the United States. It was only after the United States and its allies deployed in Saudi Arabia to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein when Bin Laden turned on the United States and began his jihad against us.

The reality in 1990 and 1991 was that the west, including the United States, was more dependent on Gulf oil. We saw Saddam's invasion as an aggression, a violation of many international laws and treaties. At the time, he had used chemical weapons against Iran repeatedly and there was concern, this is long before the 2003 war, about his arsenal, what he might have.

That certainly was the moment that pandora's box was opened and Jihadism was unleashed with a well-financed and militant under Osama bin Laden, who was able to exploit the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. History is cyclical. History does have a trajectory and you can see these things evolving. It's just like when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. The Shiites mobilized to fight the Israelis and that gave birth to Hezbollah.

Each of these military acts has consequences politically that can change the horizon for decades, even centuries, to come.

Brian Lehrer: Let's conclude on a thought. Looking back on your book 10 years ago, Rock the Casbah, which was to some degree, hooked to the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and also at that time, to the so-called Arab Spring. The youth led uprisings for democracy against both dictators that were backed by the United States and other dictators and it appeared, for a time, against the Islamists like Al Qaeda, at the same time.

I think the pro-Bush people argued that, "Look, it's working." The invasion of Iraq might've been horrible in many ways and even based on false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but it had the side effect of unleashing what President Bush always said that it would, which was, a hunger for democracy that would lead to popular uprisings that the United States didn't have to participate in, but here we are.

Almost all of those have been squelched, the horrible war in Syria and as you mentioned before, we have Mubaraq and Egypt a little bit of democracy and now El Sisi. How do those two tie together with this now 10-year lens of history of how 9/11 and the US response to 9/11 and the Arab Spring, at least an attempt at it, connect to each other?

Robin Wright: The Arab Spring was, in many ways, in mass protests inspired by the death of a young fruit vendor who set himself on fire to protest corruption and injustice. It was not inspired at all by the US intervention in Iraq and the ouster of Saddam Hussein. This was a truly indigenous movement that struck the region. I think the original sin, in many ways, was that the United States didn't know how to help a lot of inexperienced young people figure out a different future.

In Libya, we used particularly our war machine to put pressure on Muammar Gaddafi. As soon as he was killed, we walked away and allowed local militias that had formed in the intervening months to launch a civil war that is still not over a decade later. This is, again, where we throw military tools and we could've used a lot of different ways to say no when El Sisi engaged in a military coupe against the first democratically-elected government in the history of Egypt.

We have been timid about human rights, about standing up for the things we as nation believe in. We, again, are reactive rather than proactive. We're not imaginative. We think that as a power, we use our foremost instruments of power to address problems and we know how to fight wars. We don't know how to create the peace afterwards and that's where we get in trouble time and time and time again.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe with Afghanistan as an example, we don't even know how to fight wars. Robin Wright from the New Yorker and the Wilson Center, thank you so much.

Robin Wright: Thank you, Brian. Always great to be with you.

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