By Javier Solana & Angel Saz-Carranza
A quarter-century ago, the world changed course in an instant. The new millennium had roughly coincided with the arrival of new presidents in the United States and Russia, then the world’s two greatest military powers. But the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US fundamentally altered both countries’ trajectories, as well as that of a rising China, setting in motion developments that would produce the fractured geopolitical order we live in today.
Everyone who is old enough still remembers where they were on that fateful day. One of us was in Crimea, the other in Khartoum, and though we were stunned, we did not yet know that we were witnessing the beginning of a new era.
In America, the world’s unquestioned hegemon, President George W. Bush had taken a tortuous path to the White House, following a Florida ballot recount that was ultimately settled by the Supreme Court. On the morning of September 11, television cameras caught the president reading to children in a Sarasota, Florida, elementary school, where an aide whispered in his ear that the country was under attack. His look of bewilderment anticipated the quality that would come to define US foreign policy.
The US soon subordinated every other objective to national security, abandoning the multilateral leadership that it had leveraged since 1945. Starting in late 2001, US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld pushed for America to leave the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, so that it could start work on a missile shield to defend the “homeland.” This led to the Ground-Based Midcourse Defence program, which deployed missiles in Alaska and California, and had plans to do so in Poland, catching a weakened Russia by surprise.
In a move that should have surprised no one, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by abandoning the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II). Meanwhile, the US embarked on two major wars: in Afghanistan, where its intervention was legal and backed by much of the world; and in Iraq, where it launched an invasion without UN authorization.
The Iraq war caused an internal rupture within the European Union, with longstanding members like France and Germany opposing it, while newer members like Poland and older ones like the United Kingdom backed the US effort. Both wars would end in failure, and the Bush presidency would leave a poisoned gift: the offer—as grandiose as it was unworkable—of eventual NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, made at the alliance’s 2008 Bucharest summit. With no timetable and no real guarantees, this promise raised alarms in the Kremlin without doing anything to protect either country.
Putin’s ascent to the Russian presidency in 2000 had initially seemed to herald stability and economic development after the chaos of the 1990s. On September 11, he was reportedly among the first to call Bush to express his solidarity. But this did not last long.
In 2003, the Kremlin expropriated the big, previously privatized energy firm Yukos and jailed its owner, the politically ambitious oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2006, the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-210 in London. And in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin delivered an incendiary speech accusing the West of double standards, effectively breaking with the security architecture that Russia and the West had inherited from the Cold War.
The combination of American unilateralism and Russian marginalization pushed Putin toward a revisionist nationalism, an increasingly brazen authoritarianism, and, gradually, into the arms of a rising Chinese giant. In August 2008, as the global financial crisis erupted and amid the Beijing Olympics, Russia invaded Georgia, setting a precedent for the eventual invasion of Ukraine.
But perhaps the most fascinating and consequential development was unfolding in Asia.
In December 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization with the full support of the US and the EU. The West assumed that commercial integration would drag China’s economic model toward convergence with liberal capitalism. Instead, China pursued a different model: an effective, tightly directed state capitalism. Far from fading, the Chinese model became a powerful geopolitical lever that the Western model—many companies competing against one another, with no state strategy behind them—has proven unable to answer.
US President Barack Obama, already in his second term, was among the first to react. The US gave up on reforming the WTO and launched two comprehensive trade agreements that explicitly excluded China: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which would ultimately be abandoned, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which later entered into force as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership without its US architect.
In 2012, Xi Jinping came to power in China and began concentrating authority and control over society to a degree unmatched since Mao Zedong. His political doctrine was written into the Party’s constitution (joining those of Mao and Deng Xiaoping) in 2017, and a year later, the National People’s Congress abolished presidential term limits.
Since then, Xi has increasingly centralized power and decoupled China’s civil and academic life from the rest of the world. In 2017, China blocked WhatsApp and Skype, making it harder for Chinese civil-society and business leaders to communicate with their Western counterparts. And in the last five years, hundreds of senior officials and military officers have been investigated, removed, or purged. Following the unexplained disappearances of the foreign and defense ministers in 2023, almost the entire Central Military Commission was purged this year.
The world could have taken a different course after September 11, 2001. Instead, major powers have remained beholden to an overly narrow understanding of security and power. The US has turned inward and embraced the principle of might makes right; Russia, marginalized and weakened, has become a revisionist belligerent; and China has turned its economic model into an instrument of power that the West does not know how to counter.
For Europe, these developments have made one thing all too clear: We can no longer rely on American protection. Europe must build a credible military force of its own to counter Russia, and it must devise instruments to shield its economy from Chinese economic dirigisme. Whether Europe will finally take this path remains to be seen.
Javier Solana is a former foreign minister of Spain. Angel Saz-Carranza is Professor of Strategy and Policy at Esade.
