Analytical Exposition of 9/11’s Impact on US Foreign Policy: Some Observations

Within hours of the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington D.C., American commentators were already comparing the event to a new ‘Pearl Harbor’. The comparison of September 11 with Pearl Harbor was natural because both were surprise attacks that killed many Americans, but most interesting about it was its implication: that an age of innocence and isolation had passed, and that American invulnerability was gone. Just as was the case after the Japanese attack, September 11 seemed fated to change radically and permanently the degree to which, and the way in which, the United States engaged with the rest of the world. Foreign policy arguably changed direction within days of 9/11 with the most immediate and most obvious change being the shift in focus towards terrorism. The focus had been foreign economic policy under Clinton but 9/11 produced a dramatic movement away from diplomacy and towards military solutions via the War on Terror. This change provides evidence of an immediate shift in US interests and this manifested in foreign policy. As such, this is an extremely important change post-9/11, especially as it emerged out of the first response to the attack and served to dictate US actions abroad for more than a decade afterwards. In this analytical article, the author examines the US foreign policy that changed in some very noticeable ways after the terrorist attacks on American soil on Sept. 11, 2001, most noticeably by increasing the amount of intervention in foreign wars, the amount of defense spending, and the redefinition of a new enemy as terrorism. Yet, in other reflective ways, the author also observes, how the foreign policy after 9/11 is viewed by major researchers as phenomenally a continuation of American policy since its beginnings.