America’s Biggest Post-9/11 Failure Is Not What You Think

US leaders made strategic errors dealing with Russia after September 11. Their mistakes have deadly echoes in the present.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We are all still processing the murder of Charlie Kirk. After you read Garry’s analysis on the strategic consequences of the September 11 attacks, please read RDI CEO Uriel Epshtein’s reflection on Kirk’s death. Stay tuned for more from The Next Move on where the nation goes after this tragedy.

Charlie Kirk Was Murdered. Political Violence Is Surrender.

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Whenever we come around to the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the foreign policy retrospectives pour in. Those reflections tend to focus on Afghanistan and Iraq.

That’s understandable. However, I’d like to offer a countervailing analysis. America’s greatest foreign policy failure after 9/11 was not in the Middle East, but in Russia. While the twisted metal and aircraft wreckage was still smoldering, US leaders made strategic errors in their dealings with Russia.

Those mistakes have deadly echoes in the present. Just this week, Russia launched its largest aerial strikes on Ukraine since the current war began. Russia once again trespassed on NATO territory, flying drones over Poland.

Al Qaeda’s attack on America took place in the early days of Vladimir Putin’s rule. He had been a totally unknown quantity in Russia just a few years prior, and he was still fairly obscure in the West.

Putin suddenly accrued a lot of goodwill in the US for reportedly being the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after terrorists struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It made for a convenient post-Cold War story. In America’s hour of need, it was a Russian leader who was the first to pick up the phone.

Putin told Bush that Russia was America’s ally in the war on terror. He explained that Russia was fighting Islamic fundamentalists in the Caucasus just as the United States was fighting them in Afghanistan.

Bush earnestly believed him. The United States broadened intelligence cooperation and joint military exercises with Moscow. When Bush identified North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as an axis of evil, Russia was conspicuously absent despite its close collaboration with all three. Instead, Bush showered Putin and Russia with praise.

At the 2002 G8 Summit, Bush had this to say:

I view President Putin as an ally, [a] strong ally in the war against terror.

The forty-third president would frequently repeat those platitudes about his Russian counterpart. But, true to form, Putin had ulterior motives in his interactions with Bush after 9/11.

To the extent that there were Islamic extremists among the Chechen rebels, Putin empowered them on the condition that they stay in the fold of the Russian Empire.

As chief mufti of Chechnya, Akhmat Kadyrov declared a jihad against Russia in the 1990s. A decade later, Putin installed him as president of the Chechen Republic. Today, Akhmat’s son, Ramzan Kadyrov, is Putin’s loyal enforcer in Chechnya. The Kadyrovtsi are Russia’s most brutal shock troops in Ukraine. Under Chechnya’s strict Islamic society, LGBT rights are now somehow even worse than in the rest of deeply homophobic Russia.

That’s because Russia’s war was never about terrorism or religious extremism, but colonial control. And that agenda received American blessing after 9/11.

In the years since, Putin has adopted an ever more expansive definition of terrorism to include anyone who speaks out against the regime. In fact, the Russian government officially designated me as a terrorist just last year!

Looking back, it’s easy to criticize Bush’s approach to Russia in the aftermath of 9/11. Indeed, there is a lot worth criticizing.

Yet Bush was also overtaken by events while Putin benefited from relative anonymity. What’s even more outrageous is the fact that Bush’s successors continued to embrace his fatally misguided view of Russia as an American partner in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

Barack Obama pursued a dead-on-arrival “reset” with Moscow after Putin had already sent planes, tanks, and soldiers into Georgia. In a now-infamous presidential debate, he went after Republican challenger Mitt Romney for labeling Russia a geopolitical threat. Obama’s argument was all snark, no substance, saying:

The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.

Obama won the election, but Romney unquestionably won the debate: Four years after that exchange, Russia directly intervened in a US presidential race.

Of course, it didn’t end there.

Months into Joe Biden’s administration, the United States was still coordinating with the Kremlin on US operations from independent nations like Kyrgyzstan, treating those places as if they were still Russian colonies. This was after Russia invoked its imperial heritage to justify invading eastern Ukraine and annexing Crimea.

And don’t even get me started on Donald Trump.

From the day Vladimir Putin enlisted in the KGB, his mission—preserving and expanding the Soviet-Russian Empire—has remained the same, even as the circumstances have changed. The tragedy of September 11 provided Putin with an opportunity. The Russian dictator cultivated political capital and complacency in the West after 2001. He then cashed in those assets to carry out audacious operations in Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, and right on American soil.

Next year will mark a quarter century since the 9/11 attacks, yet millions the world over are still living with the consequences of Russian aggression enabled by American strategic blindness. The only way to course correct is to recognize the pattern.

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