Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

The significance of 9/11
The debates outlined above have been part of the history of the republic
since its foundation, but, perhaps inevitably, with the end of the Cold War
they took on a new significance. Still, through the 1990s these debates failed
to raise a great deal of interest, largely because there was no great issue
upon which they could be brought to bear. The US was going through
a period of peace and prosperity which fostered the illusion that interna-
tional relations were of no great significance in the wider scale of things.
The ease with which the US-led coalition won the war with Iraq in 1991,
and the zero-American/NATO-casualty war in Kosovo in 1999 bracketed
the decade; things were sufficiently low-key that the loss of 18 US Rangers
in Mogadishu in 1993 could seem a great tragedy – which, of course, it was
for the soldiers concerned and their families, but it seems extraordinary in
retrospect, and symptomatic of the context of perceived security in which
the US operated in the 1990s, that a whole new strategic doctrine concern-
ing US involvement in peacekeeping operations could have emerged from
such a minor incident. In the 1990s there were straws in the wind –
the unsuccessful attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) of 1994, and
Al Qaeda attacks on the USS Cole and US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
later in the decade – but although some security experts fretted, for the most