Ten years after the Twin Towers

Ten years have gone by since the attack on the Twin Towers. Since then we have lived in a different world marked by two wars, and a climate of general fear.

The United States, which in this decade has racked up many successes in the war on terrorism, seems now less vulnerable than it was in 2001. Osama bin Laden is dead, Al Qaeda weaker and more fragmented than it was then. The aftermath of 9/11 has stepped up the efficiency of the American security agencies (FBI, CIA), whose shortcomings were embarrassingly apparent before and after the attacks.

But the superpower has paid a high price for its boosted strength. With his doctrine of preventive war, George W. Bush eliminated containment and dissuasion as pillars of security, and a society that used to combat its enemies by proportionate and legal means has grown accustomed to the use of torture, kidnapping and murder ? in which it has enjoyed the collaboration of unconditional or weak allied governments. Even today Barack Obama, theoretically poles apart from his predecessor, keeps alive the infamy of Guantanamo and the indefinite detention without trial of the prisoners there, while in areas of Central Asia his drone planes go on killing innocent and guilty alike.

The foreign image of the United States has cracked. The ill-fated invasion of Iraq - the worst and most tragic error resulting from September 11, an exercise in unilateralism at the expense of international law - fractured relations with America's European allies.

The final profile of the government in Baghdad is still unclear, though it is to be feared that it may be closer to Tehran than to Washington. And in Afghanistan - the second war started by the White House, which the double game played by Pakistan renders impossible to win - dissensions between the allies have only enhanced the situation of distance. This is apparent in the role played by the exhausted Atlantic Alliance in the Central Asian country, a battle for its own raison d'être.

Europe, disjointed and swamped by the magnitude of its own difficulties (and lashed by Washington for its military incapacity, even in countries as near as Libya), is reluctant to go along with the superpower's armed expeditions.

The decade has seen a clear deterioration of America's position in the world. The strategic priorities born of September 11 have had a regrettable anesthetic effect in crucial areas of the international scene. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, for example, has been left to its fate, in spite of a few mumbled statements. The encouraging phenomenon of the Arab Spring came quite unexpectedly. The democratic ideal preached by Bush has only come to pass much later, and its propagation over North Africa and the Middle East has been due not to Washington and the Western democracies, but to the uncontainable pressure of chronic frustrations and vexations suffered by the peoples of those countries.

The world of 2011 is not that of 2001. The United States, whose absolute hegemony could never last eternally, is seeing its influence decline against that of rival powers on the international chessboard which, for the first time in recent history, cannot be reshaped at its whim.

China is emerging as a new titan, which aspires to impose its own conditions on the world, and sooner rather than later. Relations between Beijing and Washington have yet to overcome a long-standing mutual distrust, aggravated in the case of Washington by the challenge posed to American control of the Pacific. Asia is a powerful magnet for the economic and strategic interests of a planet in which a diffuse and diminished Europe has growing difficulties in making its voice heard.

Seen in perspective, the event of most lasting effects in the decade, and perhaps that of heaviest impact on the daily lives of Americans, may not be the September 11 attacks, which are now fading into the history books, but the economic earthquake that emerged in America itself in 2008, whose consequences are still far from being a thing of the past.

The aftershocks of this huge financial collapse have and will go on having a greater impact on the ordinary life of half the world, than the tremors set off by the act of a few fanatic believers in a visionary doctrine of international terrorism. Next year's American presidential elections, it is expected, will take place amid a different scenario of the global war on terror. After the experience of the last decade, and in view of its astronomical national deficit, the United States has less resources at hand with which to respond to future challenges to its security, among which it would foolish to rule out further acts committed by Islamist fanatics. But the lesson of the many mistakes and absurdities committed so far has to be learned by all, and not only by Washington.