global geopolitics

An independent analysis of the post-9/11 order, its institutional drivers, and the material consequences of hegemonic overreach

Editorial Analysis | September 2026

The comment that Benjamin Netanyahu made on the evening of 11 September 2001, when asked by the New York Times what the attacks meant for relations between the United States and Israel, has acquired a retrospective significance that its brevity might not initially suggest. Netanyahu replied that the attacks were “very good”, before editing himself to say that they were “not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy” and would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples”(1). The phrasing was revealing not because it displayed unusual cynicism but because it articulated a strategic logic that would guide policy for the next quarter century. Netanyahu understood that the attacks had created a political environment in which American power could be directed toward objectives that had previously been unattainable. He was not expressing satisfaction at the deaths of nearly three thousand people but recognising that the resulting configuration of American domestic politics would permit the implementation of a programme that had been prepared long in advance.

That programme was described by General Wesley Clark in a 2007 speech in which he recounted a conversation with a senior Pentagon official shortly after the attacks. The official told him that the United States had decided to attack and remove governments in seven countries over five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran (9). Clark described what he witnessed as a “policy coup” in which a small group of officials took control of American foreign policy and directed it toward a set of objectives that had no connection to the stated purpose of responding to the attacks (9). The timing of the memo, which was drafted within weeks of 11 September, indicates that the plan predated the attacks and that the attacks provided the political cover necessary for its implementation. The countries on the list shared a common characteristic: they were bastions of support for Palestinian self-determination and opponents of Israeli military occupation, and their removal from the regional order would eliminate the principal obstacles to unchallenged Israeli dominance.

( General Wesley Clark)

The Obama administration’s decision to authorise and support the Saudi intervention in Yemen in 2015 must be understood within this institutional context rather than as an isolated policy failure. The White House was simultaneously negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, an agreement that Israel and its allies in Congress opposed with unusual intensity. By permitting Riyadh to launch a bombing campaign against Ansarallah, an embattled president placated a key regional ally and demonstrated that American hostility toward Iran’s regional allies remained undiminished even as diplomacy with Tehran proceeded. Rob Malley, a senior Obama official, told the journalist Aaron Maté in a 2018 interview that the administration suspected the war would be prolonged and costly but proceeded nonetheless. The prediction proved accurate, with hundreds of thousands of deaths, a near-famine induced by blockade, and 4.5 million displaced persons constituting the observable outcome of a decision taken for reasons of domestic and alliance politics rather than humanitarian concern.

The consequences of that decision have now produced a strategic environment that Washington and Riyadh find considerably less favourable than the one they sought to create. Ansarallah’s capture of Mokha and its advance toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait has placed the movement in a position to threaten shipping through one of the world’s most consequential maritime chokepoints, and the organisation has demonstrated a willingness to use that position. The US bombing campaign that intensified after Trump returned to office killed at least 153 civilians in three strikes in April 2025 according to a Pentagon assessment submitted to Congress, which acknowledged that the strikes “more likely than not” resulted in civilian harm (33). The campaign failed to degrade Ansarallah’s military capacity and instead deepened the organisation’s popular support and its determination to impose costs on its adversaries. The Yemeni movement has now imposed a blockade on Saudi Arabia, seized the port city of Mokha, captured the island of Perim, and solidified its control over strategic points on the Bab el-Mandeb (34).

The recent attacks on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, which Baghdad has confirmed were launched from Iraqi territory, demonstrate how the post 9/11 order has produced a proliferation of conflict zones that are increasingly difficult to contain. The Popular Mobilization Forces, an alliance of militias formally integrated into Iraq’s security apparatus but possessing operational autonomy, denied responsibility for the attacks, and no group has claimed them (34). Trump stated that Iran was “probably” responsible, a formulation that reveals the absence of definitive evidence rather than the presence of it (34). The Iraqi government dismissed military and police commanders in Maysan province on the Iranian border and closed the main border crossing, actions that suggest Baghdad is attempting to demonstrate compliance with American demands while managing a situation in which its own security forces are implicated in attacks on a neighbouring state (34). The United States has pressured Iraq to disband the militias and has set a September 30 deadline for their disarmament, but several groups have refused to comply (34).

The financial architecture through which Washington exercises leverage over Baghdad represents one of the more consequential and least examined dimensions of the post 9/11 order. Approximately ninety percent of Iraq’s national budget is derived from crude oil sales, and those revenues are deposited directly into an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (55). The arrangement was established under American auspices after the 2003 invasion and has been maintained through the Development Fund for Iraq, which ensures that the cash used to pay civil servants, import food, and stabilise the currency must physically pass through American hands. The Trump administration blocked a five-hundred-million-dollar cargo shipment in April 2026 and halted regular monthly inflows estimated at over one billion dollars, freezing Iraq’s own property rather than foreign aid and weaponising the country’s financial lifeline as an instrument of political coercion (55). Iraqi officials have publicly questioned the moral basis of this arrangement, noting that corruption is a universal governance problem rather than a uniquely Iraqi condition, and that the United States possesses no credible standing to lecture other nations on financial integrity (55).

The memorandum of understanding that Trump signed with Iran in June 2025 illustrates the contradictions that pervade American policy toward the region. The agreement was described by CNN as secret and vague, with its text remaining unpublished for days after its digital signature and with leaks suggesting that it lacked firm commitments, benchmarks, or concrete sequencing (44). The memorandum reportedly included a three-hundred-billion-dollar reconstruction fund for Iran to be financed by regional powers and guaranteed by the US government, a provision that opened the administration to claims of hypocrisy given Trump’s frequent criticism of the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement (44). Vice President JD Vance insisted that economic benefits would depend on Iran living up to a promise never to seek a nuclear weapon, but the structure of the agreement suggested that Washington was relinquishing leverage before securing meaningful restrictions. The episode reveals that American policy toward Iran oscillates between confrontation and accommodation without a coherent strategic framework, reflecting the competing institutional interests that shape decision-making rather than a unified national purpose.

The removal of Syria from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism in August 2026 represents the culmination of a strategic reorientation that has been underway since the fall of the Assad government in December 2024. The delisting followed a forty-seven-year designation and was justified by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as recognition of the Syrian government’s commitment under President Ahmed al-Sharaa to distance itself from acts of international terrorism (62). Washington also revoked the designation of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the organisation that al-Sharaa formerly led, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity, and Congress repealed the Caesar Act sanctions that had threatened secondary penalties on any foreign entity dealing with the Syrian government (62). The rationale for these measures was articulated by the late Senator Lindsey Graham, who wrote that al-Sharaa had been “a true thorn in the side of Iran” and had “dramatically reduced Iran’s influence in Syria” by cutting off the land bridge that had previously supplied Hezbollah in Lebanon (62). The reward for services rendered in the campaign against Iran and Hezbollah was the lifting of sanctions that had inflicted suffering on the Syrian people, a transaction that demonstrates the extent to which the post 9/11 order has always been organised around Israeli security objectives rather than American interests or regional stability.

The strategic chain that connects the September 2001 attacks to the present configuration of conflict in the Middle East reveals a consistent pattern of decision, escalation, and unintended consequence. The decision to authorise the Saudi intervention in Yemen produced a humanitarian catastrophe and strengthened the very movement it sought to destroy. The decision to impose maximum economic pressure on Iran through sanctions and naval blockade produced a consolidation of the Axis of Resistance and an acceleration of de-dollarisation. The decision to embrace al-Sharaa’s Syria as a partner against Iran produced the delisting of a government whose leader once swore allegiance to the organisation that attacked the United States, and it has rewarded a figure who fought American soldiers in Iraq with sanctions relief that the Syrian people had been denied for decades. The objectives that were articulated in public bore little relationship to the outcomes that were produced in practice, and the gap between rhetoric and result is where the true logic of the post 9/11 order can be located.

The evidence supports the conclusion that the post 9/11 order has been organised around the protection and expansion of Israeli regional dominance, and that American power has been deployed in service of that objective with consequences that have damaged American interests and regional stability. The mechanisms through which this order is sustained include military intervention, proxy warfare, economic sanctions, financial coercion, and the systematic marginalisation of diplomatic alternatives. The institutions that implement these mechanisms possess their own interests in perpetuation, and the individuals who staff them have built careers on the assumption that the order is permanent and just. The order is not permanent, and it is not just, and the material conditions that sustained it are eroding as the costs of confrontation mount and the capacity of the United States to impose outcomes diminishes.

Authored By: Global GeoPolitics

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References

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Anadolu Agency (2026) ‘EXPLAINER – What Syria’s removal from US terrorism list means’, Anadolu Agency, 25 August. Available at: https://mobile.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/explainer-what-syrias-removal-from-us-terrorism-list-means/4037133 (Accessed: 13 September 2026).

Bahrani, W. (2026) ‘America’s financial stranglehold on Iraq’, Tehran Times, 19 July. Available at: https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/528341/America-s-financial-stranglehold-on-Iraq (Accessed: 13 September 2026).

CNN (2026) ‘Why Trump’s secret and vague MOU is stirring a political storm’, CNN Politics, 17 June. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/17/politics/trump-iran-deal-what-does-the-mou-say (Accessed: 13 September 2026).

Reuters (2026) ‘US military operations killed 153 civilians in 2025, official says, citing Pentagon assessment’, Reuters, 11 August. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-military-operations-killed-153-civilians-2025-official-says-citing-pentagon-2026-08-12/ (Accessed: 13 September 2026).

TBS News (2026) ‘Baghdad confirms attack on Saudi pipeline came from Iraq’, TBS News, 13 September. Available at: https://www.tbsnews.net/worldbiz/middle-east/baghdad-confirms-attack-saudi-pipeline-came-iraq-1541081 (Accessed: 13 September 2026).

WhoWhatWhy (2012) ‘TVWho: Gen. Wesley Clark Shocker on 9/11 “Policy Coup”’, WhoWhatWhy, 10 August. Available at: https://whowhatwhy.org/video/tvwho-gen-wesley-clark-shocker-on-911-policy-coup/ (Accessed: 13 September 2026).