{"text":[[{"start":6.14,"text":"Twenty-five years ago as the smoke and dust rose from the ruins of the World Trade Center after the devastating 9/11 attacks, much of the world rallied to America’s support — and rightly so. It was a shocking assault that even then seemed to draw a line under the post-cold war decade and the attendant hopes for a more peaceful, just and stable world."}],[{"start":26.54,"text":"Nearly 3,000 people were killed when 19 members of the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda hijacked passenger airliners and flew them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon; a fourth plane, probably intended to target the US Capitol, crashed into a field after the passengers fought back against the hijackers."}],[{"start":44.22,"text":"Le Monde memorably encapsulated the stunned sympathy of American allies in a front-page editorial under the headline: Nous sommes tous Américains. Nato invoked its collective defence clause for the first and only time since it was founded more than five decades earlier."}],[{"start":59.94,"text":"Strikingly, old enemies too rushed to show support. Russia’s then relatively neophyte president, Vladimir Putin, was the first world leader to call the US president, George W Bush. He followed through by supporting the use of former Soviet bases in central Asia to help the US-led coalition in its offensive against Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, then sheltering al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden."}],[{"start":83.54,"text":"It says much for America’s can-do spirit that New York recovered remarkably quickly. Many of the worst fears circulating in America in the bleak days after 9/11 were also not realised: there were no further large-scale terrorist attacks on US soil for more than a decade. To that extent Bush’s “war on terror” was a success."}],[{"start":102.98,"text":"But unfortunately, America’s broader response to 9/11 casts a deep shadow over the world. The politics of revenge, and the hubris in Washington that followed the rapid initial overthrow of the Taliban for the loss of just 12 US military personnel and a CIA officer, led to a series of calamitous mis-steps and misjudgments, most of all the decision to invade Iraq in 2003."}],[{"start":125.398,"text":"The US raced to war barely going through the motions of seeking UN backing, and with what even at the time seemed the flimsiest of evidence to back up its claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. (It did not.) The invasion and the sectarian conflict and insurgency that ensued cost hundreds of thousands of mainly Iraqi lives. They also gravely damaged America’s standing, as did the revelations over the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other human rights abuses by US troops."}],[{"start":154.74,"text":"The failed 20-year campaign to dominate Afghanistan, which ended in 2021 with the Taliban’s return to power, further weakened America’s reputation — and also cost hundreds of thousands of lives."}],[{"start":167.02,"text":"The global sympathy was long ago squandered, as was America’s massive pre-9/11 budget surplus; debt this year surpassed $40tn. The financial crisis and Covid-19 bailouts all played major roles, but so did the dizzying cost of the wars."}],[{"start":183.68,"text":"Even without 9/11 and the US overreaction, it was perhaps inevitable that the 21st century would see a weakening of the US-led world order against the backdrop of a rising China, and other aspirant powers. Ultimately Putin might well have always gone his own way, turning away from the west and pursuing imperialist ambitions."}],[{"start":203.3,"text":"But it is hard to escape the conclusion that a post-9/11 desire for vengeance led America to be distracted from focusing on how to approach its primary rival, China, and an increasingly revanchist Russia, as it fruitlessly unleashed its might on the world."}],[{"start":218.26,"text":"Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, tried to repair some of the damage to America’s standing in the world. But the post-9/11 spirit of muscular US interventionism has been revived by President Donald Trump in his second term. Trump has succumbed to his own bout of hubris in launching his ill-conceived war on Iran, albeit without the deployment of ground troops. At home, he has pushed to accelerate a worrying centralisation of power from the federal government to the executive that began after 9/11."}],[{"start":247.66,"text":"In a characteristically scattergun speech ahead of this poignant anniversary, Trump said that the US was “bigger, better, stronger than before”. Sadly, much of the rest of the world that stood with America 25 years ago would find it hard to agree."}],[{"start":267.66,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1789171371_9188.mp3"}