Birthed in the heady aftermath of the Second World War, the Arab Socialist Baath Party went through three major stages, each closely related to the vexed political history of the region. The first stage was one of utopian dreams. The second involved military action, power grabs and coups. The third, and worst, was of ideals betrayed, of personal dictatorships and brutal death squads. Yet, if Baathism has finally entered history, with the Syrian party officially dissolved in February, its story is far from over.

On the contrary, the lessons of Baathism must now urgently be absorbed by a new generation of Arab leaders. From the way it pitted the region’s Arab majority against minorities, and in how it took the ideology’s mythical sense of destiny and placed it into the hands of strongmen, there’s plenty for men like Ahmed al-Sharaa to think about, even if they emerge from very different ideological backgrounds — especially if they hope not to end their premierships either exiled or hanging from a noose.

Founded in Damascus in April 1947, Baathism was the most enthusiastic iteration of Arab nationalism. Whereas Gamal Abdel Nasser understood the Arab world in hard-nosed strategic terms, as a place to exert his own influence, the Baathists had an almost mystical sense of the Arabs as a nation transcending historical forces. As one of its founders put it, this was a people with a “natural right to live in a single state”.

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Such high-minded ideas are unsurprising. After all, the ideology was founded by Syrians who had immersed themselves in European philosophy, from Marx to Nietzsche, while studying at the Sorbonne. Two of the three founders were members of minority communities, and it’s useful to think of Baathism as a way of constructing an alternative Arab identity to Islam. While Salah al-Din al-Bitar was a Sunni Muslim, Michel Aflaq was an Orthodox Christian. Zaki al-Arsuzi, for his part, was an Alawite who later embraced atheism.

What all three shared was an eagerness to blend Enlightenment modernism with Romantic nationalism. Arsuzi, for instance, believed Arabic, unlike other languages, to be “intuitive” and “natural”. Aflaq, for his part, turned the usual understanding of history on its head. He considered Islam to be a manifestation of “Arab genius” and deemed the ancient pre-Islamic civilizations of the Fertile Crescent to be Arab too. Never mind the fact that the Assyrians or the Phoenicians had never spoken Arabic.

Like other grand political narratives of the 20th Century, then, Baathism was an attempt to repurpose religious energies for secular ends. Even the word “Baath” means “resurrection”. Consider the party slogan, “umma arabiya wahida zat risala khalida” in Arabic. That means “one Arab nation bearing an eternal message” — which sounds strangely grandiose, even before you realize that “umma” is the word formerly used to describe the global Islamic community, and that “risala” is used for the divine message the Prophet Muhammad delivered to humanity.

If a secular form of messianic faith was one wing of Baathist ideology, you get a sense of the other from the party’s motto. Proclaiming “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”, it evoked a single, unified Arab state stretching from the Atlantic in the west to the Arabian Gulf in the east, and from Syria in the north to Sudan in the south. This Arab state, Baathists argued, must also be free of foreign control, and construct a socialist economic system. That makes sense: the region had long been exploited, both by the Ottomans and their European imperialist successors.

At first, Baathism was spread by rural doctors and itinerant intellectuals. In those early days, the leadership consisted disproportionately of schoolteachers, ruling over a membership of schoolboys. In 1953, however, the party merged with Akram Hawrani’s peasant-based Arab Socialist Party. This brought it a mass membership for the first time, and it came second in Syria’s 1954 election.

By then, though, democracy was becoming ever rarer. Since Colonel Husni al-Zaim’s March 1949 coup, the first in Syria and anywhere in the Arab world, politics was increasingly being determined by men in uniform. The most significant of these soldiers was Nasser, who seized power in Cairo in 1952, and promptly became a pan-Arab hero after successfully confronting Britain, France and Israel over the Suez Canal in 1956.

Nasser’s popularity fueled an already raging popular desire to eliminate colonial borders and, at the behest of Baathist officers in Damascus, Syria and Egypt merged into the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958. Yet Nasser’s conception of unity, one which the Baathists would emulate, was totalitarian. There should be only one leader, one party, one truth. Following Nasser’s orders, the Syrian Baath dissolved itself. It would never be a grassroots movement again.

In the meantime, Syrian officers seconded to Cairo formed a secret Baathist military committee. This marked the start of the Baath’s next stage, with the party now belonging firmly to military elites. Following the collapse of the UAR, in 1962, Baathists tasted power for the first time, seizing control of both Iraq and Syria. The Iraqi Baath had a different sectarian make-up to the Syrian. Its membership was mainly Sunni Arab, which was a minority locally but the majority across the wider Arab world. Iraq’s Shia Muslims, therefore, associated Baathism with Sunni identity and were more likely to join the communists, then Iraq’s largest party. This meant that the Iraqi Baath appealed to some — and may well have been sponsored by the CIA — as an anti-communist force. Its March 1963 coup was accompanied by a massacre of Leftists. In November, however, it was ousted by another coup.

The Syrian Baath retained power from 1963 onwards, but was riven by conflict, culminating in 1966 in an internal coup by Salah Jadid. Arsuzi was brought back from obscurity to play the role of ideological figurehead of the Syrian wing, but most of the party’s original leadership, including Aflaq, fled abroad. Bitar was assassinated in Paris in 1980.

The Baathists turned on each other, its Syrian and Iraqi wings becoming irreconcilable enemies. In Syria, an endless series of purges further sectarianized an already sectarian army. Competent officers were replaced by loyalists, overwhelmingly from the same Alawite community as Jadid and his ally Hafez al-Assad. The consequent weakening of the army may explain the catastrophic loss of the Golan Heights in 1967, when Assad, then defense minister, gave the order to retreat long before Israeli troops actually arrived.

Under Jadid’s “Leninist” leadership, the Syrian Baath practiced a top-down Leftism aimed at eliminating the old bourgeoisie. In 1970, however, the “pragmatist” Assad launched a new internal coup. Jadid was sent to prison, where he languished until his death. Assad eased off the class warfare, concentrating instead on building his own power base. The Iraqi Baath, meanwhile, had returned to power in 1968, and Saddam Hussein ascended within it until he became absolute leader in 1979.

This marks the third stage of the Baath, in which the party became a vehicle for one-man dictatorships. Cults of personality exalted Assad and Hussein with mass rallies and titles like “first pharmacist” or “hero of war and peace”. They were lionized as “eternal leader” and “symbol of the Arab revolution” — as if the hitherto deified nation had been reduced to a single figure.

Some sections of society benefited, for a while at least, from this system. Members of hitherto marginalized rural communities, including religious minorities, entered the army and security services. Some of the urban working class benefited from jobs in the rapidly expanding state sector. In Iraq, enormous oil wealth allowed rapid development of civilian infrastructure. Yet terrifying political repression and massive corruption caused a brain drain, scaring off investment from both Damascus and Baghdad.

Then Hussein’s regime squandered Iraq’s wealth on wars of choice. Despite bloody stalemate against Iran, and embarrassing defeat in Kuwait, Hussein hailed his victories. In this, he borrowed from the Baathist playbook: Assad had done something similar in 1973, after losing to Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The gap between rhetoric and reality was vast and growing, perhaps inevitable given Baathism’s totalizing aspirations.

All the while, both Assad and Hussein built fearsome security states. Far from uniting the people, repression in both countries soon took on ethnic and sectarian overtones. Hussein killed tens of thousands of Kurds — the 1988 chemical atrocity at Halabja was especially infamous — before exterminating Shia Muslims when they rose against him in 1991. Hafez al-Assad responded to the challenge of the Muslim Brotherhood by killing up to 40,000 people in Hama in 1982. Then Assad’s son Bashar, who inherited the presidency in 2000, outdid his father, responding to the 2011 revolution by killing hundreds of thousands.

Hussein was deposed by the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and soon met his end at the gallows. Many of his security officers later joined ISIS which — despite its religious rhetoric — is actually the Baath’s closest successor: both revel in mass surveillance, detention and torture.

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So what became of “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”? Instead of unity, the Baath brought divide and rule, splintering society by ethnicity, sect, class and region. Instead of freedom from foreign powers, Iraq and Syria ended up occupied. In both countries, socialism ended in sanctions, neoliberalism and graft.

In Greek drama, the tragic hero is brought down by a fatal flaw in their character. The Baath party’s flaw was its identification of the Arabs with state power, and then the reduction of the state to one-man rule. An Arab nation can be said to exist, and sometimes it even transcends state borders. The Arab Spring proved this, when Arabs from Tunis to Sana’a, influencing each other, all revolted simultaneously. But the Arab countries include non-Arab peoples, and the Arabs themselves are plural and diverse, far greater and more creative than a single man or a single mystic ideology could ever be.

That still leaves one more question: what lessons should present and future leaders learn from the failure of Baathism? First, that strong men are brittle and easily broken, whatever their ideology. Second, that the highly centralized, hyper-authoritarian states built by such men end in military defeat and economic collapse. These dictatorships weaken and impoverish society, and provide security to no one, not even to the strong men in the end.

There’s a foreign policy dimension here too. The Arabs have long been assaulted by a string of foreign states: Israel, the US, Russia and Iran. The need to win freedom from the nation’s enemies — or at least to deter their aggression — is more crucial than ever. But seizing control of the state by military force is not sufficient to shift the balance. There are no shortcuts. Lasting power can only be built by liberating the people rather than smothering them: and that means human and civil rights are essential tools in constructing national power. Once the peoples of the Arab and Muslim region are able to express themselves freely and determine their affairs democratically, then their various polities will be ready to coordinate their energies. And that, more than Baathism ever did, will truly change the world.

Britain is now one of its many targets. The IRGC has sponsored terror, kidnap and seemingly endless sordid criminal acts since its founding. Its targets have always been global and since 2015, there has been a surge in IRGC activity in the UK and Europe. In 2022, MI5 acknowledged a real threat from Iran’s “aggressive intelligence services” to kidnap or kill UK-based people.

On Monday, the UK placed further sanctions on Iranian officials following the execution of dual British-Iranian national Alireza Akbari. On 12 January 2023, the House of Commons passed a motion calling on the UK government to finally proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation. The vote passed unanimously in favour, though it’s not binding. It does, however, remain an indication of the growing tensions between the UK and Iran, which have intensified after the recent execution of dual British-Iranian national, former Iranian Deputy Minister of Defence Alireza Akbari, for alleged spying.

On one level, as Kasra Aarabi, Iran Programme Lead at the Tony Blair Institute, observes, the IRGC is a “violent, Islamist-extremist organisation that operates no differently to proscribed groups in the United Kingdom, including the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda and Hizbullah”. But the group is more than this. Key figures in the 1979 revolution — some of whom had trained with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Lebanon and even, further back, the Muslim Brotherhood — decided that, after the Islamic Revolution achieved victory by overthrowing the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, an organisation would be needed not just to safeguard the revolution, but to bolster and strengthen it.

A tough gig, then. But what makes the IRGC so potent, beyond mere military prowess, is its ideological mission — which has only grown over the past few decades. If the group’s centrality emerged with the foundation of the state, its only increased in 1989 when Ali Khamenei succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader. Khamenei was determined to use the IRGC to further spearhead one of post-revolutionary Tehran’s key ideological tenets: exporting its Islamic revolution across the Muslim world. For this task, he set up a division known as the Quds (Jerusalem) Force, whose official objective is to “liberate” Jerusalem through the destruction of the state of Israel.

The Quds Force has become the engine of Iranian offensive operations across the Middle East — murdering its way across Syria, Yemen and Iraq, to name just a few countries. And in all the theatres in which it operates it does so not just as a military outfit, but a political one, too.

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The case of Iraq is instructive. It is Tehran, partly through skilfully deploying its Quds Force, that has been the clear winner of 2003’s cretinously planned and executed invasion of Iraq. From the beginning it exploited the void left by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, to expand its political, military and economic penetration of Baghdad. This is the bonus that comes with “extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world”. It tends to have considerable geopolitical benefits.

It’s no surprise that the Quds Force was led by Qasem Soleimani, who — until the US droned him in Baghdad in January 2020 — was a man of great charisma, striking looks and political acumen. Yes, Tehran was behind a lot of the violence in post-invasion Iraq, not least through its founding and sponsoring of several Shia militias to challenge and often supplant Baghdad’s authority. But it was the political talents of Soleimani, and his Iraqi sidekick Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis (who was killed in the same drone strike), that really drove the Iranian stake into the heart of Iraqi governance.

When, in 2014, several of the Iran-based Shia militias decided to band together in an umbrella organisation that came to be known as Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), it was Soleimani and Muhandis who kept their near-pathological infighting in line, and who were integral to formulating their political strategy. They were soldiers, but they were also what the Russians would call “political technologists”.

When they got whacked, it all started to fall apart. In the October 2021 Iraqi general elections, the political block of the Iran-backed Shia militias lost badly; and it lost because the various parties failed to understand the ramifications of electoral reforms, while their opponents used them to their own advantage. Since then, Baghdad has been unable to form a government while the Shia militias are squabbling among themselves and becoming even more unpopular among the Iraq people.

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As one regional expert told me last year: “The mess the Iran-backed Shia militias are in right now, can be traced directly to that drone strike in 2020. Without Soleimani they simply aren’t as politically effective.”

This speaks to an important, and inescapable, wider truth: All of the IRGC’s soft power activities are designed to aid its hard power activities. It has, over decades, cultivated demonstrably effective political, cultural, economic and intelligence divisions, the importance of which can never be underestimated. They ensure the group’s influence permeates into almost all aspects of national life, and across the Middle East — and now, critically, even in the United Kingdom.

In the UK, the IRGC can rely on a lattice of ostensibly religious and cultural institutions to further its ideological and criminal aims. Much of its propaganda, which is designed to nurture homegrown extremism, poses a threat to Britain’s national security and promotes the Guard’s ideology in mosques, charities and schools.

An analysis of the IRGC’s training manuals used to radicalise recruits reveals that the group’s ideology promotes both violence and a clear doctrine of extremism underpinned by a misreading of Islamic texts similar to terror groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. The materials make armed jihad against “enemies of Islam” — identified as non-Muslims and opponents of the regime (including Muslims) — an imperative for adherents, and explicitly calls for killings against Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians.

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As ever, ideology stands in the service of politics. The materials are at pains to stress that there is an equally strong imperative to torture Iranians who oppose the Islamic Republic prior to their execution on the basis they are “waging war against God” (moharebs).

As protests continue across Iran following the killing of Mahsa Amini in police custody on 16 September 2022, a succession crisis also looms. The 83-year-old Khamenei is seeking to ensure that his son Mojtaba, if he does not follow him as Supreme Leader, is at least the real power broker in Iran. In the background sit the IRGC, determined that whoever succeeds will be amenable to their interests.

Right now, Iran is in flux. The protests are unquestionably the most serious the regime has ever faced. The IRGC’s foot soldiers, the Basij, are out in the streets alongside the protestors doing what they do best — killing and maiming. Alongside mass unrest, the economy is tanking; summer will bring with it the now-familiar problem of drought. The threats facing Tehran are multiple and pretty much existential now.

The Mullahs and their sadistic enforcers are worried. In a state known for its near-pathological exercise of control, the future is unusually vague. One thing, though, is certain: whatever happens next, the IRGC will stand malevolently at the centre of it, and not just in Tehran but, unless the UK government finally acts, increasingly in London as well.

Weinberger was a Right-wing Republican who worked for another, Ronald Reagan, and even in those days Right-wing Republicans were automatically written off as racists. But I never detected the slightest bit of discomfort in Powell’s demeanour, perhaps because neither Weinberger nor Reagan had any doubts about his ability: after leaving the Pentagon for a career-required Corps command once he was promoted to Lieutenant-General, Powell was summoned back to Washington by Reagan to serve as his National Security Advisor. That Powell was the first black man to run the “inter-agency” National Security Council was not much mentioned at the time, as far as I can recall, except perhaps in the vernacular press that I do not read.

More important was the impossible job at hand: in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair, Reagan’s entire presidency was in question. To outsiders who did not know any better, senility seemed the most charitable explanation for the President’s active support for an insane caper that ended at Tehran’s airport — and which could have left a very senior US official in Iranian custody.

His predecessor Carlucci, under Chief of Staff  Howard Baker, ex Senate Majority Leader no less, stopped the shipwreck, but it was Powell who righted the ship along with Reagan himself, and to such good effect that the faithful Reaganauts who had been plotting a backdoor exit from the White House for their hero when the scandal exploded suddenly found themselves discussing the possibility of the first third-term President since Roosevelt: Reagan’s ascent in the public opinion polls was astounding.

The famous Powell doctrine enunciated in 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, weas that if the US goes to war, it must not play “controlled escalation” games as it did, disastrously, in Vietnam. If force had to be used, it was best used on the largest possible scale, to quickly end the war rather than start it.

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But there was also an undeclared Powell doctrine, not for the nation but for himself: prejudice exists; but if it can only be inferred because it is not visibly enacted, just ignore it. Do not sacrifice your own advancement to try to re-educate the malevolent and the ignorant; do not start a scandal that will only exacerbate the problem.

When his boss, Caspar Weinberger, complained in a Senate Hearing that the Senators were ignoring his own Secretarial advice and listening instead to the strategic lucubrations of a “PhD with a foreign accent” — he was referring to me, testifying about my book The Pentagon and the Art of War in a debate about the 1987 Defense Reorganization Act the book called for — Powell told me not to kvetch (he grew up with Yiddish speakers in the Bronx). Just be happy that the Senators are listening to you, he said, and that we will finally be able to re-organise the Pentagon.

But it was not until decades later, in a chance meeting aboard a transatlantic flight, that he told me why he was so little agitated by the subtle racial tensions of the Reagan years. As a battalion commander in Vietnam, he was recruited on a number of occasions by more senior officers to avert racial tensions among the troops, to avoid violence not with fists or even handguns but with fragmentation grenades or even M.16s.

For him, that was the end result of McNamara’s political science: a war not only endless but nonsensical, in which the same village might be flooded with economic aid, propagandised by a provincial team, bombed with napalm to destruction and then rebuilt. Hence his personal approval of Col. Warden’s “Instant Thunder” plan for the 1991 Iraq war: bomb every military target day after day to break up Iraq’s logistics, knock out bases and destroy as many armoured vehicles as possible. Then launch an all-out armoured offensive, force Saddam Hussein’s surrender and retreat from Kuwait — and bring the troops back home.

As a result of the 1987 Defense Reorganization Act, Powell was the first Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff who was in the actual chain of command. And although he was too tactful to order the Army and Marine field commanders about as the subordinates they were, when the Marines started nibbling at Kuwait before the two weeks of bombing was done, he made sure that it was no more than a photo-op. Ignoring the majority view in Washington that air power always disappoints (because it did in Vietnam) he understood that it was best to hollow out an enemy before moving the tanks forward. That was the Powell “first” that really matters: not that he was the first black US military chief, but the first and so far only US military chief since 1945 to win a war.

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The last thing that Powell thought would happen was the disastrous repudiation two decades later of all that was learned in Vietnam and all that was demonstrated in the 1991 war: that American military power can destroy high-contrast targets anywhere and can defeat enemies that assemble in conveniently targetable mass formations — but cannot defeat insurgents. As Powell well knew, the “counterinsurgency warfare” peddled by generals with PhDs was never more than military malpractice, as Afghanistan 2021 showed yet again.

Over the past week, every obituary of Powell has interrupted its praise to condemn his tenure as Secretary of State (another first for a black man that Powell himself hardly celebrated) because it was his approval that made the 2003 invasion of Iraq politically feasible.

As usual, the media criticises the intelligence malfeasance that trapped Powell — the failure to recognise that Saddam was only pretending to be developing nuclear weapons — as opposed to the inability of the over-staffed, over-funded intelligence community to recognise that if Saddam Hussein and his regime were removed, what would ensue was not “democracy” but a Hobbesian war of all against all as different factions killed each other. (When I testified accordingly before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just before the war, the pro-war witness call me a “racist” who denied that Iraqis could sustain a democracy, just as the Germans and Japanese did after 1945…)

Then there was the fact that an Iraq in civil war would not be able to resist Iran. So there were ultimately two choices: stay out of Iraq, or convert the US Army into a 700,000-strong Mesopotamian constabulary forever. When Army Chief of Staff Shinseki said exactly that in a Congressional Hearing, he received zero support from the Intelligence Community, so Rumsfeld & Co ridiculed him with impunity for something he emphatically did not say — that 700,000 American soldiers were necessary to defeat the Iraqi Army — and denied him the customary extra year.

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That was Colin Powell’s world on the eve of the 2003 war that would tarnish his reputation. As a Secretary of State, he could not apply the Powell doctrine to flood Iraq with troops. What he should have done — as he was the first to recognise in the aftermath — was to give a simple choice to Bush: Mr President, either give up the dream of a US-made democracy in Iraq or send in 700,000 troops, which cannot be done.

If the intelligence community had realised and transmitted what was happening in Iraq, Powell could have calmed the war fever with a phone call. Without that support, Powell couldn’t turn harshly against Bush, who was not only the President but also in effect a family friend, from the days of his father’s vice-presidency.

As it was, the second Iraqi war became an agony for him that never actually ended — very poor recompense for a life well-lived from the time that he packed boxes in a Bronx shop as a teenager. Characteristically, Powell kept in touch with the fatherly owner (who urged him to study on at all costs) and then with his sons, all through the years.

I only met Powell now and again over years, and it was only early on, and then in 2003, that those meetings were charged with much significance. But his death is still a real blow. I miss him already.

North Korea has been a nuclear power for almost exactly 15 years — but in 2018, the nation agreed to put its nuclear ambitions on the back burner, in the first meeting between a Supreme Leader and an American President. Recently, though, the regime has been on a weapons testing binge. Two weeks ago, North Korea successfully tested a new “strategic weapon” — meaning one that can carry nukes — in the form of a hypersonic missile called Hwasong-8. It was the country’s third missile test in the space of a month, having earlier tested a new type of cruise missile, as well as a Hollywood-sounding system that launches missiles by train.

All this is just evidence of the military-powered petulance of a despotic regime, you might say. What Western commentators seem reluctant to point out, however, is that their neighbours on the other side of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) have been upping the stakes too. Few remarked upon the fact that the train-launched system test happened the same day that South Korea tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile, making it the first country without nuclear weapons to develop such a system.

Analysis tends to centre around the two Koreas as proxies of China and the United States. And in the West most have a binary view of the North as relentlessly aggressive and the South as virtuous yet besieged. But this flurry of weapons testing reveals a worrying arms race in which both nations are participating, as each side seeks more independence from their superpower of choice. It’s been a mere three years since Kim Jong-un and his counterpart Moon Jae-in first met — and promised to work towards reunification. Now, both are upping the ante in search of heavily fortified peace, as a new generation of leaders are stepping back from the long-held goal of returning to one Korea.

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For the North, becoming a nuclear power was always an existential calculation — partly triggered by the US invasion of Iraq. One of many disastrous consequences of a disastrous war, the toppling of Saddam Hussein — and, later, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya — led Kim Jong-il to conclude that dictators unarmed with nuclear weapons get overthrown. But there are other, more oblique, benefits to having a nuclear armoury. Lankov tells me:

“They have used their weapons to squeeze aid from foreign governments which would not normally provide aid to North Korea, or at least would provide aid on conditions which the North Korean government does not see as acceptable, such as total monitoring distribution of aid to the needy population by foreign NGO workers.”

The regime doesn’t want to be wholly reliant on China, so needs to coerce other nations into charity. At the moment, China keeps the state afloat, partly in line with its foreign policy of “non-interference”, and partly because it does not want a humanitarian crisis of 25 million people on its border. I’ve seen that border, from both sides, and parts are painfully easy to cross: in some places, like Dandong, it’s nothing more than trickles of rivers with flimsy wire fences and a couple of disinterested border guards who knock off at sunset.

For their part, the Chinese are said to be unhappy with the Kim regime, setting red lines for its military program — such as not reintroducing long range missile and nuclear tests — which the North has wisely obeyed. At the same time, China’s only real influence is economic: if it were to overthrow the Kim regime and install a favoured general, it would create just the kind of destabilising effect the Chinese are afraid of.

To put it bluntly, North Korea is nobody’s ally and a pain in everyone’s neck. Beyond its military, two of the state’s greatest capabilities appear to be manufacturing methamphetamine and hacking (it’s believed to be behind the hack of Sony in 2014 after an unflattering portrayal of their leader in the film The Interview). Experts believe that its military capabilities are likely stolen from Russia and reverse engineered.

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All of which is to say that the North Korean military program is about ensuring the regime survives. Appearing responsible allows them to negotiate sanctions relief with the United States, adhering to the moratorium on nuclear tests keeps China happy, and a happy China continues the flow of aid and resources to the tune of about $2 billion per year (without it, the nation could fall into decay within weeks).

Old promises offered by the United States to the North, namely economic growth, are now of little interest to the regime. Military might is the only tried and tested way of getting what it wants. “Markets are bad for political stability, and the North Koreans are rolling them back,” Lankov said. “It means that we are probably going to deal with North Korea for the next 10 years or so as a significantly more repressive society, where the government will care more about central control than they do about economic development.”

Talks between the two Koreas about reconciliation and unification are an accepted theatre. People often point to the unification of Germany, which he says was really a conquest of the East by the West (albeit one that most people wanted). “North Korea dreams of conquering the South, but it is a dream that will probably never come true,” says Lankov. Recently, Kim Jong Un moved away from the old goal of liberating Southern compatriots from their miserably capitalist lives to “common prosperity of the entire nation.” 

This is something the North and South seem to agree on. “Unless you’re talking to old school, anti-communists or hardline human rights people in the South,” Lankov tells me, “reunification is not what they want — because they don’t want to have to pay for the victory,” he said. Young South Koreans, in particular, care less and less about reuniting the two nations and closing the huge gap in health, education, infrastructure — even language and culture — cleaved by almost 70 years apart. It’s estimated that doing so would cost the South $591 billion over a decade.

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The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has labelled public opinion in the South — significant majorities of people wanting military alliances with both the United States and China — “a mixture of paradoxes”. In reality, it’s an expression of wanting peace, with Koreans knowing all too well the cost of civil war — which is what any dissolution of the North Korean regime would probably amount to. “Any sort of reunification would immediately provoke the collapse of the regime,” says Lankov. “It won’t look like Germany — we’re talking serious bloodshed on the scale of Libya or Syria.”

“They’re not a bunch of suicidal idiots — the idea of reunification with social justice and righting wrongs is the kind of rubbish intellectuals like to believe.”

The real paradox here, then, isn’t the Southern yearning for multiple military alliances, or moving away from reconciliation — it’s the current and substantial military build-up taking place in the country, on top of the United States’ continued military expansion in the Pacific.

The best prospect for a unified Korea would be a situation where the Chinese decide not to intervene, the US agrees to pay, and the South Korean tanks roll in — conquest disguised as reunification. In other words, something so unlikely that the status quo is looking like the only way forward for people on both sides of the DMZ. This is the reality of post-Cold War peace and harmony: two neighbours armed to the teeth, looking beyond the patronage of their superpower ally to advance their own military capabilities in a futile game of chicken.

Despite some bright moments, like the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 or the rescue of the Yazidis from Mount Sinjar in 2014, the overall story hews more towards farce and tragedy. In the grief and rage following the attacks on the Twin Towers, the US collectively took leave of its senses and embarked on a generational project of warfare that entailed creating two overseas protectorates, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now that inexplicable and indefensible project is over, stillborn and incomplete, as America retreats ignominiously from its obligations, reneging on its lofty promises. After hundreds of thousands of deaths, none of the instigators or cheerleaders for this disaster has suffered any career or reputational loss for their hubris or misjudgment, and almost no one has ever expressed regret.

It began with much more bravado in the early 20th century; wars were waged on two fronts with a casual arrogance that many seem to have forgotten. On 29 May, 2003, a few months after the US invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times declared on The Charlie Rose Show: “suck on this…We could have hit Saudi Arabia…We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq, because we could. And that’s the real truth.”

Meanwhile David Frum, erstwhile speechwriter of George W. Bush, co-authored a belligerently pro-war book with the hyperbolic title An End to Evil in 2004. Before the invasion, Jeffrey Goldberg, now editor of The Atlantic, wrote an article titled “The Great Terror” for The New Yorker, making the case that Saddam Hussein’s regime was engaged in genocide against the Kurds, offering a compelling humanitarian rationale for the invasion of Iraq and Hussein’s overthrow.

Goldberg wasn’t alone at that august magazine, with storied foreign correspondent George Packer also being an invasion supporter. William Kristol, arguably the most prominent turn-of-the-century neoconservative, contributed The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission in early 2003, and predicted a two-month rather than eight-year conflict. At the highest levels of the American government, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney concurred with their advisors that the best way to win the “War on Terror” against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was to invade and conquer a secular nation-state, Iraq. Leading national security lights such as Condoleezza Rice and L. Paul Bremer encouraged Bush and Cheney and then attempted to execute their imperialist vision.

Somehow, all this seemed reasonable to 72% of Americans in 2003. America was the land of promise and possibilities. At the turn of the millennium, the US budget surplus was $230 billion. America was 30% of the world economy, and Russia and China were both considered geopolitical allies. The protracted dispute over the 2000 presidential election actually convinced many that the democratic system in the United States of America was robust even under stress. America at the turn of the century was in the afterglow of Cold War victory, a hyperpower in a world where it was the singular imperial colossus.

But the world has turned sideways in a single generation. By 2020, the US had a $3-trillion-dollar budget deficit, and our share of the global economy had decreased to 25%, in large part due to the rise of China. Nearly 7,000 Americans had died in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than double the number killed on 9/11. In the 2020 election, Donald J. Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden, and on 6 January this year the US Capitol was stormed by an enraged mob. To the broader world, the American colossus was looking a lot more like an American basket case.

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The results of American hubris have been mixed at best for Iraq and Afghanistan. A conservative estimate is that more than 200,000 Iraqis and 250,000 Afghans have died since 2001 as a result of the invasions. Iraq’s democracy is shaky, having undergone an existential fright with the rise of ISIS in the mid-2010s. Afghanistan is now under Taliban rule, just as it was in 2001. America came to liberate, but in the wake of imperial conquest, the natives suffered through corruption, factionalism and civil war. Due to our all-volunteer army and reflexive recourse to deficit spending, most Americans did not experience the wars in a visceral or indirect manner. All the while, viscera were being splattered across the streets of Baghdad and Kabul as young men blew themselves up, inspired by a religious fanaticism in turn aggravated by American occupation.

Notably, while the consequences for the Iraqis and Afghans have been tragic, our social, intellectual and political elite have suffered no professional repercussions for their incompetence. On 2 November, 2001 Friedman asked us to “give war a chance”. Twenty years later, he continues to opine for The New York Times, pulling down a salary of $350,000 per year at a time when journalism as a profession is collapsing.

Goldberg, whose New Yorker piece burnished the humanitarian need for the overthrow of Hussein, was appointed editor of The Atlantic in 2016. Packer wrote a book, Assassin’s Gate, where he chronicles his disillusionment with the war. This was sufficient to maintain a sinecure at The New Yorker until 2018, when he moved to The Atlantic to work under his former colleague Goldberg. Frum has had a more chequered career, but that had little to do with his position on the War on Terror, and everything to do with his scepticism of the Republican stance on healthcare reform in 2010, illustrating the true red-lines in American politics.

Frum is now more often speaking to a centre-left rather than a centre-right audience (though still identifying as a conservative), but he is still comfortably ensconced in the American establishment. Similarly, Kristol has converted into a “Never Trump” “Biden Republican,” and is a member of good standing of the “Resistance”. His publication, The Bulwark, receives funding from centre-left foundations. Even George W. Bush, who was once a hate-figure for the Left, is now being rehabilitated. The man who unleashed two disastrous wars and whose decisions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands is now celebrated for his paintings of immigrants.

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Bush’s one-time viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has also taken up painting and become a ski instructor in his leisured semi-retirement. Meanwhile, his hawkish lieutenant Dick Cheney is now well regarded for his support of gay marriage, while Cheney’s daughter, Liz, is garnering respect and accolades from Democrats for her anti-Trump views following the 2020 election. Condeleezza Rice, also an anti-Trump Republican, returned to academia, but has also become a pop culture phenomenon, and has now been tapped to make guest appearances on The View.

The soft-glow Cheney rehabilitation is emblematic of the primacy of domestic political concerns in today’s American cultural landscape. Just a decade ago, he was being pilloried for his frank defence of torture. Today his anti-Trump stance gets more weight when determining whether he’s one of the “good ones” or “bad ones”. Despite how much foreign policy dominated American politics in the early 2000’s, the rest of the world has faded from view over the past decade. The 2016 and 2020 Democrat presidential candidates were both supporters of the Iraq invasion and hailed from the party’s more hawkish wing, Hillary Clinton being a major proponent of American intervention in Libya.

Under Trump, many conventional narratives surrounding national security and foreign policy flipped. Liberals and the intelligentsia came to love the CIA and FBI, and cast a sceptical eye on foreign powers like Russia. Kristol, the architect of the neoconservative intellectual project in the 2000s, has now become an icon of the anti-Trump faction, even lauded by mainstream liberals. Establishment intellectuals even now see Bush as a bulwark of American democracy, a contrast to Trump’s strongman tendencies.

It turns out that 9/11 didn’t change everything. Despite a decade of international adventurism in the 2000s that extended at lower wattage into the 2010s, the US remained a nation apart, focused on its own concerns. The pundits and politicians whose blunders in the early 2000s had grave consequences for nations far away suffered few ill consequences for their disastrous prognostications, short-sighted decisions and uninformed arguments.

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Bush is now allowed to be the pro-immigrant painter ex-president, not the executive who authorised extraordinary rendition and whose decisions pulverised two nations for a generation. Kristol’s legacy may not be as organiser of Bush’s imperial braintrust, but as the rebel against the Trump regime. Friedman remains one of the best-paid journalists in the country, while Goldberg is now editor of one of the nation’s most venerable magazines. Frum and Cheney have not changed their fundamental politics, but are now embraced by the liberal establishment thanks to their strident anti-Trump position.

Never mind that Cheney’s objection to Trumpism is rooted in the latter’s deviation from the disastrous foreign policy of the 2000s. The period in the middle of that decade when foreign policy loomed large as a polarising issue in partisan politics was the exception and not the rule, and the collateral damage abroad of American adventurism is out of sight and out of mind. The current President supported the Iraq War, while Kristol is now a Biden-defender against even the gentlest conservative criticisms.

Twenty years down the line, the American elite is somewhat chagrined to be reminded of the arrogance and ignorance they showed in the wake of 9/11. But they are the same elite that they always were, because their sinecures are ultimately yoked to the whims of domestic politics, not the horrors that American enthusiasms unleashed abroad. Once obtained, a position in the pundit and political elite is rarely subject to the vicissitudes of meritocracy. America is ruled by a soft and complacent aristocracy of error in 2021, just as it was in 2001 on the eve of the 9/11 terror attack. In that sense, it was a day that changed nothing.