The attacks in New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001 were the first shock on the international scene in the twenty first century.

America felt not only under attack, but vulnerable. It was the first time in many decades that large sections of Americans felt that an enemy can reach their homes, a feeling that Americans hardly ever experienced during the four decades of the Cold War.

The fact that that enemy seemed elusive and hardly organised, and for many came across as bands of seemingly medieval men, both, exacerbated the sense of strangeness of that danger, as well as fuelled the desire for revenge.

And so America unleashed its powers, not merely to destroy these groups that were hiding in the Asian steppes, but primarily to show the world and its own people that it can and is willing to use its unrivalled military power to punish those who had attacked her – and to deter those who are thinking of challenging her.

The latter point was key. In attacking Iraq in 2003, irrespective of the rhetoric then about Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, America was not avenging for the attacks of 2001 (which Iraq had no link to). America was sending a clear message to the entire world about its ability to shatter any existing or would be challenger to its world order. In Iraq, America blatantly emphasised that it would sustain, by force if needed, its global order, that emerged after the end of the Cold War.

Some observers argued that the American response to 9.11 was blinded by fury, and that America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were strategic blunders. There were certainly elements of that. But there was also a strategic calculus. America wanted potential challengers, primarily but not only China, to see the capabilities of the American war machine, and to see America’s willingness to deploy these capabilities in far away lands. And in so doing, America was ready to mobilise hundreds of thousands of Americans in different theatres of military operations, initially in Central Asia (in Afghanistan) and later in multiple locations in the Middle East and the Gulf.

The message was received and registered by China and Russia, but also by many countries, allies and foes of the United States.

The message was also intended internally, to the American public - that the era of peace – the single decade of the nineties, after the end of the Cold War – was over, and that America was at war again. Militant Islamism, the Taliban, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein became faces of successive enemies that the American imagination – and its myriads of highly creative agents, from East Coast print houses to West Coast drama production studios – could conjure up in different forms. But the underlying emotional current that was, repeatedly, pushed to the American public was that American values, interests, ways of life, and supremacy were far from secure, and that they needed to be protected through America’s might.

This message remained consistent with the Republican and Democratic administrations in the past two decades.

It is interesting that what appeared to be the dismal political results of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars never lessened America’s penchant for using its military might abroad. It is true that influential circles, whether in the Republican and Democratic parties or in key state institutions, have internalised the lesson of how challenging nation-building in the global south is. One of the most interesting exercises in serious strategic studies in America in the past decade was reflecting on the differences of the nation-building experiences in Germany and Japan in the two decades after World War Two, versus the experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past two decades. That aside, America understood that it must significantly dilute its nation-building endeavours. But there was a flip side to this understanding. That is, military might and top-down imposition of American will, largely through force, have bigger roles to play in the world appearing in the twenty first century.

The Middle East became the primary theatre of successive deployments and usages of that American military might. It proved successful. America managed, not only to achieve all of its military objectives in the Middle East; it has also significantly expanded its military presence across the region, which remains of central importance in controlling the world’s key energy sources (now and in the foreseeable future) and the world’s busiest trade routes.

Military success in the Middle East, along with an imperial mindset in a historical moment in which America was indeed an unchallenged sole global hegemon, gave rise to other forms of ambitions to secure the American world order. And again, the Middle East was the theatre of these ambitions. As the next article of this series will show, the Middle East became, in the past two decades, the ground for testing large scale socio-political experiments that have effectively reshaped the Arab world, and that had spillover effects on its key neighbours, Iran, Israel, and Turkey.