On the 27th June, as the West’s involvement in Libya hit 100 days, an audience convened at the Royal Geographical Society to discuss, ’Ten years after 9/11: The world remade’. An event organised in collaboration with our friends at the global analysis and advisory firm, Oxford Analytica.

Beginning with a general analysis of the decade, former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband described 9/11 as the trigger behind “the most traumatic decade for the West since the nineteen-thirties”. Al Qaeda, he argued, was able to send  “the most powerful country in the world into convulsions” and the West was forced to concentrate on this threat instead of working towards building an interdependent world.

In accordance was former UK Diplomat Michael Crawford, but looking forward, he posited that the Arab Spring could do much to revive relations with the Arab world: “This revolt of the citizen supported by new social networking and other media may be the harbinger of a different world”. Nonetheless, he warned that we pay close attention to the “ungoverned space of the internet” - a newly emerging battleground.

Former US Intelligence Advisor Philip Mudd argued that “as a result of the killing of innocent” in the Middle East, Al Qaede is dying. Still he shared his colleagues caution: “I fear that we’re going to give a [dying] adversary ammunition” because “without the experience of Ireland, without the experience here of seven/seven, [the US] will overreact if there’s another event.”

Moving from the West to the East, Oxford University History Professor, Rana Mitter explained that 9/11, and subsequent Western foreign policy in the Middle East, had help forward the “emergence of China”. And unlike his colleagues, whose speeches held warnings, Mitter urged the West to welcome China into the international community.

Defending the positive turn of the discussion, former Naval Reserve intelligence officer and advisor for the US Defense and State Departments Sarah Michaels argued that Russia’s progression over the last decade “warranted” optimism. Russia’s economy is now on par with India’s and GDP per capita has grown five-fold. However, Michaels acknowledged that the country had also “dodged a few bullets” and it would be wise to be neither too pessimistic, nor too optimistic about the Russia in 2021. 

Watch the video here

Ten years after 9/11: The world remade by intelligence2