Significance of 9/11's impact upon U.S. foreign policy should not be overestimated, Leffler says

September 12, 2011 — Ten years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the long-term significance on U.S. foreign policy should not be overestimated, University of Virginia history professor Melvyn Leffler said Friday at U.Va.'s Miller Center.

The attacks were a terrible tragedy, and a monumental act of aggression and provocation that spurred the George W. Bush administration to pivot its foreign policy and launch a "global war on terror," said Leffler, Edward Stettinius Professor of History in the College of Arts & Sciences and a faculty associate at the Miller Center.

But the attacks did not change the world or transform the long-term trajectory of U.S. foreign policy, said Leffler, who has written or edited seven books and dozens of articles on the history of American foreign policy.

The post-9/11 policies for which Bush received the most criticism, and which were often portrayed as ill-conceived inventions of neoconservatives – prevention, preemption, unilateralism and the promotion of democratic peace, especially after weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq – are not new, but in fact are deeply embedded in American tradition, said Leffler, whose most recent book, "In Uncertain Times: U.S. Foreign Policy After the Berlin Wall and 9/11," was co-edited with Jeffrey Legro, Compton Professor of World Politics....