ABSTRACT
The War on Terror briefly promised to define American strategic priorities for a generation. Indeed, after 9/11, under the auspices of the War on Terror, the resource and bureaucratic base of US foreign policy shifted dramatically, as the short-lived refocusing of priorities after the Cold War to the arena of foreign economic policy under Clinton was replaced with an overwhelmingly military emphasis, and as the geographic scope of American diplomacy moved away from emerging markets to zero-in on the Middle East. Yet the War on Terror, even for all that was spent in blood and treasure, proved a strategic diversion from the underlying structural changes in the international system, as the United States temporarily neglected the major geopolitical trends begun in the 1990s: the diffusion of influence to emerging regional powers. This was most starkly demonstrated by the economic rise of China in East Asia, traditionally regarded as America’s strategic backyard, which became all the more striking following the US financial crisis of 2008.
