There’s a strange symmetry in the news this summer. Iran’s foreign minister announces that ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz will henceforth pay a fee — a “service charge”. Tehran insists for navigation security and environmental stewardship, and Washington responds with familiar indignation, invoking international law and the sanctity of free passage. The CEO of Maersk calls the arrangement “dangerous”. American officials demand the strait remain “permanently free”. And much of the world shrugs. It has heard this refrain before: the United States insisting on rules for others that it has spent a quarter century declining to apply to itself.
The irony runs deeper than atmosphere. The treaty that actually governs transit passage through straits like Hormuz — the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea — is one Washington has never ratified. America invokes its provisions as binding custom while declining to be bound by the convention itself: the pattern in miniature, before a single word about the wars has been uttered.
To understand how we arrived at this moment — when an American appeal to international law lands with all the moral force of a lecture on temperance delivered from a barstool — you have to go back to 11 September 2001. Not to the atrocity itself, which was real and monstrous, but to what America chose to do with its grief.
A Squandered Inheritance
It is easy to forget now, but on 12 September 2001 the United States possessed something close to universal sympathy. Le Monde declared, “We are all Americans.” Candlelight vigils appeared in Tehran. NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history. The moral capital available to the United States in that moment was perhaps greater than at any point since 1945. The nation’s founders had staked their revolution on “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”; two and a quarter centuries later, mankind’s opinion had never been more favourably disposed.
Within two years, most of that capital was gone. Within twenty years, America had spent the rest — and gone into debt.
The war in Afghanistan began with a narrow and broadly legitimate aim: to strike al Qaeda and remove the regime that sheltered it. The Taliban fell in weeks. And then, having achieved the achievable, the entire mission metastasised. Counter-terrorism became state-building. State-building became a twenty-year occupation sustained by a rotating cast of generals, each promising a “turning point”, each privately conceding — as the Afghanistan Papers and declassified documents later revealed — that no one could articulate what winning actually meant.
American officials knew for years the strategy was failing and told the public otherwise. Soldiers were sent to fight and die for a project their own leaders had quietly stopped believing in. That isn’t just a strategic failure. It’s a moral one, and it corrodes an assumption at the centre of a democracy: that a government does not knowingly lie to its citizens about why their children are dying.
The ledger is well known but bears repeating, because while familiarity can breed contempt, it should never breed numbness. More than 2,300 American service members were killed. Over 20,000 wounded. Some 46,000 Afghan civilians were killed directly, by conservative counts — and far more than that once the deaths from displacement, disease, and a shattered health system are reckoned in, as honest accounting demands the civilians were. Roughly $2.3 trillion spent. An Afghan army, built at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, that dissolved in days. And at the end of it all, in August 2021, the Taliban walked back into Kabul, and the United States handed the country to the very movement it had invaded to destroy. Twenty years, and the war’s final geometry was a circle.
Habits of Empire
Afghanistan was not an aberration; it was the flagship of a fleet. Iraq, launched on intelligence that ranged from mistaken to manufactured, killed hundreds of thousands and birthed ISIS from the wreckage. Guantánamo institutionalised indefinite detention beyond meaningful legal remedy — the courts eventually granted detainees the right to petition, but rights without release orders being enforced proved a thin sort of law. The torture programme — and let’s call it that, not “enhanced interrogation” — was documented by the Senate itself and prosecuted by no one. Drone campaigns normally begin assassinations as administrative routine, complete with “signature strikes” that kill people for behaving suspiciously from thirty thousand feet.
Each of these was defended, at the time, as a regrettable necessity. Together, they formed a pattern the rest of the world could read fluently: the United States would champion the rules-based international order precisely up to the point where the rules inconvenienced the United States. Freedom of navigation is sacred when Iran charges tolls in Hormuz; the UN Charter’s prohibition on aggressive war is negotiable when Washington wants a war. Sovereignty is inviolable, except where it isn’t. Human rights are universal, except among allies.
This is why the current standoff over Hormuz stings the way it does. Let it be said plainly, Hormuz z. n’s fee scheme may well be a protection racket dressed in marThe reports of two-million-dollar charges on supertankers, with “special treatment” for friendly nations, suggest exactly that — and nothing in America’s record excuses it. Both things are true at once. Iran can be running a racket, and America can have disqualified itself from being the one to say so. A United States with intact moral authority could make the accusation and be heard. But moral authority is not a permanent endowment. It is a reputation, renewed or depleted by conduct, and America has been making withdrawals for twenty-five years.
What Was Actually Lost
This lament, though, should be precise. It is fashionable to say America lost its innocence after 9/11. But nations don’t have innocence; they have choices. What America lost was more subtle and much more valuable.
It lost the distinction between strength and force. A country confident in its power can afford patience, law, and restraint. A frightened country reaches for the hammer, and after 9/11 America was governed by fear — fear it then exported, weaponised, and eventually turned inward, in surveillance programmes that vacuumed up its own citizens’ lives and a security state that never demobilised.
It lost the ability to tell itself the truth. The gap between what officials knew about Afghanistan and what they said became a governing style, and the habit of official unreality did not stay overseas. The collapse of American institutional trust has many parents — a financial crisis, a fractured media, decades of wage stagnation — but the war lies among the first and deepest tributaries. A public deceived about war for two decades does not readily trust its institutions on vaccines, elections, or anything else. Some of the poison in American life today was brewed in Kabul and Baghdad.
And it lost the example. This was always America’s most persuasive asset — not the carrier groups but the idea, however imperfectly realised, that a powerful nation could bind itself to law and be stronger for it. It was the idea present at the country’s creation: a founding document that felt obliged to justify itself to the world. It is what dissidents in autocracies once pointed to. It’s harder to point to that now. When Washington objects to Iranian tolls or Chinese island-building or Russian aggression, the objections are often correct — but they are instantly discounted, because the world prices in hypocrisy.
The Levy Comes Home
The levy was not collected only in Helmand and Fallujah. It was collected at home as well.
The trillions that flowed to Kabul and Baghdad revealed something about American priorities that no budget debate ever could. It was never that the money for bridges didn’t exist – a state that can borrow $2.3 trillion for incorrect borrowing for water systems was discounted because it chose not to. America built roads in Kandahar while its own bridges rusted; constructed compounds and bases overseas while public housing decayed and homelessness was treated as an eyesore rather than a crisis; and funded schools in distant provinces while starving many of its own classrooms and letting university costs climb beyond the reach of the young people it sent to fight. The wars didn’t empty the treasury. They exposed what the treasury was really for.
At the same time, the logic of force migrated inward. A country that already caged more of its citizens than any peer democracy deepened the habit of answering social problems with cages, policing, and surveillance. Post-9/11 paranoia evolved into a security mentality — the constant search for threats and the assumption that risk must be crushed rather than managed — finding domestic uses in militarised police, sprawling prison systems, and the quiet normalisation of watching everyone all the time. Homelessness became a visible, growing feature of city life, often intersecting with that same carceral system, as people cycled between the street and the cell with little in between.
The world watches this, too. It sees a superpower willing to deploy carrier groups at a moment’s notice, yet apparently unable to repair its bridges, house its citizens, or provide basic healthcare without bankrupting them. It sees a state that incarcerates more of its own population than any comparable democracy and then lectures others about human rights. It sees the bullyboy abroad and the indifferent landlord at home, and draws the obvious conclusion: this is not a model, but a warning.
Fear, in the end, was the one commodity the post-9/11 state produced in surplus — enough to sanction and strike abroad, enough to cage and surveil at home, enough to teach a citizenry to see enemies everywhere but in the mirror.
An Honest Coda
Two decades in Afghanistan did lift homes, and it cut child mortality and raised a generation of educated urban women who have not vanished, even under renewed repression. American money has vaccinated children, fought famines, and funded relief upon which the world quietly depends. The United States is not uniquely villainous among great powers; it is simply uniquely loud-mouthed about its virtue, which makes the gap between sermon and conduct impossible to ignore.
But that’s precisely the point of this lament. We do not grieve for things that were worthless. We grieve for what was real and squandered. On 12 September 2001, the United States held the world’s sympathy and a genuine, if flawed, claim to lead by example. It traded both for two lost wars, a torture archive, a surveillance state, and a foreign policy the world now experiences chiefly as pressure. The Taliban got Afghanistan back. Iran got its tollbooth. And America got the bill — which, unlike the fees in Hormuz, cannot be paid in dollars.
The tragedy is not that America was attacked. The tragedy is what it chose to become in response. And the work of anyone who still believes in the idea of America — as opposed to merely its power — is to insist that the choice can still, even now, be unmade.
Happy birthday, America. A land no longer believed. Two hundred and fifty years ago you thought the opinions of mankind worthy of respect; may you find the courage to earn them again, and let your undoubted power be guided once more by principle.