This is the Katori Daily Podcast for Monday, September 13th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

9-11 Fundamentally altered American foreign policy and made a broad range of mainstream Muslims nervous.

Cato's Doug Bandau and Mustafa Akyol discussed the changes 20 years ago and how the US should engage with the Muslim world and Afghanistan in the future.

We are recording this to coincide with the 20-year anniversary of the attacks of September 11th.

Doug, what did American foreign policy look like on, oh, say 9-10?

It looked very different.

President George W. Bush had run on a platform where he said he wanted a humble foreign policy.

He seemed somewhat skeptical of military intervention.

He was somewhat critical of American involvement in the Balkans.

One had a sense that America, while the dominant power coming out of the Cold War, was going

to have a more restrained attitude towards the world and that vision of

foreign policy completely disappeared on 9-11. So what I suppose what did that mean? I mean

practically speaking within days we had an

a-U-M-F to take on Al-Qaeda and its extremist allies which of course has been stretched beyond all recognition but in the

immediate aftermath of 9-11 what did that look like?

Well the most important action immediately was Afghanistan. It was threatening the Taliban,

demanding the turnover of Osama bin Laden, when that did not occur, the U.S. got involved in October,

the U.S. inserted forces in Afghanistan, but it also

set in motion the invasion of Iraq because there were people within the administration who

had wanted to do that and they saw 9-11 as

essentially their opportunity. So they were quite ready to move on from

...