“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
These were the words George W. Bush said in his address to Congress shortly after 9/11 as Tony Blair watched on intently. Bush was, no doubt, referring to those nations who were considering opposing the War on Terror. After any such tragedy like 9/11, response was inevitable – perhaps even justified.
A coalition of the willing was pulled together for forces to enter Afghanistan where the culprits, al-Qaeda and bin Laden, would be taken out. There seemed to be a clear narrative: tragedy struck, action was taken against the culprits and a clean exit strategy is pursued. That was the line of thinking many western governments took in regard to Afghanistan, what they did not think about was nation building. They also didn’t think that there was a reality in which their troops would be there for 20 years.
But as the focus on Afghanistan began to shift to Iraq, the clear red lines of the new post-9/11 world began to fade.
Many could see the clear link between al-Qaeda and 9/11. The same could not be said of Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Indeed, the very man that the West had supplied weapons to in the 1980s was now the next target for the War on Terror. The narrative the British and Americans deployed was quite simple and, in a sense, defendable: Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator who kills his own people and possesses WMDs which he can use against our nations. Therefore, he must be removed before he can threaten the peace of the world. From a moral standpoint, this aim made sense – after all, who would want an autocratic leader who possesses WMDs to use these weapons against other nations?
That was the justification used for the invasion of Iraq. Bush and Blair both had to go through intense diplomatic pressure in order to create legitimacy for their plans. They managed to gain domestic permission, with Bush managing Congressional approval whilst Blair won a vote in Parliament. Simultaneously, both nations were working with the UN to get a resolution passed, much like how Bush and Baker got a UN resolution passed to begin the Gulf War. In 2002, the line of thinking was that if a UN resolution authorising war passed, the UK and US would be able to begin the process of removing Saddam. They would have to settle for less when Resolution 1441 was passed, demanding that Saddam declare the existence of his WMD programs, granted inspectors unrestricted access and warned of serious consequences if there was no compliance. Both the pro and anti-war camps would interpret the resolution differently, sowing the seeds for division.
Those nations in the pro-war camp were not happy as the threat of war was not explicitly stated in the resolution. Thus, a second resolution was attempted – one that would authorise war.
It was at this point when the melodrama within the western alliance began to show. The US administration was split between the diplomats and the neocons. On the one hand, figures such as Colin Powell and many in the State Department saw the need to approach the UN and gain legal authority to pursue Saddam. On the other hand, figures such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and many in the Pentagon were firm neoconservatives who believed that the UN route was a waste of time. Both these camps were in conflict for the favour of the President.
Meanwhile, Blair was not having a smooth time on the domestic front either. Whilst he had his allies in government, senior and influential figures such as Robin Cook resigned due to the lack of a UN mandate for war. Moreover, the majority of the public were firmly against action in Iraq, with many taking to the streets of London to protest. The vote in Parliament over whether the UK would go to war put Blairs premiership on a knifes edge. Their September dossier would be accused of being “sexed up” to justify war.
Whilst both governments were in factional disputes, they were also fighting on the international stage too. Jacques Chirac, the outspoken French president, made it clear that any second resolution authorising war would by vetoed by France on the Security Council. Similarly, German chancellor Gerhard Schröder opposed the war along with Russia and Canada. The UK and US were quickly becoming isolated and diplomatic pariahs. Inevitably, this led to a war of words such as when German Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin stated that Bush was using the war to distract the public from his domestic agenda failures. She stated that it was a “method that Hitler also used”. Chirac asked Blair how he would look his baby son in the eye knowing he started a war. Putin famously lashed out at Blair, allegedly saying to him “you are not God”.
Those in the anti-war camp, however, also found themselves at the receiving end of diplomatic abuse. Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the “Old Europe vs New Europe”, implying that the new world order was being created and that those who opposed action in Iraq, were part of an old fashioned mindset that was the main hurdle standing in the way between the pro-war camp and Iraq. French fries were renamed to “Freedom Fries” in a politically motivated move to protest French opposition to the war. Condoleezza Rice summarised the US strategy toward the anti-war camp with this line: “punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia.”
The diplomatic mud throwing in front of the world damaged the foreign policy credibility of all nations involved. Not only were the governments themselves split, but they were clashing with other governments too.
As everyone knows, the invasion of Iraq pressed ahead anyway much to the dismay of the anti-war camp who were convinced that with just enough pressure, perhaps they could pull the US and UK away from the brink.
When Saddam’s statue was pulled down, initially it looked as if the Iraqi people had been liberated from an oppressive regime. Reality quickly hit when the country plunged into chaos and disorder. Looting was rampant, police were nowhere to be seen and civil war began. It became clear why.
The lead up to the Iraq War presented something never seen before in world leaders, a state of mind feeding off emotion rather than rationality. Action bias got the better of many of them in both camps. Firstly, for the pro-war camp, this was shown in the shift of mindset from “defensive” pre-9/11 to “corrective” after. There was also a “messiah” complex that took hold of many in the pro-war camp as they began to see the world through the lens of “good vs evil”, forgetting that the world is too complex to fall into those two binaries. The impact of the “messiah” complex was that those leaders in the pro-war camp thought themselves to answer to a higher moral authority rather than a political one. Indeed, there have been arguments that attempt to make sense of the psychological shift in leaders by acknowledging the fact that extreme stress can lead to an automatic and uncontrolled impulse for action.
For those in the anti-war camp, they shifted from the “strategic dependence” mindset to the “strategic autonomy” mindset. In other words, they shifted from traditional Atlanticism to a new “Europhile” mindset. One must understand the term coined by French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine: “Hyperpuissance” which translates to “hyperpower”. This refers to a superpower that is so dominant to the point where it lacks effective rivals. The fear Chirac had was that if the US was allowed to topple regimes at will, the concept of the sovereign state is dead. Similarly, Schröder followed “The German Way” after 9/11, a contrast to how Germany used to consistently side with the US. Both countries would use their position in the western alliance for an internal sabotage to stop the US from using NATO assets for the Iraq War as they felt the War on Terror was no longer rational. The anti-war camp went from being unable to counter a major US foreign policy move to being able to firmly – and publicly – oppose it.
Indeed, the lessons and mindsets from the past are still around today. Mindsets, patterns and mistakes in geopolitics hardly ever change. This is an arc that begins with Korea, continues in Vietnam, Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. Here is how the “Iraq War mindset” is dominating international affairs today.
2 – Geopolitical Mindsets From 2022-2024
The shift from the “defensive” mindset to the “corrective” can be traced back to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the integration of Eastern Europe into the wider NATO alliance, the idea that there would be another war on European soil was unfathomable.
When the invasion of Ukraine happened, it was all hands on deck for a world that had just emerged from a devastating pandemic that strained national resources and politics. It can be argued that it was international economic hardship that prompted the invasion at that moment, perhaps to distract the Russian people from domestic woes. Fundamentally, the idea that there is no binding obligation for western support to Ukraine is categorically false. One must point to the Budapest Memorandum in December 1994 to provide security assurances to the nations of Belarus, Kazakstan and Ukraine when they joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Where the UK and US signed the four memoranda, France and China gave their own separate assurances. In other words, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons with the knowledge that should an invasion happen, the western powers would come to their aid.
This is what happened in 2022. Many in the international community condemned the invasion, many countries put sanctions on the Russian economy and weapons were sent to Ukraine for self-defence. That said, it didn’t all happen at once: in January when tensions were reaching new highs, the German government responded requests for arms by sending 5,000 helmets.
“The behaviour of the German government leaves me speechless,” Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, told the newspaper Bild. “The defence ministry apparently hasn’t realised that we are confronted with perfectly equipped Russian forces that can start another invasion of Ukraine at any time. What kind of support will Germany send next, pillows?”
Nonetheless, the invasion resulted in western unity with NATO applying economic pressure on Russia in the hope that a weakened economy would wear the aggressor down. Much like the failure to effectively plan an exit strategy for themselves, there wasn’t an actual end goal for western involvement in Ukraine. The fear was if the aid stops and Ukraine is taken over by the aggressor, the aggressor may push further into Eastern Europe. That said, there was no willingness to directly engage with the aggressor out of legitimate fears of a world war. Much like Truman back in the early days of the Cold War, the idea was containment.
But it quickly became clear by 2024 that containment was going nowhere. The Russian state had successfully developed a wartime economy which was competing with the West – who were still in a peacetime mindset – and many citizens were growing tired of what seemed to be a forever war. It’s little wonder, therefore, that the man promising to end the war was elected in the US in November of 2024.
Donald Trump was offering something very appealing to American citizens: ending foreign entanglements that didn’t have a material benefit for the American people. Almost immediately, the USAID program faced significant cuts and when the foreign aid was taken care of, the next item on the list was ending the foreign wars.
It was at this point that the collective psyche of western foreign policy shifted from “containment” to “corrective”. Trump seemed ready to begin negotiations to end the war but the Europeans were sceptical about how this may end. This became the inverse of Iraq: this time it was the American administration who wanted to end the war for the sake of focusing their time on domestic issues. The Europeans went into 2025 with the knowledge that the fight was far from over and that withdrawal was not an option.
3 – The Diplomatic Meltdown of 2025
The international community had every right to feel nervous when the incoming US President had threatened to annex Greenland, make Canada the 51st state and end the war in Ukraine regardless of what the terms of the peace deal are. It was a press cooker alliance.
Ultimately, 2025 was the year that laid the foundations for the “corrective” mindset to be implemented the following year – think of it as a frog in boiling water.
Europe attempted to end its role as a “security consumer” and tried to shift towards strategic autonomy with the EU approving a new defence fund, NATO members committed to raising their defence spending to 5% – despite some struggling to get to 2% – and increased aid to Ukraine to fill the void that the US was going to leave behind.
A new European core emerged in the form of the “Coalition of the Willing” which comprised of countries willing to commit to troop deployments in Ukraine to enforce any potential ceasefire. But perhaps the biggest signal of this seismic shift was when Germany shocked the world when the government smashed its debt ceiling to pay for increased defence. This essentially said that any defence spending above 1% of GDP was now exempt from borrowing limits, allowing them to jump their spending to 3.5% by 2029. This was hugely symbolic as if showed that if Chancellor Merz, a fiscal conservative, was willing to end defence austerity for the sake of continental security, other European states should take similar steps to ensure they could stand on their own.
This was the year of the “corrective mindset”: the US had corrected its burden of paying for the security of others whilst Europe corrected its delusions over the idea that they could get away with being a “security consumer”.
In a way, this was the inverse of the Iraq War Mindset as instead of the US trying to persuade a reluctant Europe to go to war, it was Europe in 2025 that was trying to keep the US from leaving the diplomatic stage entirely.
The divisions that were reminiscent of the lead up to the Iraq War would have its consequences show up in 2026. 2025 ended with many alliances broken, mindset shifts from the “defensive” to “corrective” and the collapse of what was known as the “rules based international order”. All these elements manifested themselves in the form of 2026 – which so far, has been the year of regime change.
4 – When the Water Boiled Over
To start 2026 with the hopes that the tense divisions laid in 2025 would suddenly disappear would have been naïve. Instead, everything that happened the previous year has made confrontation inevitable. The debates that many geopolitical intellectuals were having about the breakdown of the international order were suddenly ended when it was confirmed by the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro that we may be living in a world where anyone can take what they want.
It was with this event in Venezuela that people started to debate the ethics and legality of regime change – the same debate that was had in 2003. On the one hand, some argued that whilst the kidnapping was morally right, it was legally wrong. They feared it would set a precedence whereby any country could grab the leader of another as there is no criteria that would justify forced regime change (eg: Putin thinking that the leadership of Ukraine is a Neo-Nazi regime). On the other hand, some argued that the removal of a brutal dictator was the correct thing to do – and that if international law makes it illegal for a autocrat to be removed from power, then it may be international law that is wrong.
This is where the revival of the neoconservative ideology began. Some may be unaware of it, but indeed, it is a neocon view to take if one favours interventions in foreign countries for regime change. It is an interventionist ideology that advocates the use of military might to force regime change towards democracy, emphasises the idea that the world is split between good vs evil with no room for nuance. It is an ideology that thrives off human fear, hence why the way it’s manifested is through pre-emptive action.
The neoconservative ideology in the days of Iraq sought to promote democracy in the Middle East through military intervention and overthrowing dictators such as Saddam Hussein from power. It was thought that a democratic Iraq would cease to pose a threat to the US and wider West. There was little intelligence to suggest that Saddam possessed WMDs, there was no evidence to suggest he had anything to do with 9/11 so therefore, the action taken in Iraq in 2003 was pre-emptive. The idea was to remove the threat before the threat came to Western soil – by then it would been too late. The Iraq War Mindset doesn’t think of deterrence or containment as a viable strategy. Instead, it suggests that the only way your nation can be safe is through every other country having a similar way of governance to you.
Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada seemed to warn against the revival of the neoconservative ideology and the Iraq War Mindset, though he never named it. Instead, he spoke of the “Middle Powers” needing to come together to keep the rules based order alive. Such an idea may be difficult as this diplomatic approach clashes with the European states such as Germany trying to arm themselves to survive. Carneys speech was made in Davos against the backdrop of the threats against Greenland – yet another example of neoconservatism in action. The line of thinking on the part of the US was that if they didn’t take Greenland, Russia or China would. Again, there was little evidence to suggest as such but neoconservatism doesn’t account for rational facts. It’s an ideology of pre-emption: the US wanted to pre-emptively take Greenland before someone else did, which would threaten US national security, though it ignores the fact that Greenland is a NATO member.
Neoconservatism and the Iraq War Mindset are back because the fear that was created in 2025 has provided the ideology a perfect environment to fester, grow and thrive. It leaves little room for debate and nuance: if you were against intervention in Venezuela, you must be sympathetic towards the regime. If you were for it, you have the moral high ground. At the very least, the Bush Administration in 2001 had this line of thinking. This is because the human emotions of fear and worry will fog the view of a rational geopolitical thinker or world leader.
Here is the other aspect of neoconservatism and the Iraq War Mindset: once you are on the spiral, it’s hard to find an exit point. So normally, a disaster would have to happen to obstruct you from going further.
For the War on Terror, this was the Global Financial Crisis. For where we are now, we have yet to find out.
When the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran in June 2025, it was to end the nuclear weapons program the regime was developing. The intervention was hailed as a success. This creates the question: why did they launch strikes again recently?
The killing of the Supreme Leader was hailed by supporters as a great thing for world peace. After all, why would you mourn the death of a brutal dictator who suppressed his own people unless you were a sympathiser of the regime? Again, that’s a simplistic way of looking at it.
It’s important to highlight that there are many on the Right of western politics who are against meddling in the affairs of Iran and are uncomfortable watching others on the Right expose their inner neoconservatism which they may have had all along. Many conservatives, particularly in the US, wish to deliver on the “Country First” platform they advocate for. They do not see any reason to get involved in the affairs of another country as life becomes increasingly unaffordable for those in their own. Moreover, they do not wish to send the nations sons and daughters to another country for “nation building” which – if any lessons are to be taken from the past – never works.
The western Left meanwhile, seems pretty united in its condemnation of the intervention.
There is a debate happening now over the extent to which European allies aid the US and Israel in Iran. Some argue that it is the duty of an ally to help another in times of need. Others argue that this isn’t Europe’s war and that to get sucked into the pre-emptive way of thinking about the threat Iran poses would put countries on a collision course they can’t get out of.
I would point this out, once again, to world leaders if they let themselves get sucked in to a pre-emptive foreign policy dictated by neoconservatives and others in the Iraq War Mindset. First, you will start to view the world through the lens of good vs evil with no rom for nuance. Moreover, you will develop a messiah-like complex whereby you will see it as your duty to act first and think later. You will then develop half-hearted plans based off of dodgy intelligence to justify your actions. Then, one country will become inspired by your line of thinking, and act the same way. But then the radicalisation will take place and some will be inspired to take revenge against you for your failures in rebuilding their nation. You might find foiled attempts to carry out plots against your country, so you decide to hit back. And the toxic cycle repeats itself.
So to leaders, I’d advise caution, to commentators, I’d advise nuance over dogma and to everyone else – your place in this will be dictated by those on the TV.
