Counterfactual history suggests that the last ten years of American foreign policy has made us safer

With the ten-year anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon only days away, a debate still rages over whether Britain and America are now more secure now than on September 10th 2001. Critics complain that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the overarching idea of the “Global War On Terror”, were counterproductive, doing “more damage to ourselves than did the two-bit criminals who baited us” and “left the US weaker, more divided and broke”. This raises the question of what would have happened had American foreign policy continued along pre-9/11 lines.