How the War on Terrorism Influences Political Regimes and Neo-liberal Globalisation

When two planes struck the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the immediate damage was visible to everyone. The deeper, slower change was harder to see: a reordering of how the world’s most powerful state ranked its priorities. Through the 1990s, the dominant story in global politics had been economic – open markets, free trade, privatisation, and the steady spread of neo-liberal globalisation. After 9/11, security muscled its way to the front of the queue. The “war on terrorism” did not simply launch two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It reshaped American foreign policy, empowered a particular set of ideologues, and changed the kinds of political regimes that survived and thrived across the world. This post unpacks how that happened and why it still matters for anyone studying political regimes today.

From economics to security: a reordered agenda 🔗

For most of the 1990s, the United States promoted a fairly consistent package abroad: liberalise your economy, open up to global capital, and democratise your politics. The assumption was that markets and democracy travelled together, reinforcing each other. The war on terrorism disrupted this neat pairing. Counter-terrorism cooperation, intelligence sharing, military bases, and “stability” suddenly mattered more than whether a partner government held clean elections or protected civil liberties.

The shift was not just rhetorical. As the Institut Montaigne notes, the Bush administration used the shock of the attacks to declare a war that was, by design, open-ended – a war against a tactic rather than a defined enemy, one that “by definition would never end.” A permanent state of emergency justifies permanent exceptions, and many of those exceptions cut directly against the liberal political and economic norms the US had spent a decade exporting.

The economic-security nexus 🔗

Scholars have argued that the war on terror was woven into, not separate from, the neo-liberal project. One influential reading in the journal New Political Science frames post-9/11 policy as “neoliberalism by other means” – using the security emergency to restructure expectations of government and weaken organised labour at home, while opening new economies abroad on terms friendly to global capital. Whether or not one accepts that strong interpretation, the basic point holds: security and economics were not running on separate tracks. The “global war on terror” became the lens through which trade deals, aid packages, and military partnerships were all negotiated. This fusion of the economic and the security agenda is what political scientists mean by the economic-security nexus.

The rise of the neo-conservatives 🔗

The intellectual current that gained the most from this moment was neo-conservatism. Neo-conservatism is best understood as a nationalist foreign-policy outlook that favours the assertive use of American military and political power to spread democracy and protect US interests. Its core ideas had circulated since the late 1960s, but they remained on the margins of actual policy. The Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative think-tank, had called as early as 1997 for sharply higher defence spending and confronting regimes “hostile to our interests and values.” Before 9/11, these recommendations had little traction.

The attacks changed that overnight. Neo-conservatives felt vindicated and moved quickly from the sidelines into the centre of decision-making. A study in the journal International Politics traces how this group shaped the early counter-terrorism agenda, even as it notes that not every decision flowed purely from neo-conservative ideology – removing Saddam Hussein, for instance, had support across party lines well before 2001.

The Bush doctrine and democracy by force 🔗

The neo-conservative argument rested on a simple, sweeping claim: bad regimes breed threats like terrorism, and democracies do not. If that were true, then overthrowing “threatening” governments and replacing them with democracies became a security strategy, not just an idealistic preference. This logic produced the Bush doctrine, built around unipolarity, pre-emptive war, unilateralism, and democracy promotion. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was its clearest expression – an attempt to engineer a democratic transformation of the Middle East through military force. The contradiction, as critics pointed out, was that coercing freedom through invasion sat awkwardly with the liberal language used to justify it.

Security trumps democracy: the new realpolitik 🔗

Here lies the central tension of the period. The same administration that proclaimed a global democratic crusade simultaneously deepened its reliance on authoritarian governments wherever they were useful for counter-terrorism. In a widely discussed Foreign Affairs exchange, the analyst Thomas Carothers argued that the imperatives of the war on terror had pushed Washington to cooperate with authoritarian regimes and overlook their anti-democratic practices – a charge the administration disputed but one that captured a real pattern.

Countries like Uzbekistan, Egypt, and several Central Asian states became valued partners precisely because they offered bases, intelligence, and a willingness to crack down hard on Islamist movements. Democracy promotion, in practice, was selectively applied: pursued aggressively against adversaries, quietly shelved with friendly autocrats. This is a recurring dilemma of great-power politics – the gap between what a state preaches and what it does when security is on the line.

Echoes of the Cold War 🔗

If this pattern feels familiar, that is because it is. During the Cold War, the United States routinely backed authoritarian regimes – military juntas, monarchies, one-party states – as long as they were anti-communist. The war on terror revived the same calculus, simply swapping the enemy from communism to jihadist terrorism. A partner’s internal repression mattered far less than its external alignment. The “you are either with us or against us” framing left little room for the messy middle ground where most democratising states actually live.

Pakistan: the front-line ally 🔗

No case illustrates the Cold War echo better than Pakistan, which matters enormously for the South Asian and Indian context. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the US had channelled support to the mujahideen through Pakistan’s intelligence services, as the Washington Institute describes. After 9/11, the pattern repeated almost exactly. General Pervez Musharraf, a military ruler who had seized power in a 1999 coup, became an “indispensable ally.” Washington lifted the sanctions it had imposed over Pakistan’s nuclear tests and channelled billions in aid to a government that remained, in substance, authoritarian.

The United States Institute of Peace documents how the relationship swung repeatedly between close alliance and deep mistrust, because the two partners never shared the same priorities. Washington was focused on al-Qaeda and the Taliban; Islamabad remained focused, above all, on its rivalry with India. The Middle East Policy Council makes this point sharply: just as the Cold War alliance had served different ends for each side, the war on terror partnership was built on overlapping but ultimately divergent goals. For India, this meant that a military regime in Pakistan was rewarded and strengthened even as that same establishment maintained links to militant groups operating in the region.

What it meant for neo-liberal globalisation 🔗

The security turn complicated the neo-liberal project in two directions at once. On one hand, economic liberalisation continued – Musharraf’s Pakistan, for example, pursued privatisation and deregulation and saw strong growth between 2002 and 2007. On the other hand, the idea that free markets and free politics naturally advanced together lost credibility. You could now have economic opening under an authoritarian umbrella, propped up by security aid rather than democratic legitimacy. The clean 1990s narrative of “markets plus democracy” fractured into something far more conditional and transactional.

Changing regime types around the world 🔗

One of the most striking outcomes of this era was a shift in the distribution of regime types. Between roughly 1990 and 2005, the world did not simply split into democracies and dictatorships. Instead, a large grey zone expanded. Closed, fully authoritarian regimes became somewhat less common, but many were replaced not by genuine democracies but by hegemonic authoritarian regimes and hybrid systems that held elections while concentrating real power in the hands of rulers, militaries, or dominant parties. Pakistan under Musharraf – described by analysts at the Quincy Institute as a hybrid regime blending democratic and authoritarian features – is a textbook example.

The war on terror helped sustain these hybrid arrangements. International pressure to democratise eased for governments that delivered on security. Leaders learned that they could maintain a democratic facade – elections, parliaments, a partly free press – while curbing opposition and judicial independence, and still keep Western backing. Counter-terrorism laws, expanded surveillance, and emergency powers gave such rulers convenient tools to limit dissent, a dynamic visible far beyond South Asia.

The long tail of the “forever war” 🔗

The neo-conservative moment did not last. By the 2010s, the movement had been largely marginalised within the Republican Party, and later US administrations distanced themselves from grand democracy-by-force ambitions. Yet the institutional machinery built for the war on terror – security partnerships with autocrats, normalised emergency powers, the habit of ranking stability above accountability – proved far more durable than the ideology that launched it. This is the “forever war” legacy: the ideas faded, but the structures and habits remained, continuing to shape which regimes the world’s powers choose to support.

What do you think? When a powerful state must choose between promoting democracy and securing reliable counter-terrorism partners, which should win – and who pays the price for that choice? And looking at South Asia today, do you see the Cold War’s “stability over democracy” logic still at work?

References

1. https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/expressions/2001-2021-how-september-11-changed-united-states
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0739314042000251306
3. https://www.e-ir.info/2015/09/17/the-iraq-invasion-the-neoconservative-perspective/
4. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41311-023-00488-y
5. https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/fa/fa_mayjune03l.html
6. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/pakistan-and-war-terror
7. https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/sr145.pdf
8. https://mepc.org/commentaries/pakistan-and-war-terror/
9. https://quincyinst.org/research/normalizing-u-s-pakistan-relations/