Five years after 9/11: a shifted view of the world

And it is the presence of large numbers of US troops which has helped spur anti-Americanism in the region. Those troops may have given disaffected Muslims, unhappy with the shortcomings of their own economic and political structures, something else on which to focus their ire.

Much of the hostility that some Islamists bear toward the US "is driven by one of the most powerful of human emotions, a sense of indignity and humiliation," says Lawrence Harrison, an adjunct lecturer in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. "That's a quite new foreign- policy problem."

Overall, Islamic jihadism is one of the biggest geopolitical winners of the past five years, according to Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.

Before Sept. 11, the beliefs represented by Osama bin Laden represented a "niche ideology," Mr. Daalder writes in his Web log at TPMCafe.com. But the US invasion of Iraq, coupled with wide publicity of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse and other US abuses, has fueled the rage of millions in the region and pushed them toward Islam's radical fringe.

Rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea have also benefited from the changed world of 9/11, according to Daalder. The US has focused its power and attention elsewhere, allowing them to push forward with domestic nuclear programs.

"The final clear winner is China, which during the past five years has emerged as a dominant global player without anyone, at least in America or Europe, paying it much attention," writes Daalder.

Losers over the past five years include bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Radical Islamism may be on the rise, but it has become dispersed as US forces have hunted and smashed Al Qaeda's direct organization.

Trust in the US has also eroded substantially since 9/11, according to Daalder, among friends as well as adversaries. International cooperation on a wide range of problems, from counter-proliferation to global warming, is thus "increasingly absent," he claims.

But international cooperation played a large role in last month's arrests in England of suspects charged with planning to destroy transatlantic aircraft. And other experts say Europe is increasingly aware that it may be the terrorists' new focus.

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If 9/11 was an alarm bell, it took Europe a long time to stir.

Months went by, years even, before it began to wake up to the dangers posed by terrorists. After all, until that point, all the major Al Qaeda attacks had targeted American interests. Although Europeans understood that the world had changed, they didn't sense they were vulnerable.

"When the attack took place in America, it should have served as a major wake-up call for Europeans, but it didn't," says M.J. Gohel, a terrorism expert and director of the London-based Asia-Pacific Foundation think tank. "Security services were growing concerned about the threat, but at the political level there was failure, no strategy devised."

That only changed when the terror threat erupted on European soil, first in Madrid in 2004, and then a year later in London. After Madrid, the European Union appointed an antiterror chief, Gijs de Vries. But Mr. de Vries's role is restricted; he has little executive authority.

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