9/11 attacks: Is America still dreaming, or writing its own destiny?

Our soldiers fights as well as ever, of course, but days after 9/11 we were urged to go shopping as an expression of defiant normalcy. And ever since there has been a tendency – frequently contradicted, but stronger than ever today – to minimize the challenges this generation faces.

The other note was transformational: He emphasized American confidence that “our destiny is never written for us, it’s written by us.” But can we really say that we wrote our destiny in Iraq, or in Afghanistan?

Mr. Obama may have reached the right conclusions but he reached them too soon. His generation has not yet run its course, and we are not especially in control of our destiny. This is because most of our foreign policy has been shaped by the tremendous, and justifiable, fears unleashed by 9/11.

Our destiny, in fact, lies elsewhere, in the global power shifts we all recognize yet before which we have been strangely passive.

Leaders in a global change

The movement of political and economic power and ideological dominance away from the West – for centuries, the center of the world – has in recent years become a geopolitical commonplace. Yet no nation or group of nations has undertaken to lead this global process of change that every nation nonetheless realizes is occurring. It is an extraordinary vacuum. And the United States is uniquely suited to fill it.

Why? Because the US has always kept a distance from Europe, for better as well as worse. Because the US is fundamentally anti-imperial and, as a culture, fundamentally open. Because the American project is, by general agreement, unfinished and even unfinishable.

And because its current president is himself uniquely suited to this historical moment. I say that not as a compliment to the man but as a statement of fact. He is the first president to embody this country’s characteristic ethnic and religious openness, its fluidity of identity. He is an exemplar of class mobility. And he knows it. In his celebrated campaign speech on race – indeed, throughout the campaign – he turned what might have been a liability into an unassailable advantage. It was very American. It was the truest thing about him. As president, in his celebrated Cairo speech last year about relations with the Muslim world, he took this American quality onto a global stage: the race speech writ large.

The September 11 attacks were clarifying in some ways, but they were also distorting. They have distracted the country from its real opportunities. Multilateral reforms and global reapportionment are waiting to be achieved. The US can and should lead.

Scott Malcomson is the author of “Generation’s End: A Personal Memoir of American Power after 9/11” published this week.

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