All the way through history, power has demonstrated to be an empty shell in the nonappearance of the will to use it. Preceding empires have had their Caesars and Disraelis to admire and expand power, in their outlook bringing civilization, peace, and law by means of legionaries and redcoats. But there have also been abundance of critics to caution that there are inherent limits to what power can attain, and that power over others carries with it the inbuilt risks of reaction and rebellion. "The Captains and the Kings depart," in Kipling's downhearted words.

By the 19th century, the world order had laid out the basis of a steadiness that persisted more or less fruitfully until 1914. Each nation had its rightful interests, and the best device for intervening among those interests, and thus for keeping the peace, was a balance of forces; any single power with pretensions to supremacy would be confronted by a defensive coalition of other powers. Consecutive British prime ministers functioned this mechanism, along with the Metternichs and Bismarcks and some of the Russian czars. They were statesmen--the highest term of praise in Kissinger's vocabulary--earning his approval as wise, cautious, restrained.

Some American Presidents have also understood this time-honored mechanism of power politics, and have acted accordingly--Theodore Roosevelt, for one. And after all, it was a coalition of allies that defeated Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and reinstated the world balance of power. But all along there was also a substitute American tradition, one rooted in the New World idealism of the founding fathers. This alternative found its modern embodiment in Woodrow Wilson, who after World War I affirmed that America was under a moral imperative to persuade self-determination and democracy for all peoples. This became the basis of American foreign policy and this vision also led to unilateral actions by America throughout the world, and their coalition partners were merely tools to protect their interests and promote their vision of self-determination and democracy throughout the world.
 

How 9/11 Changed America’s Foreign Policy
When the planes attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, George Bush and his aides had an option of how to react. The preference they made was the instant call for a military reply, the call to war for the American people and for everyone as well in the world that desired to be "with us," rather than treated as if they were "with the terrorists." The single alternative presented was to go to war, to put down already devastated Afghanistan, relying on an intimidated coalition, devoid of a hint of UN influence.

There was an additional option, but it was discarded. That option would have been to straight away judge the attacks a crime against humanity, and call for a new, global coalition to locate and bring to justice the perpetrators, while commencing a key attempt to inspect root causes, within U.S. foreign policy, of such slaughters. The president could have started with a promise to reveal to the world that the U.S., its government and its people were in reality dissimilar from the terrorists, and that it would commence with a promise that not one more blameless life would be lost in hunt of the goal of justice. He might have gone on to say that the 9/11 attacks made the U.S. government comprehend it had been wrong to be in opposition to the International Criminal Court, and that further than pledging full financial and political support to the ICC in the future, that it would begin that day to give new support for the United Nations. That support would allow the UN to set up a new judicial agency, backed by a new international enforcement mechanism, to assist with regional forces to look for those accountable for the attacks. And then to institute a new UN Department of Preventive Diplomacy, with sufficient support and backing to make sure that such an attack never happened once more.