Gilbert Achcar, where were you on 11 September 2001?
I was at home in Paris; it was my partner who alerted me that something momentous was unfolding, so I joined her watching television. What I saw was appalling. Beyond the appalling character of the crime itself, my immediate fear was for its consequences in the Middle East. It was obvious to me that it would be followed by the deployment of U.S. forces in the region, given that the Bush administration was already intent on invading Iraq. I was fully conscious that this would sow chaos, and that it would ultimately end in failure for the United States.
Before we move on to the global implications of the attack, what effect have 9/11 and the War on Terror had within the West?
The result has been catastrophic. Since 9/11 we have witnessed a succession of murderous attacks, from the Bataclan to Berlin, and each one has served as a pretext for strengthening an already formidable repressive apparatus. The far right has exploited these attacks relentlessly; in a sense, they have amounted to permanent life-support for far-right politics. Today the animating ideology of the far right is anti-Muslim racism, it is the Muslim migrant, not the Jew, who has become its central figure of menace. Antisemitism has not disappeared, to be sure, but it is no longer the animating ideology of the far right.
And in the Middle East, how would you characterise the situation twenty-five years on?
The Middle East has sunk into chaos and repression. As one could have predicted from the start, one notable side effect of the U.S. interventions after 9/11 was the strengthening of Iran, the greatest beneficiary of the region’s destabilisation. Tehran took full advantage of the American occupation of Iraq; it was the United States, after all, that installed pro-Iranian Iraqi parties in government, enabling the creation of a Tehran-dominated corridor running from Iran through Iraq to Syria, and from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon. That same regional destabilisation also positioned Iran to help the Houthis seize control of northern Yemen. One of the underlying causes of the recent U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran is precisely the reach the Iranian regime achieved as a consequence of the U.S. intervention that followed 9/11. And look at Iran itself, where the regime is slaughtering its own people. The brutal repression and public executions are designed to terrorise the population into silence. We’ve entered a long-term destabilisation of the region, which today is probably the most unstable part of the world. It is a very sorry state of affairs.
When demonstrations erupted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011 and what later would come to be called the Arab Spring began, you were quite optimistic. In your 2012 book The People Want your analysis was still relatively hopeful, a position you revised with 2016’s Morbid Symptoms. How did your analysis of the Arab Spring change over time?
When the Arab Spring erupted, I insisted that it was rooted in a deep structural crisis, and that it should therefore be understood not as a fleeting episode but as the opening of a long historical process. The clearest symptom of the region’s social and economic paralysis is that the Middle East and North Africa region has, for decades, held the world’s record rates of youth unemployment, a direct consequence of the collision between neoliberal economics and the type of state and ruling system that prevails there. I have always maintained that whatever happens, there can be no return to the despotic stability that prevailed in the Middle East and North Africa before 2011.
In the beginning, the uprisings everywhere were initiated by progressive forces, but the region was, and to some extent still is, characterised by the existence of reactionary currents of opposition to the old regimes. Religious fundamentalists are not progressive; they are reactionary in their social and cultural programmes. So, what we saw was not a simple binary of revolution versus counter-revolution, but it became clear there was a triangle: one revolutionary camp, and two distinct forms of counter-revolution, the old regimes on one side, and right-wing religious fundamentalist forces seeking to seize power on the other.
But the hopes raised by the Arab Spring have been defeated. We have watched civil wars erupt, dictatorships return in forms even harsher than before, and the continuation of U.S. wars in the region, peaking in the U.S.-Israeli genocidal war in Gaza and onslaught on Iran. The condition of the Palestinian people has reached its lowest point in history; it has never been worse. Hamas’s attacks are among the worst miscalculations in the history of anticolonial struggle. In my view, all this is the consequence of the absence of a credible political alternative in the region: no progressive force has emerged capable of channelling the mass anger generated by social and economic crisis into meaningful change. That failure has produced a political blockage layered on top of the existing social and economic one.
How would you assess the current state of the Islamist pole of the triangle you described?
When the uprisings began, the progressive forces that had unleashed them were too weak organisationally to constitute a real alternative to the existing governments. Into that vacuum stepped the Muslim Brotherhood, which had spent decades in opposition and now seized its opportunity, presenting itself as the alternative. In the immediate aftermath of 2011, the Brotherhood took advantage of the moment, winning elections in Egypt and Tunisia. But for all its claims, it offered no social or economic alternative: its project is fundamentally ideological and political rather than socioeconomic. It did not represent a real social alternative to what already existed, and its political project collapsed accordingly. By 2013, 2014 the Muslim Brotherhood was defeated everywhere, with the military coup in Egypt and the political crisis in Tunisia. When the second wave of uprisings arrived in 2019 — in Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon — the Islamic fundamentalist forces were no longer part of it; they were rather enmeshed in the existing regimes
You said Sunni Islamist forces were largely defeated, yet in Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, former leader of the Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, now controls the state and is consolidating power. Even the Kurdish YPG in the northeast has agreed to integrate into the Syrian army. Doesn’t that suggest Sunni Islamists have, in fact, succeeded in some places?
There is a certain irony in the Islamic fundamentalists’ victory in Syria, because it was a side effect of Israel’s wars in Lebanon. By dealing a devastating blow to Hezbollah, Israel removed the last pillar propping up the Syrian regime. That regime had previously relied on Iranian and Russian military support, but after invading Ukraine, Russia became so bogged down there that it withdrew most of its forces from Syria. Once Israel had crippled Hezbollah’s capacity to intervene on behalf of Iran, the fundamentalist forces controlling Idlib in the north were able to sweep in with relative ease. the Assad regime collapsed, much as the Kabul government did in 2021.
Since then however, Al-Sharaa has tried to project himself as a moderate. He is trying quite hard to get accepted by the West. He has made no major moves until now to impose Sharia, although there are signs of Islamisation of the state and society. That is not the same as the way they ruled the Idlib province until 2024 or even less the way Daesh, the so-called Islamic State or ISIS, ruled parts of Syria and Iraq declaring its so-called caliphate.
So, in essence, you would say the Islamist project has failed?
It could never have succeeded, because it does not represent a real alternative to the underlying crisis. The same applies to al-Sharaa: he is simply replicating the socioeconomic policies of other Arab states, which is already generating an acute social crisis in Syria, one that will produce growing discontent, quite apart from the unresolved issues facing the country’s minorities.
Why have the Kurds in Rojava agreed to fold themselves into the Syrian state? At the same time, the PKK in Turkey has agreed to disarm and has entered peace talks with Erdoğan. Why have Kurdish movements in both countries given up their bases of power?
Foremost of course in the Syrian case, because they were abandoned by the United States. Once Daesh had been defeated, Washington no longer needed the Kurds. Trump showed no interest in supporting them any longer.
Erdoğan, meanwhile, has been losing electoral ground since 2015 and is trying every available means to cling to power: suppressing the opposition, arresting its leading figures, even meddling in the leadership of the CHP. His outreach to the Kurds is another such manoeuvre: a bet that the Kurdish movement will not play the role it played in 2015, when it threatened the AKP’s dominance in parliament.
The Kurdish leader Öcalan has been advocating compromise with Ankara for years. It has become clear that the PKK’s armed strategy failed. Turkey, after all, has the second-largest army in NATO. Having bent the movement’s strategy toward armed struggle for so long, Öcalan has now bent it completely in the opposite direction, toward compromise. But I am not convinced this will succeed either. The oppression of the Kurdish nation has not subsided, and there are no real guarantees for Kurds in either Turkey or Syria. There are disagreements within both the Turkish and Syrian branches of the movement, and some members resent the ongoing self-dissolution and warn of what may follow.
The agreement with the Syrian government envisions dissolving the Syrian Democratic Forces and folding them into the Syrian army, but that remains largely theoretical. Who commands the forces in practice? Will command remain in the Kurdish-administered areas in Rojava, or will Damascus take control of the northeast? This process will encounter many obstacles, not least the role of women. Feminism has been central to the Kurdish struggle, but women fighting in army units, such as the YPJ, have no place in al-Sharaa’s conception of society.
Given the rightward drift you’ve described across these very different states, are they really all moving in the same direction?
Not at the regional level. Most Arab states remain traditional despotic regimes; they have not so much shifted to the right as always occupied that position. The Iranian regime, similarly, isn’t meaningfully described as far right. What I would call neo-fascism at the global level, represented by forces like the AfD in Germany, the Rassemblement National in France, and the MAGA movement around Donald Trump, finds its clearest regional equivalent in the Netanyahu government, which has already reached the far right’s outer edge. And then there is Erdoğan’s own drift toward the far right within the Turkish regime.
In your 2002 book The Clash of Barbarisms on the immediate aftermath of 9/11 you described a dynamic in which reactionary forces across different contexts feed off and radicalise one another. That was twenty-five years ago. Has this process slowed, or has it simply continued?
I countered Samuel Huntington’s idea of the so-called “clash of civilisations” with the thesis of a “clash of barbarisms”. The wars between Western imperialist powers and Islamic fundamentalist forces were not opposing civilizations, but barbaric tendencies inherent in each side’s civilization. This is still ongoing; it is dreadful to watch the Israeli government’s drift toward the far right, and the wars it has waged since 7 October.
That process has reached its peak with Gaza. I described Gaza as the first genocide perpetrated by an industrially advanced state since 1945, since the defeat of Nazi Germany. There have been other genocides since then, Rwanda among them, but none carried out by an industrialised state backed by Western powers.
You’ve written that Gaza marks the definitive end of the Western liberal order. Why not the invasion of Iraq in 2003 already?
Because the invasion of Iraq was opposed by figures like Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac, and by some voices even within Washington. The illusion persisted that liberal forces would ultimately correct course. Barack Obama, after all, built part of his political identity on having opposed the Iraq invasion, and adopted a principle of only joining a war with UN cover. He intervened in Libya only once the Security Council authorised the no-fly zone. That illusion of a liberal, rules-based order survived and was later used against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. But the contrast in how Western governments responded to Ukraine and how they responded to Gaza was the final nail in that order’s coffin.
You mention Chirac and Schröder opposing the Iraq war, but they still granted overflight rights and cooperated in other ways. Was that resistance genuine or largely symbolic?
At the time of the Iraq invasion, the United States stood at the very peak of its global hegemony, so neither Chirac nor Schröder dared provoke Washington to the point of denying it use of their airspace or military cooperation. Still, each had real interests at stake. France had invested heavily in its relationship with the Saddam Hussein regime and understood that it stood to lose that investment through U.S. invasion. Schröder, for his part, recognised that German public opinion was strongly opposed to the war, and he thus found an easy way of trying to be popular. With Gaza we have not seen any resistance to Israel’s wholly disproportionate response to October 7th. The last fig leaf of liberal decency is gone. Hamas’s attacks triggered an intensification of the instrumentalization of the memory of the Holocaust, one that left Western governments unable to muster a critical position toward Israel for several months into the genocide.
That’s a surprisingly idealist claim for a Marxist to make. Do you believe this is a matter of cultural legacy rather than material interest?
The United States has a clear material stake in its alliance with Israel as a subcontracted enforcer of American hegemony in the region. European governments’ support for Israel has far less to do with material interest. The starting point regarding their stance on Gaza is ideological, it is the way October 7th was represented as the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. This sentence was repeated again and again. The attack led by Hamas produced a wave of shock and sympathy, and Western governments rallied behind Israel’s so-called right to self-defence. Only months later, once the scale of destruction became impossible to ignore and it became clear how disproportionate the Israeli response was, did they begin shifting toward calls for a ceasefire.
In terms of material interest, it is certainly not in the interest of Europe’s liberal governments to have a government like Netanyahu’s in power in Israel, it creates no end of problems for them. Netanyahu has no sympathy for the liberal European governments at all, and he keeps showing it. Even the United Kingdom now has tensions with Israel. Europe is far closer geographically to the Middle East than the United States, so whatever happens in the region has immediate consequences in Europe. That simple fact reveals that there is a clear divergence between the interests of the different Western powers in the Middle East. But Europe is subordinate to the United States. That is a quite peculiar strategic position for the Europeans to be in. A handful of governments, Spain and Ireland among them, have dared to speak out against what the Israeli government is doing. In doing so, they arguably represent European interests more faithfully than those who remain silent.
The neoconservatives famously pursued American interest with little regard for anyone else. The neocons were quite dominant in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but now almost no one speaks of them. What was their project, and did it succeed?
The neocons are remembered chiefly for their doctrine of “regime change”, the idea that the United States had a mission to impose liberal democratic rule across the globe. The illusion of rebuilding an Iraqi state on the Western model led the occupation to dismantle the existing state apparatus entirely. And this led to chaos. It was a total failure as an exercise in imposing a “liberal” order by force.
So Washington then shifted away from its ostensibly democratic project for Iraq, which had actually empowered pro-Iranian actors , toward a more pragmatic reliance on tribal structures and the withdrawing of its troops. Even before the occupation formally ended, Iran had already gained more influence in Iraq than the United States itself. And from this, the so-called lessons of Iraq were drawn: the error, it was believed, consisted in dismantling the dictatorial state, which should have been kept intact, just changeing its orientation like what happened in Venezuela at the beginning of this year.
There is currently a rift within the American right between interventionists and isolationists. Trump’s own approach seems different in both method and aim from either camp. How would you characterise this split?
The American far right has always contained an isolationist strand alongside a hawkish one. Trump has tried to weld together its different currents, from the isolationists to the conspiracy-theory milieu, appealing to all these constituencies simultaneously, a fact that accounts for the many contradictions in his behaviour. Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of the American right, assembled from all these disparate parts. But one thing is certain: he has no regard for democracy whatsoever. He is fighting democracy at home in the United States! So, it should surprise no one that he makes no pretence of exporting it elsewhere.
In any case, narrowing the debate to a simple opposition of intervention or no intervention misses the nuances of imperialist policy. The type of intervention matters enormously. Today, rather than replacing regimes it considers rogue, the U.S. attempts to preserve them, simply forcing them to collaborate. Before taking office, Trump was explicit in embracing this lesson of Iraq and publicly criticised the “regimechange” illusion. His approach to Venezuela is entirely consistent with that: he removed Maduro, and the remainder of the apparatus was simply made to collaborate with Washington, with no attempt to impose democratic elections or bring back the so-called liberal opposition. Even with Cuba, where Marco Rubio has a particular interest, Washington is negotiating with figures from within the regime; the grandson of Raúl Castro is among its main interlocutors! And that’s what Trump tried to achieve in Iran as well. He believed that he could force the regime to collaborate with him, except that his actions have been reinforcing the hardliners instead of those who would be willing to make a compromise.
Where does that leave American liberals, caught between these competing camps?
They are thoroughly disoriented, unsure what position to adopt. This is precisely why we are seeing a resurgence of the left: people recognise that the half-hearted liberalism that the establishment offers is no longer credible, and they are looking for more radical answers to their social, economic, and political circumstances, even in the defence of democracy itself. Liberals have proven far too pusillanimous, for instance, to mount a frontal challenge to the ongoing strangulation of Cuba. What is happening there is criminal. Decades of embargo have now reached the point of imposing outright hunger on the population, and this is provoking far less international reaction than it warrants, not only among governments, but among mass movements, which should be expressing far greater solidarity with the Cuban people. These sanctions punish the population more than the regime.
Your 2023 book The New Cold War tackles the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Do you see Russia’s attack as a long-term consequence of the War on Terror and neoconservative interventionism?
In a sense, the 2003 Iraq invasion demonstrated to Russia, to China, to everyone, that the United States would not abide by the rules of the order it claimed to champion. The invasion of Iraq was a flagrant violation of international law. After the Soviet Union collapsed, matters could have unfolded quite differently; there was talk of a "peace dividend" and all that. Instead, the U.S. made deliberate political choices that antagonised Russia, particularly the expansion of NATO. I believe this was done on purpose. Washington wanted Russia to remain a scarecrow for the rest of Europe, so that other European states would remain in a vassal-like relationship with the US.
Helmut Kohl also initially favoured eastward expansion, since it served German capital’s interest in establishing hegemony over Eastern Europe. But by the time Georgia and Ukraine were invited by George W. Bush to join NATO, Angela Merkel actually came out against it. Again, here we have a divergence between American interests and the interests of European states like Germany.
None of this, however, justifies in any way the invasion of Ukraine, a terrible crime whose price is being paid by the Ukrainian people, and increasingly by the Russian people as well. Putin bears the greatest responsibility for that catastrophe.
Looking back at a quarter century of U.S. imperial intervention and the War on Terror, where does the U.S. stand today?
Every war the United States launched after 9/11 was, in a sense, "lost". I would put that in quotation marks because Washington did succeed in destroying the regimes it targeted. The real losers were the civilian populations of these countries, not the United States itself. Still, America failed to achieve its own stated objectives in every case.
This has been a classic case of imperial overstretch. In the late 1980s, the British historian Paul Kennedy wrote a bestselling book observing the fairly obvious fact that empires decline once they take on more than they can control. But he was wrong in his reading of the Reagan era: Reagan managed to reboot both the American economy and American hegemony. After the Soviet collapsed, however, the Bush administration succumbed to hubris. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were a textbook case of overstretch, well beyond what the United States could actually control, and it failed in both countries. But anyone who believes the American empire is finished is simply dreaming. The U.S. remains an extraordinarily powerful state, still the most powerful on earth, still capable of enormous destruction. Its limitations, however, are now far more visible than they were at the turn of the century.
Is there anything that gives you hope in this situation?
Absolutely, I hold on to hope, hope rooted in the new generation and its capacity to invent new forms of struggle, as we have seen recently with the Moroccan Gen Z movement, an extraordinary moment, with thousands of young people mobilising and using modern technology to coordinate their action. I make a crucial distinction between optimism and hope, they are not the same thing at all. Optimism is the belief that the best outcome will happen. Hope is the belief that a better outcome is possible, with no guarantee attached. I can keep hoping, while recognising that today the balance of evidence weighs heavily toward pessimism.
10 September 2026
Source: [Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung: To start pagehttps://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/55207.
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