None can deny whose strong arms made the winning difference in World War II. The same fingerprints can be found on the remnants of the Berlin Wall, and on the Iron Curtain not merely thrown open but torn off its rails in so doing lightening up many hundreds of millions of lives. The same hands too which acted so foremostly in Desert Storm and dextrously orchestrated the Oslo Accords and Good Friday Agreement. They were applied again in the tense liberation of Kosovo.

The reality is that from late 1941 all the way up to the late 1990s, the US seemed democracy’s peerless “policeman.” In fact, entering the new Millennium, few could have begrudged Washington considering itself something positively unique as the “unfailing” captain of Team Democracy. And yet, as we so sadly and shockingly discovered on 9/11, there were those who viewed the US unfavourably. True, there had been warning strikes, but nothing on the scale of what was inflicted on that fateful day, so shamelessly reminiscent of what had struck Pearl Harbour well over a half century before.

Events during that dramatic day in 2001 altered all our lives and, most significantly, changed US foreign policy for good (sic). For rather than be allowed to pursue his desired policy of “retiring” or reshoring the US from international competition, Bush Jnr was stopped from pulling US boots out of foreign ground to putting them down even harder. 9/11 (and before it, December 7^th 1941) propelled the US into what would prove lengthy overseas engagements, a scale arguably not seen since it exited Vietnam just over 25 years earlier. The latter was, of course, one of the many direct or proxy conflicts so common during an overarching Cold War, which saw the US the key player in Team NATO and alliances across Asia, contending against a Soviet Union and Red China playing attacking roles on separate continental wings. And yet, by 2001, there was no Soviet Union, but instead a – largely – compliant and insolvent Russia. There was also a recoloured China; its hue changed by its near-death experience in Tiananmen Square. A new China embracing a self-defined “socialist market economy.”