Samuel Huntington has called it the Lippmann Gap, echoing the American journalist Walter Lippmann in 1943: “Foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.” The historian Paul Kennedy has another name for it: “Imperial overextension”. Whatever you call this dangerous disease, the symptoms are clear in the US. as a result of the perfect strategic storm.

In early 2001, shortly after President George W. Bush was inaugurated and before 9/11, the Federal Emergency Management AgencyFEMA warned of the three most devastating disasters that could strike the US: a terrorist attack on New York City, a hurricane flooding New Orleans and a San Francisco earthquake. The Bush administration , we know now from memoirs and journalistic accounts, was focused on its priority: Iraq. Even warnings in the summer of 2001 did not persuade the Bush administration that Osama bin Laden was a far greater threat than Saddam Hussein.