Like the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, September 11 not only plunged the United States into war but also transformed American foreign policy, inspiring a determination to reshape the world in terms of American ideals and interests. Remarkable changes quickly followed the assault on Afghanistan. To facilitate further military action in the Middle East, the United States established military bases in Central Asia, including former republics of the Soviet Union like Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Such an action would have been inconceivable before the end of the Cold War. The administration sent troops to the Philippines to assist that government in combating an Islamic insurgency, and it announced plans to establish a greater military presence in Africa. It solidified its ties with the governments of Pakistan and Indonesia, which confronted opposition from Islamic fundamentalists.
The toppling of the Taliban, Bush repeatedly insisted, marked only the beginning of the war on terrorism. In his State of the Union address of January 2002, the president accused Iraq, Iran, and North Korea of harboring terrorists and developing “weapons of mass destruction”—nuclear, chemical, and biological—that posed a potential threat to the United States. He called the three countries an “axis of evil,” even though no evidence connected them with the attacks of September 11 and they had never cooperated with one another (Iraq and Iran, in fact, had fought a long and bloody war in the 1980s).