And second, the ideological ambitions of a group of supremely hawkish officials in Washington known as the neoconservatives came to dominate US foreign policy-making. The stage was set for their drive towards achieving "global, full-spectrum dominance" following 9/11.
Creative DestructionIn fact, the neocon plan to remake the world - starting with the Middle East - grew out of the void left by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington's Cold War rival.
The neocons produced a series of documents through the late 1990s setting out their agenda, including perhaps the best known - A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.
One of the movement's leading ideologues, Michael Ledeen, an adviser to President George W Bush's chief of staff, Karl Rove, explained the plan in terms of what he called a "creative destruction", in which the US would "undo traditional societies". He observed that the goal was "not whether but how to destabilise" states like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and even Saudi Arabia.
Later, Bush's secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, lauded this destabilisation programme as the "birth pangs of a new Middle East". Those pangs, it was made clear, involved removing leaders Washington abhorred.
International law was not on their side, so it had to be sidestepped. Washington created very obvious pretexts to launch its invasion of Iraq, by producing fake evidence that the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction and was implicated in al-Qaeda's 9/11 attack on New York. Bush and his British ally, Tony Blair, asserted entirely falsely that their invasion was justified as a "pre-emptive" war.
Putin, we should note, has implicitly invoked the doctrine of pre-emption too in invading Ukraine - to prevent the incursion of hostile Nato forces and Nato weapons into Russia's "sphere of influence". One could argue that his claim carries more weight than Washington's in Iraq ever did.
Colour RevolutionsWhat was intended by the neocons was the dissolution of those authoritarian regimes in the Middle East most resistant to US hegemony - states that had been created only a century earlier by the then-dominant colonial powers of Britain and France to serve their own interests.
In Washington, the new rhetoric was about colour revolutions and bringing democracy to the Middle East - a spin on the humanitarianism invoked to justify Nato's illegal actions in Kosovo. But the real goal was quite different, and its ultimate targets were the potential rival superpowers of Russia and China.
The aim was to make concrete Bush's "Us and Them" doctrine. States would have to choose: either to become vassals of the new US global empire or face the fate of those belonging to a supposed "axis of evil".
The intention in the Middle East was Balkanisation. The US would invade and smash the central institutions of authority in any resistant state, leaving only internally divided societies whose sects or tribes could easily be made to turn on each other.
The destruction of the old colonial set-up - under the slogan of a "war on terror" - was supposed to usher in a new era in which the US would control the planet's key resource: oil. In the process, rivals like Russia and China would find themselves isolated and weakened, surrounded by either US client states or failed states.
That game plan proved much harder to realise in practice than anyone in Washington appears to have imagined. Afghanistan and Iraq became so-called "quagmires". The US army quickly became over-extended. In a range of arenas, from Libya, Syria and Iran, to Venezuela and Yemen, Washington was forced to fight chiefly through proxies.
Doubtless, the most important lesson learned by Putin occurred in Syria. Its president, Bashar al-Assad, requested help from the Russian military after popular protests erupted in 2011 and soon morphed into a civil war. In no time, militants linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) group were flooding into Syria to take on the Syrian army alongside local fighters.
Even though al-Qaeda and IS were supposed to be the sworn enemies of the United States, Washington quickly revised its allegiances. Through allies in the Gulf, Israel and Europe, the US worked behind the scenes to assist, fund and arm the militants as they broke Syria apart into various zones of control.
Syria survived barely as a state only because of Russia's prolonged intervention.
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