AS his global teleconference broke up in disarray Sept. 11, 2001, a top economist at a U.S. investment bank began to ponder what the attacks on the United States might tell him about the future shape of the world. His conclusions had little to do with Al Qaeda.

    Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs had been at a meeting in the World Trade Center only two days before, and flew home to London just hours before the airliners slammed into New York’s twin towers. About to become head of the bank’s global economics team, he was looking for a “big idea” to put a stamp on his leadership.

    Soon, he had it: the decade after Sept. 11 would be defined not by the world’s sole superpower or the war on terror but by the rise of the four biggest emerging market economies — China, Russia, India and Brazil. O’Neill nicknamed them the “BRICs” after the first letter of their names.

    “I’ll never forget that day,” O’Neill told Reuters. “It was right at the core of how I dreamt up the whole thing... Something clicked in my head that the lasting consequence of 9/11 had to be the end of American dominance of globalization... that seems to be exactly what happened.”

    O’Neill, who now heads Goldman’s global asset management business, launched the BRIC phrase in a pamphlet published in November 2001. The numbers from the past decade suggest the trend he identified will resonate more in world history than the strikes and their aftermath.

    When O’Neill dreamed up the BRIC acronym, the four big emerging powers made up 8 percent of the world economy. The top five world economies were, in order, the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain and France.

    Ten years later, the BRICs have grown faster than even O’Neill expected to constitute nearly 20 percent of the global economy. China is the world’s No. 2 economic power, while Britain — the closest ally of the United States in the decade-long war on terror — has dropped out of the top five, overtaken by Brazil. India and Russia are not far behind.

    Within days of the attacks on New York and Washington, the United States had launched a costly and attention-sapping global “war on terror” and was plotting retaliation against not just Al Qaeda but also other members of what it saw as a wider “axis of evil,” including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

    At first sight, the United States and its allies appear to have won their war. The Al-Qaeda network is badly damaged, Osama Bin Laden and other key leaders are dead and the group has not pulled off a major terror strike in the West for years.

    What is less obvious is the cost of that apparent victory, both financially and diplomatically.

    “For most of the first decade of the century, as the world economy gradually shifted its center of gravity toward Asia, the United States was preoccupied with a mistaken war of choice in the Middle East,” said Joseph Nye, a former U.S. under-secretary of state and defense as well as ex-chair of the National Intelligence Council and now a Harvard professor of international relations.

    U.S. actions, he says, critically undermined its “soft power” in diplomacy, values and culture, while diverting and ultimately weakening its military and economic “hard power.”

    On the day before the attacks, the U.S. national debt stood at a sliver under US$5.8 trillion. A decade on, it has skyrocketed to US$14.7 trillion.

    Unfunded tax cuts, post-financial crisis stimulus and other increased domestic spending account for much of that. But America’s post-9/11 conflicts added heavily to the burden.

    One recent estimate, from Brown University in the United States, put the cost of America’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at up to US$4.4 trillion — nearly a third of the total.

    The United States was not the only Western power to take drastic measures.

    Like then-U.S. president George W Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair saw the Sept. 11 attacks as a defining moment.

    “I was very, very clear from the outset that this was not just a terrorist attack of extraordinary magnitude but one that had to change global politics,” says Blair in a television interview published over the weekend on www.reuters.com.

    The Iraq war ended up seriously tarnishing Blair’s premiership and his reputation, after it emerged Britain went to war based on a faulty assessment of the risks posed by weapons of mass destruction.

    Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German deputy foreign minister appointed ambassador to the United States in 2001, says Sept. 11 “burst the bubble” of any illusion that one superpower could rule the world.

    Goldman’s O’Neill believes the dramatic economic growth of the BRICs will dwarf the long-term impact of Sept. 11. His bank is now touting the merits of what they term the “N-11” — the next 11 big emerging market economies after the BRICs, including such powers as Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey.

    He also believes the attack and its aftermath may have played a part in shaping the BRICs’ newly assertive approach in the world.

    With the West’s single-minded focus on the Middle East, Al Qaeda and its allies, some worry that the old powers missed their chance to help shape the new world order that is emerging. But even had they been paying more attention, perhaps it would have made little difference.(SD-Agencies)