Zhong Wen: Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about global issues, hoping humanity can achieve peaceful development. Because since humanity entered the 21st century, the world has been anything but peaceful, and human society faces increasing danger.

The first gunshot of the 21st century was the “9/11 terrorist attacks” in the United States in 2001. This triggered two decades of anti-terror wars, which kept the Western world too busy to attend to anything else. That gave Communist China and fascist Russia the chance to rise. The result was the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.

Boya: That summary is extremely accurate—one short sentence captures the pulse of a quarter century of global events.

On February 29, 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attended the signing ceremony of the peace agreement with the Taliban in Doha. Accompanying officials included the foreign minister of Oman and the deputy foreign minister of Qatar—did this mean the United States finally admitted defeat and walked away empty-handed? This directly encouraged Russia to invade Ukraine!

Zhong Wen: The U.S.–Taliban peace agreement in Doha was widely regarded as the clearest signal that the 20-year “war on terror” was coming to an end. The U.S. also withdrew troops from Iraq. Thus, the two major battlefields of the war on terror had concluded. This longest war of the 21st century began with dramatic fanfare and ended quietly and anticlimactically. But things didn’t stop there—this exit triggered an even greater crisis: it encouraged Russia to invade Ukraine.

Boya: U.S. operations in Afghanistan can be divided into two phases. The first phase (2001–2014) was Operation Enduring Freedom, a large-scale military campaign targeting al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The second phase (after 2015) was Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, a peace-keeping mission aimed at protecting Afghanistan’s elected government.

And the final result? The U.S. ended up signing a “peace agreement” with the Taliban—essentially reenacting the withdrawal from Vietnam and abandoning its own ally. Russia saw this and could no longer restrain its aggressive ambitions.

Zhong Wen: Over the 18 years of the Afghan War, at least 4,000 American and allied soldiers and 62,000 Afghan government soldiers were killed. Taliban and Afghan civilian casualties are difficult to count but are believed to be several times higher.

Beyond human casualties, U.S. congressional documents show that by the end of 2017, the Afghan war cost taxpayers $2.4 trillion.

International estimates suggest that from 2003 to the present, the Iraq War caused 150,000 to 600,000 deaths and displaced millions.

U.S. Congress estimates the Afghan and Iraq wars together cost taxpayers about $6.5 trillion. According to the U.S. Defense Department (2016), the Iraq battlefield alone saw 4,424 American deaths and 31,952 wounded.

Boya: In retrospect, the war on terror failed! It drained the resources and energy of the Western world and helped enable the rise of the “authoritarian alliance.”

Zhong Wen: International opinion holds that the greatest outcome of the U.S.’s 21st-century wars was this: Americans no longer believe, as many did after 9/11, that preemptive war is the key to counterterrorism.

A recent poll by the Charles Koch Institute showed that 70% of Americans believe the Afghanistan and Iraq wars did not make them safer. Nearly half say the wars harmed American interests and worsened Middle Eastern security. While 70% of Americans and 54% of Britons originally supported the Iraq War in 2003, a 2007 BBC poll found that 73% of global respondents believed the war was a mistake.

Boya: No wonder that during periods of extreme U.S.–Iran tension, the U.S. Congress urgently passed legislation forbidding the president from launching a war against Iran without congressional authorization.

A 2004 study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London concluded that the Iraq War backfired in counterterrorism efforts; U.S. troops became a major reason for the proliferation of extremist groups across the Middle East—especially ISIS. The intervention also disrupted the Sunni-Shia balance, enabling Iran’s expanding influence.

American international law expert Reed Smith and U.S. Army strategist Danny Sjursen jointly wrote in 2018—on the 15th anniversary of the Iraq invasion—that the entire war on terror was a massive strategic miscalculation that no amount of tactical competence or bravery could salvage.

Zhong Wen: I believe America’s failure was not a military failure—it was a cultural failure. As the saying goes, “The barefoot are not afraid of those who wear shoes.” Meaning: those who have nothing have nothing to lose and can act without fear—unlike wealthy or high-status people, who hesitate and worry about consequences. Those “wearing shoes” are often intimidated by the “barefoot.”

This wasn’t just true in the war on terror—also in the Vietnam War, and even in China’s civil war, where the “grass-shoe wearers” defeated the “leather-shoe wearers.”

Boya: So world peace, like social justice, cannot be achieved by force alone. It requires a greater moral consensus above material interests—that is, cultural cultivation. But how can such cultural cultivation be achieved?

Zhong Wen: Ancient thinkers called this “moral transformation,” led by sages. Today, if governments can be guided to correct their shortsightedness, and if the major religious traditions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism—can engage with one another, then achieving world peace would not be difficult.

Boya: So this is a vision of religious harmony and universal world unity?