The state of America’s role in the world since the turn of the 21st century can be defined by a single event: the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

I, like most other students here at Binghamton, was just a child when news of the attacks hit my ears. Like most other 12-year-olds, I was incredibly naïve, confused and largely ignorant about both my place and our country’s place in the world. At that time, “jihad” could’ve likely been a term phrased by an obscure Cartoon Network program. It made little difference to me.

In the decade prior to the tragic attacks, our nation was soaring high, as prosperity was still reigning king after the “Gay ’90s.” Record gains were reached on Wall Street. The United States appeared rather confident during its first post–Cold War decade, arguably the sole superpower existing in the world.

And though our national integrity may have been vacationing during the 2000 presidential election — which may have been an indication as to what our national trajectory might look like during the next 10 years — the United States, like my 12-year-old self, was too naïve to the danger and confusion which would lay ahead.

The Sept. 11 attacks changed this naivety. Accordingly, for a short time after the attacks, many Americans believed that our foreign pursuits, in an idealized way, were efforts to right a wrong. I speculate that many American citizens — and in many regards, leaders and citizens of foreign countries who initially sympathized with our formal cause to combat global terrorism as indicated by their foreign military support — believed that we were “white knights” on a journey to slay the dragon.

But on came Iraq. Torture. Austerity. The Patriot Act. The expansion of presidential powers. False promises to leave Afghanistan. Both the motives behind and the necessity for each of these pursuits can be endlessly argued.

However, it is the compilation of them all that makes it quite clear that our current political situation cannot be understood through dichotomies of good versus bad or analogies of the “white knight” slaying the dragon. Rather, each provides a poor, simplified representation of an exceedingly complex, difficult and confusing geo-political situation, which if handled incorrectly and by the wrong individuals, would likely leave the world barren.

A fundamental problem, I find, lies in the failure of political actors to admit to their own confusion, where the lives of many are at stake. But, then again, aren’t political actors simply playing a modified game of human “Risk?”

And now after 10 years, as I do my best to get a small morsel of perspective on our country’s involvement in foreign affairs, I find my current self to be much like my former 12-year-old self: largely confused and unsure about our country and my place in this complex and small world.