Writing about changes to the US State Department in the wake of the September 11 attacks in a 2020 article in "Foreign Affairs" magazine, former Deputy Secretary of State William Joseph Burns and former Assistant Secretary of State Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, "Although the transformation of the State Department into a more expeditionary and agile institution was healthy in many respects, it was also distorting. It was tethered to a fundamentally flawed strategy—one that was too narrowly focused on terrorism and too wrapped up in magical thinking about the United States' supposed power to transform regions and societies."