Twenty-five years have passed since a bright September morning turned into a national wound, and still the grief feels close. We remember the images: the twin towers burning, the second plane slicing through blue sky, the smoke rising from the Pentagon, and the brave passengers who brought a fourth plane down in a Pennsylvania field. Nearly 3,000 people died that day, and each was a life with a name, a face, a future stolen. They were parents, partners, firefighters, office workers, immigrants, soldiers, strangers who greeted each other at security checkpoints. It was the deadliest foreign attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, and it happened live on television, in front of millions who could only watch. What makes the memory even harder is knowing that warnings had been missed. Between May and July 2001, the National Security Agency had intercepted communications suggesting a terror attack was coming. The day before 9/11, an intercepted message from Afghanistan contained a chilling phrase: “Tomorrow is zero hour.” But the pieces were not put together in time. That failure, more than the attacks themselves, haunts the American story. It explains why a single day could change so much. It is a cliché to say that 9/11 changed America, but that cliché is also an understatement. A quarter of a century later, the United States still spends more money, attacks more countries, and surveils more people than it likely would have if those planes had never flown. The day helped breed a modern culture of distrust and disinformation. It gave government powers that politicians, including Donald Trump, seem determined to exploit. And it forced citizens to confront, perhaps for the first time since Vietnam, the uncomfortable truth that war is not always the answer.
In the immediate aftermath, grief and anger fused into a promise of vengeance. President George W. Bush stood in the rubble and vowed that evening to make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them. Three days later, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force, known as the AUMF, granting the president nearly unlimited power to wage war anywhere in the name of self-defense. Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq followed. What became known as the “forever war” was born. The United States has not suffered another 9/11, but the response to 9/11 has taken millions of lives, directly and indirectly, at a staggering human cost. Brown University has estimated that the post-9/11 wars have killed more than 900,000 people, many of them civilians, and that number does not include the many more who died from disease, displacement, and the collapse of basic services. The trillions spent on the military industrial complex sent it into overdrive. Because the AUMF was never rescinded, it has been used by every president since 9/11 to justify military operations, air strikes, and troop deployments in more than twenty countries, from the Philippines to Yemen. The United States has carried out post-9/11 counterterrorism operations in at least seventy-eight countries. Studies of operations in places like Somalia and Burkina Faso have found that American activity has often caused more, not less, instability and violence. The war on terror, meant to make the world safer, has too often manufactured new enemies, weakened governments, and filled graveyards with the young, the innocent, and the desperate.
The financial cost has been almost impossible to comprehend. Brown University estimated $8 trillion in spending between 2001 and 2022. That number is so enormous because most of that spending was not paid for with taxes but with borrowed money. The United States, which ran four budget surpluses between 1998 and 2001, has run a large budget deficit every year since. Government debt hit $40 trillion in August, roughly 123 percent of GDP, a higher proportion than during the Second World War. The economic burden of the forever war is not abstract; it means fewer schools, fewer hospitals, fewer opportunities for ordinary Americans, while defense contractors and private military firms have profited beyond imagination. Just as damaging has been the quiet death of diplomacy. Soft power has atrophied in this equation. In 2001, the ratio between what the United States spent on defense and what it spent on the State Department and foreign aid was 13 to 1. If Donald Trump had fully gotten his way with his most recent defense budget request and proposed aid cuts, that ratio would have neared 100 to 1. A nation that once understood that its safety depended on alliances, development, and the slow work of building trust has come to rely almost exclusively on bombs and surveillance. It is a terrible bargain, and the price is paid not only in treasure but in moral authority. The rest of the world watches and learns: America speaks of values, but it acts with force.
The attacks also gave the state extraordinary new powers over its own people. A few weeks after 9/11, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which dramatically expanded the ability of the government to eavesdrop on Americans, collect digital information without a warrant, and detain some foreigners indefinitely without trial. In the name of national security, the hard-won balance between safety and freedom shifted permanently. We learned to accept checkpoints, secret court orders, and mass data collection as normal. We told ourselves that if we had nothing to hide, we had nothing to fear. But that erosion of liberty did not stop at terrorism. It created a legal and political machinery that presidents could use against their own citizens, political opponents, immigrants, and protesters. It also created a throughline between the Patriot Act and Trump’s ability to declare unfounded national emergencies, target marginalized groups, and carry out deadly interventions in other countries. The state’s eye is always watching now, and it watches not just enemies abroad but people at home. Perhaps the most painful legacy is that a nation founded on the consent of the governed has allowed fear to justify the erosion of the very rights that give that consent meaning. We are no longer certain who is watching us, why, or where the data goes. And that uncertainty has poisoned public life itself.
Out of that poison grew a land of fantasy. Baseless rumors and unsolved mysteries around 9/11, combined with the Bush administration’s false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, launched a new age of conspiracy theories. It was no longer enough to question the official story, which citizens have every right to do; instead, whole alternative realities took root, where nothing could be believed and everything was suspect. That distrust paved the way for a politics stained by misinformation, where lies spread faster than truths and where leaders could exploit confusion for power. Trump, fittingly, continues to propagate falsehoods about the attacks, and a large number of Americans believe things that are demonstrably untrue. This is the deepest legacy of 9/11: not just the loss of lives, but the loss of a shared understanding of reality. Without the attacks and their aftermath, there might have been no President Trump. He benefited from the post-9/11 treatment of immigration as a national security issue, convincing voters that the state needed to turn away desperate families at the border. He also convinced voters that he alone could end the forever wars that 9/11 set in motion. In this sense, his political rise is inseparable from the very event he has so often dishonestly described. The culture of distrust and disinformation that now grips American life did not emerge from nowhere; it was built, brick by brick, on the ashes and confusion of that terrible day.
Now we face another crossroads. Trump’s inability to stick to his promise of restraint is likely to define his second term. It is deeply worrying that he has signaled a willingness to invade Iran in the name of national security, even as Americans now fear domestic terrorists more than foreign groups. The echoes of 9/11 are everywhere, but the enemy has changed, and the old responses no longer work. War has not provided safety; it has produced more war. Surveillance has not provided safety; it has produced more fear. The endless borrowing has not provided strength; it has produced a nation living on credit, with a hollowed-out diplomacy and a fatigued military. The most honest thing we can do on this twenty-fifth anniversary is to remember not only the dead but also the lessons we were too slow to learn: that intelligence cannot be ignored, that vengeance is not strategy, that security without liberty is a prison, that a nation cannot bomb its way to respect, and that distrust and lies will eventually tear apart the very community that grief once brought together. The best memorial to the thousands lost is not a new war, but a renewed commitment to truth, to diplomacy, to civil liberties, and to the messy, difficult, ordinary work of building a world where such attacks are less likely to happen, and where a free people can sleep without constant surveillance and fear. We owe that to the deceased, to the brave passengers who fought back, to the rescuers who ran into the towers, and to the children who were born into a world forever changed by that one blue morning.