The 9/11 attacks reverberate around the world to this day

Nina L. Khrushcheva is a professor of international affairs at The New School and the co-author (with Jeffrey Tayler) of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones.

The 20th century concluded on a euphoric note. Its last 10 years proved Francis Fukuyama’s theory about the “end of history” right: the Cold War ended, the West triumphed, the Soviets lost, and the world seemed to move in one direction toward liberal democracy. Like all euphorias, it was short-lived. The new century began with the challenges of a new war – the War on Terror – which emerged in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, a day reverberating ever since in the lives of New Yorkers, Americans, and people around the globe.

As the plane struck at 8:48 a.m. on that sunny Tuesday morning, I was on my way to the gym, crossing Sixth Avenue on Eighth Street. I glanced up at the World Trade Center further downtown and froze so suddenly in the middle of the road that the cyclist behind me ran into my back: A passenger plane had collided with the north tower.

In the same moment, the rush-hour heavy Sixth Avenue traffic stopped. Everything seemed in slow motion. We exchanged screams and shocked glances, confused by what we were seeing. A few minutes later, just past 9 a.m., another plane approached the Twin Towers.

“Must be an evacuation,” I told the cyclist with relief.

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As we all well know now, the second plane struck the remaining south tower.

I ran home on the nearby McDougal Street to find out from CNN what was happening. Half an hour later, a third plane, captured by another group of Islamic extremists, hit the Pentagon, and one more crashed in Shanksville, Pa., brought down by passengers who fought back against the hijackers before they could reach their target in Washington.

September 11, 2001

Hijacked airplanes crash into both World Trade Center towers as well as the Pentagon. A fourth plane crashes near Shanksville, Pa. after passengers fought back against the hijackers.

Shortly after, CNN reported that the wounded from the World Trade Center would be brought to Saint Vincent hospital on Seventh Avenue, a few blocks away from my house. Volunteers like me gathered to take care of the wounded. But the ambulances were arriving with the dead. I saw my first dead body that day – my first despite having grown up in the violent political world of the Soviet Union with its history of mass purges, political punishments, and post-Soviet gangster wars.

After a few chaotic days at Saint Vincent’s spent identifying bodies and contacting relatives, amateurs like me were replaced by professionals. I went on to do what I normally do –⁠ analyze political events. My first phone call was to storied historian and diplomat George Kennan, an architect of America’s post-Second World War policy of Soviet containment. A few years before, I had been his last research assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and I wanted to learn from the legendary political thinker what to make of these attacks.

Mr. Kennan, at 97, was direct – “too old to beat around the bush,” he told me. The pun – a reference to President George W. Bush – was intended. He lamented the despicable tragic act, but thought that the White House needed to carefully contemplate its response. His argument: It is America, after all, that once created the attacks’ mastermind, Osama bin Laden.

I stiffened on the other side of the line after this blasphemous statement. He rushed to rationalize: “Bin Laden was used as an explosive tool against the atheistic Communists. U.S. forces trained the mujahedeen, guerrilla-style religious Muslim warriors, as insurgents during the 1979–1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.”

It was only a matter of time before the mujahedeen turned on their American creators after the Soviets withdrew. The United States’ foreign policy disengaged too unceremoniously once the superpowers’ confrontation was over, and the former freedom fighters began to search for importance elsewhere, Mr. Kennan continued. Because of its hubris and superiority America became a target of their animosity. In his view, funding Osama bin Laden was a fine idea, but dropping him and others was a short-sighted disaster.

“American policymakers should think twice before acting militarily, refrain from blowing up the Middle East without planning for the multiyear consequences,” Mr. Kennan said. “Otherwise, one day the reckoning will come.”

Unforeseeable consequences were Mr. Kennan’s concern. Yet, with little contemplation the United States charged into Afghanistan. Iraq was next, and even more questionable. Not only was it accused of possessing weapons of mass destruction, which it did not have, but the White House fabricated Saddam Hussein’s connection to the Sept. 11 attackers to justify the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Everyone was dazed by 9/11, and people in Washington were no exception. Vice-President Dick Cheney, in particular, had a “disquieting obsession” with Saddam Hussein as the next menace. He had a long history with the Iraq dictator, who in the 1980s was a useful ally against Iran. At that time, the Iraqi army secretly received from the U.S. weapons, technology and satellite intelligence against Iranian soldiers.

When Mr. Cheney was secretary of defence in the George H. W. Bush administration, the Persian Gulf suddenly became his biggest challenge. In 1990, Iraq sent invading forces into neighbouring Kuwait, an American ally. Mr. Cheney interpreted this geopolitical disobedience as an insult and a grave threat to U.S. interests.

A decade later, confronted with the challenge to American supremacy, the younger Bush and his cabinet pursued the destruction of two Muslim countries with devastation continuing to this day, an outcome Mr. Kennan predicted. These policies helped push Afghanistan to the precipice of state failure, while opening the way for the Islamic State to take over more than one-third of Iraq’s territory by the late 2010s. The resulting discontent in those countries and across the Muslim world was also greatly felt in Europe. The influx of refugees surged there in 2015, straining resources and infrastructure.

Mr. Kennan and I spoke again after May 1, 2003, the day President Bush declared victory in a three-month Iraq war in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln carrier’s bridge.

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“Nothing is accomplished,” Mr. Kennan told me with conviction. “It was foolish of Bush to announce that ‘major combat operations in Iraq have ended.’ Problems are yet to come.”

The diplomat didn’t live to see his warnings come to fruition, but the war is now uniformly regarded as “catastrophic,” with the U.S.’s actual combat mission only ending in December, 2021.

In 1995, writing in Foreign Affairs, Mr. Kennan warned about Western victors’ triumphant post-Cold War boasting and their feeling of invincibility, as if they had driven a capitalist sword through the heart of communism.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s version of euphoria promoted a prosperity agenda of often-unscrupulous market values on a global scale. As the end of the Cold War marked the democratization of world politics and made the United States the only remaining superpower, American and Western businesses became abundant in the former USSR and its adjacent territories. People were told to embrace “shock therapy” – drastic changes in national economic policy that were meant to help turn a state-controlled economy into a free-market one. Those changes, however, became ruinous for a large swath of national populations. By putting a primacy on profit, and often for the select few, an opportunity in international co-operation was lost, particularly around serious global issues such as combatting disease, poverty, inequality and terrorism.

American leadership showed it valued ideological victory above all else; the most glaring examples were the former Cold War battlefields not only in Afghanistan, but in Congo, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. The United States’ foreign policy disengaged once the superpowers’ confrontation was over.

Still, all wars, hot or cold, have been framed as an ideological struggle even without the Soviet threat. The 9/11 atrocities required a “total” response from the Cold War’s undisputed victor. Instead of targeted military strikes and expansive international antiterrorist co-operation, which would have been the more sensible approach, the Bush administration used its unchallenged global hegemony to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Clinton era’s economic triumphalism in the new century translated into the predominance of unrestrained military force under Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. Journalist Mark Danner wrote of Mr. Cheney’s “kind of stark amoral grandeur … Just as he was likely the most important and influential American official in making the decision to withhold the protection of the Geneva Conventions from detainees, Cheney was likely the most important and influential American when it came to imposing an official government policy of torture.”

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In my own chance conversation with the former vice-president in 2010, he justified America’s belligerence: “Our weapons are always of mass love, the others’ are of mass destruction.” He was not joking.

Throughout history, military strategists from Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War, to Carl von Clausewitz with his idea of the “fog of war,” have insisted on destroying the enemy’s will to resist. After 9/11, the Bush cabinet developed a tactical response to indiscriminately bomb Afghanistan in hopes of speedy results.

Recounting these decisions as failed strategies in his 2003 book Bush at War, Bob Woodward wrote about the debate to pause the bombing to invite the Taliban to negotiate. U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld refused resolutely: The “bombing pauses smacked of Vietnam.” Mr. Bush had agreed. In Iraq, too, they instigated the devastating Shock and Awe campaign – first introduced in a 1996 Pentagon study as overwhelming power and rapid dominance on the battlefield. With these wars, the White House declared a sweeping and overreaching Global War on Terror, seeing it not merely as a response to the attacks of a group of radical Islamists but as a chance for America to validate its superiority.

It was also a business opportunity. For example, the American multinational oil giant Halliburton received lucrative contracts in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Dick Cheney was secretary of defence, dealing with Iraq first as an ally and then as an adversary. Halliburton did even better with Mr. Cheney serving as its CEO from 1995 to 2000. And in this century’s wars he relied on them as vice-president. In 2003, the National Public Radio investigation revealed that “America’s war on terrorism has created a windfall” for Halliburton and its subsidiaries. “Since Sept. 11, 2001, the company has constructed base camps at more than 60 locations throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Under its deal with the Pentagon … [it was] the go-to company to provide troops in Iraq with everything from portable toilets to Internet cafes.” Other corporations had a hand in the post-9/11 surge in military spending as well: the Pentagon’s expenses totalled a staggering US$14-trillion-plus since the Afghan War, of which up to one-half was spent on defence contracts.

Invading Afghanistan and Iraq after the attacks of 9/11 was strategic nonsense. What was the point of creating 21st-century colonies under the rule of a Great Power with no strategy of dealing with those “colonies” in the first place?

What’s more, these actions allowed Russian President Vladimir Putin to strengthen his criticism of Western domination. “In the era of colonialism, colonialist countries talked about their so-called civilizing role. Today, [some countries] use slogans of spreading democracy for the same purpose,” he argued in 2007. When annexing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, the Kremlin made similar assertions. In February, 2022, to justify Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukrainian territory, Mr. Putin used this argument once more.

For many non-Westerners, he has a point. As one observer put it, “Bush did what Putin’s doing – so why is he getting away? The answer: hypocrisy, even in the way the West’s narrative describes the Iraq invasion and Ukraine war … It was disgracefully dubbed ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ by the invading United States military forces,” which millions of Iraqis suffered from.

Over the past quarter century, there has been hardly any accountability for the plethora of false arguments during the era-defining War on Terror.

Earlier this year, John Sopko, special inspector-general for Afghanistan reconstruction, revealed that for years generals and politicians were eager to produce optimistic lies. He lamented that “self-serving delusion was America’s most formidable foe,” laying “bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.”

Few mainstream narratives treat the Afghan war as a source of reflection, and almost no government representatives had admitted the possibility of failure. Mr. Sopko’s suggestion that the “Trump administration, Congress and the long-suffering American taxpayer must ask how this happened so that the United States can avoid similar results in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and other war zones” will probably fall on deaf ears.

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The American political class always grandly overstates both the menacing enemy of the moment or the danger it poses to the United States. A Communist-led local nationalist movement in Vietnam was portrayed as a powerful force capable of bringing communism to the West. A regional Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was fashioned as a nuclear threat to the U.S. Because of the Taliban, a homegrown Afghan force, it was necessary to destroy all of Afghanistan, otherwise, the argument went, the Taliban would end up in America.

Similarly, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, U.S. politicians managed to simultaneously insist that Russia is so weak that Ukraine can defeat its army and essentially unseat Mr. Putin, and that Russia is so strong that if not stopped now it will become a mortal threat to NATO and freedom around the world.

Mr. Putin has increasingly ruled Russia like a despot from the communist past; his assault on the neighbouring nation is appalling. That doesn’t validate the West’s fundamental misinterpretation of the Kremlin’s motives: Mr. Putin has long preferred not to engage directly with NATO. His main reasoning was to prevent Ukraine from joining the military bloc, otherwise Russia, as he saw it, would have to fight with the whole Europe. Ukraine, after all, was offering itself as a potential bridgehead for America’s opportunity to weaken Russia.

In 2021, the Biden administration had conversations with the Kremlin about security and Ukraine’s NATO membership. The U.S. insisted that the West won’t “allow anyone to slam closed NATO’s open-door policy,” which only managed to push Mr. Putin’s “red line” further. More realistically, President Emmanuel Macron of France and then-German Chancellor Olaf Scholz both agreed that the alliance option for Ukraine is at best a remote possibility.

A desire to show the Kremlin its place by not admitting that Ukraine’s path to NATO is virtually non-existent had proven perilous. Joe Biden’s fixation on Mr. Putin, who dared to confront American superiority even though the West had won in the Cold War, could be compared to Dick Cheney’s obsession with Saddam Hussein. At times Mr. Biden unconvincingly argued the “U.S. doesn’t seek Russia’s destruction,” still, most categorically he demanded “Russia’s strategic defeat.” Other White House officials “saw an opportunity” in pushing to arm Ukraine and “seized a rare chance to undermine Russia.” Imagine if Russia came to the aid of Mexico threatened by the United States; America’s response would be to reduce its southern neighbour to rubble.

The Ukraine war could have been potentially avoided by “speaking aloud what NATO has left unsaid”: There will be no NATO membership for Kyiv. These developments were reminiscent of the Taliban impasse at which point the U.S. rejected the option of pausing the bombing and negotiating with the Taliban, instead opting for a full-force military campaign lasting 20 years.

In my personal archive, I have a copy of Mr. Kennan’s letter to Strobe Talbott, then the Deputy Secretary of State. Dated April 22, 1997, it discussed “a side effect of the NATO decision on the extension of its boundaries to the east.” Mr. Kennan warned that the former Soviet republics were “brought to realize that they must now choose between joining NATO at the cost of the sacrifice of good relations with their Russian neighbour, or accepting what they view as being left helpless, and without Western support, in contending with the pressures and attacks on their independence from the east which, as they are assured from a number of Western quarters, are to be expected. Nowhere, and for very good reason, does this choice appear more portentous and pregnant with fateful consequences than in the case of Ukraine.”

Elsewhere, he cautioned that the expansion of NATO “may be expected to inflame” Russia’s “nationalistic, anti-Western, and militaristic tendencies,” as it gave Russians the impression that their prestige – “always uppermost in the Russian mind” – and their security interests were being “adversely affected.”

Mr. Kennan was right. Mr. Biden’s maximalist approach has failed to deliver. After three and a half years of war and Western “sanctions from hell” that were supposed to destroy Mr. Putin, his grip on power has gotten stronger. Russian forces hold almost 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, and Kyiv, with little opportunity to push them out, braces for more losses.

America’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 preceded Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. A former KGB recruiting agent in East Germany, he is a master of exploiting opponents’ weaknesses. The U.S.’s final humiliation in Afghanistan was the ripe time to challenge its hegemony.

Disorderly departure from Kabul further exposed America’s habit of making decisions fully devoid of humility. President Biden believed that the war started by George W. Bush all those years ago should not be his. Assessing potential similarities with the U.S. army withdrawing from Saigon in 1975, he insisted there is none: “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy ... of the United States from Afghanistan.”

The White House didn’t deploy adequate forces to hold the Afghan capital long enough to safely evacuate, letting the Taliban to take over at the end of August that year. As a result, people were falling off the chassis of American airplanes trying to escape. Thousands of local affiliates who risked their lives to help the United States were treated as afterthoughts. Some critics indignantly demanded that America take “responsibility for the welfare of these people, having crashed into their house 20 years ago and broken so much inside.” They concluded that it is too much to ask: An “exceptional country” thinks of others only in relation to itself.

Now, Donald Trump declares his wishes to end the Russo-Ukrainian war and “move on.” Not because his administration has learned the lessons of American delusion. Simply, it is not his war. He wants to wash his hands of it as Mr. Biden did in Afghanistan. And Europe is too used to American primacy to be an independent force.

Striking Iran’s nuclear sites this summer to assist Israel in its defensive battles, the U.S. has shown that it cannot extricate itself from all the wars. But generally, Mr. Trump has picked his specific brand of all-out fights to confirm American superiority – namely tariffs and global economic pressures that have strained relationships with India, China and other countries. There are also threats to take Greenland from Denmark by force and make Canada the 51st state.

The post-9/11 geopolitical roller coaster continues, bringing with it a strange onslaught of dysphoria with no end in sight. Only this time, we can’t be surprised by the horror of what we see when we look up, not like we were that fateful September morning in 2001.