Nearly 25 years ago, on Sept. 10, 2001, the left-wing parties of Europe and America surveyed their breathtaking domain. Viewed from their vantage point, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and the world was theirs to inherit. To most Westerners, even educated ones, Islam was an ancient myth rumored to be surviving in distant places. Christianity was a fading force beaten down by Free Love and atheism. With the fall of Moscow, the world was theirs.
That tomorrow was embodied by the European Union and the UN, just as the truth was personified by the mainstream media. Francis Fukuyama, drawing on Hegel and Karl Marx, who defined human history as a linear progression from one socioeconomic epoch to another, foresaw that humanity had reached "not just... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." But this was false, as the world would discover the next day.
A god had died, and a new future had opened, but the liberal democrats had mourned the wrong deity. What lay in the coffin was the bankrupt corpse of Stalin’s empire – not every rival to liberal democracy. Their victory was incomplete. To one side of the bier stood China, which since 1991 had already pursued its own path of market economic reforms ("socialism with Chinese characteristics") while rejecting Soviet political openness, determined not to repeat what they viewed as a fatal mistake that caused the USSR's collapse. China would be, it must have promised itself, a more dangerous opponent.
Round the rest of the vigil stood many motley figures. Much of the world had no desire to be the Last Man as the UN or committees in Brussels defined. They defined themselves in the older vocabulary of membership by tribe, sect, umma, clan, and the sacralization of grievance. Islamists in 2001 did not think of themselves as primitives surviving in distant places only awaiting enlightenment by gay activists. They were a living political theology that had already produced the Iranian Revolution, the assassination of Sadat, the Rushdie fatwa, the Algerian civil war, Hezbollah’s state-within-a-state, and the first World Trade Center bombing.
Still to come was a vast mass of ordinary but informed citizens who would use the power of the nascent Internet to rival, then in many cases surpass the information-disseminating monopoly of the BBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times. But that was all in the future. Perhaps the last lie of the Soviet Union, which convinced the world and suited the book of agencies in the West paid to contain Moscow, was that only the Kremlin mattered and everything else could be ignored. The politicians in the great Western capitals, falsely reassured, momentarily discounted the men preparing to bring down the towers. Indeed, they could not even conceive of them, even as the September 11 suicide pilots trained to fly in the United States itself. But the men who flew the planes did not regard liberal democracy as the final form of human government. They regarded it as a corrupt, decadent, and blasphemous ephemera. Their enduring future was described by the Koran, not Das Kapital, and they would make the statement emphatically in the most dramatic way.
The wars following 9/11 were therefore less a case of pointless revenge so much as the price of having lost the plot and making up for lost knowledge. Veterans of the early 2000s War on Terror, now senior figures in the US, spent their youth relearning the ills of the world, rethinking grand strategy from first principles and coming to disparate conclusions. They kept conventional wisdom when there was nothing better, but because of their experience, often returned divided over the way to modify it. Some returned feeling the need to uphold what was left of the liberal world order because the alternative was unthinkable. Others felt that being the world policeman was a mug’s game and the people who sold it would walk into the next ambush just like they did before.
The MAGA drew more heavily from the second conclusion than from the first. Iraq fatigue, the debacle of the Afghan withdrawal, and the sense that the same Washington establishment that had been surprised by 9/11 was still in charge of trade, borders, and culture did more to rearrange the Republican coalition than any book ever could. The Biden-era collapse of the U.S. border, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, followed not long after by Hamas’ invasion of Israel, probably struck an uncomfortable chord of memory, not in the least, because it reminded the veterans uncomfortably of the days of complacency leading up to September 11.
But they knew that the age of surprise was over and had seen enough to realize that history is too complicated to be predicted and simply made it up as they went along until today, a quarter century later. Al-Qaeda’s original project to strike the “far enemy” until America withdrew from the Muslim world, then topple the “near enemy” regimes, then restore a caliphate did not work as planned. The US and indeed Israel's presence in the Muslim world actually grew over the quarter century, as did Muslim emigration to the West. Gulf basing, arms pipelines, intelligence fusion, naval control of the chokepoints, special operations and air power are at a scale that Osama Bin Laden would not recognize today – ironically to keep the Shia Muslim world from attacking the Sunni. What would Bin Laden make, one wonders, of the Abraham Accords that created open diplomatic, commercial, and later security ties between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco? Who could have foreseen that the enemy capital would move from Russia to Afghanistan to Tehran to China so quickly? Disasters and triumphs did ensue, just not the ones conventional wisdom expected.
The world we see today is far different from that of September 10, 2001. On that day, who could have predicted that both New York and London would have radical Muslim mayors? That a real estate developer would be in the White House? That antisemitism would become a trademark of the Left and that the U.S. would be on the leading edge of technologies which weren’t even conceived at the turn of the 21st century? We have gone from a world that thought it knew where it was going to a journey in the dark.
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