Most Americans past a certain age remember where they were when they learned of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. I was in the White House Situation Room at the regular Tuesday morning meeting of the National Security Council senior staff, chaired as usual by Condoleezza Rice, who was then National Security Advisor in the still-new George W. Bush administration. At the time, I was Senior Director for Europe and Eurasia at the NSC. Most of the NSC staff had just heard of some sort of plane flying into one of the Twin Towers in Manhattan but, reflecting the assumptions of the times, few thought of terrorism as the cause — a matter for the Federal Aviation Administration, I wrongly thought.
All that changed when a Situation Room staffer announced that a second plane — another large passenger jet — had struck the Towers. A second of silent shock. Then Rice took charge, calling for a small team to remain and telling the rest of us to stand by. Those not asked to remain in the Situation Room were soon ordered to evacuate the White House. As I was hustling through the West Wing, I saw Secret Service moving fast, escorting (half carrying) Vice President Dick Cheney from his West Wing office to a place of greater safety.
A couple of hours later I was asked to come back to the Situation Room to help out. Condi Rice was by then in a different, more secure, part of the White House complex, in touch with the president, who by then was on a plane leaving Florida, where he had been reading to schoolchildren when he got the news. The stunned look on his face in the photos that circulated far and wide at the time said a lot: horror and surprise.
Steve Hadley, Rice’s chief deputy, and Frank Miller, NSC senior director for defense, were heading the staff in the Situation Room, trying to piece together what had happened and whether more attacks were coming, staying in touch with key allies and NATO, and keeping together the disparate parts of the U.S. national security structure. Everyone was in emergency mode; focused and efficient. At one point, Hadley called for attention. Work stopped. The Situation Room was a soft target, he announced, and more attacks might be coming. If anyone wanted to leave, they were free to do so. Without a word, the staff — military, intelligence, and Foreign Service officers, the sort of folks often disparaged these days as a ‘deep state” of questionable loyalty — resumed work. Nobody left their post.
Amid the pressure of the moment — especially the urgency of determining whether more attacks were coming — snatches of conversations included frank acknowledgment that we — the national security staff — had messed up. We hadn’t seen this one coming. Of course, Osama Bin Laden was a known enemy. NSC Senior Director for Counterterrorism Dick Clarke had been monitoring al-Qaeda. But terrorism was generally thought of as a niche problem, not one that required all hands on deck. By the day’s end, most of us had guessed at the problems that later studies laid bare: scattered intelligence, insufficient channels for synthesis, and lack of imagination.
What also became clear fast was the solidarity that the United States would have from its allies. The following morning, shortly after dawn, I was headed to my office in the Old Executive Office Building in the White House complex when I got a call from Nick Burns, an old friend who had just arrived as U.S. ambassador to NATO. Burns conveyed that there was a move among NATO members to invoke Article 5 on behalf of the United States. That’s the clause in the NATO treaty that says, “an attack on one is an attack on all” (though, contrary to common misunderstanding, it contemplates but does not require military action specifically).
NATO had never invoked Article 5. Did we want this, Burns asked? I walked straight into Rice’s office with that question. Yes, she decided, the United States wanted to know that its allies stood with it. Burns advised her of some hesitation by France. She picked up the phone and called her French counterpart, getting through immediately. She made no elaborate argument, saying only, “We need this.” The French then and there agreed to invoke NATO’s security commitment.
In the days that followed, European governments came in with offers of help, often unsolicited: overflight rights, intelligence, military contributions if need required. “We know what you may have to do,” one senior European official told me later that week, referring to Afghanistan, where we knew al-Qaeda was operating, “and we will be there with what you need.”
Those promises held in the years to come. As the United States launched military operations in Afghanistan, America’s allies and friends were there, including with troops. And like American forces, some of those allied soldiers never made it back home. They included soldiers from countries the current U.S. President regularly insults and threatens, like Denmark and Canada.
How should we assess the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks (many details relayed in “Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama”) and the position of the United States globally 25 years later?
The 9/11 Aftermath
Some things went well. The Bush administration took stock of and fixed institutional shortcomings that had made the attacks more possible. The U.S. government reorganized its intelligence and analytic apparatus to better detect and prevent recurrence; it improved security measures at airports and ports; it fired up efforts to weaken and dismantle terrorist organizations, going after their finances, structures, and leaderships; and worked with allies and partners around the world to these ends. No attack of comparable scale has recurred in 25 years, an achievement that would have given those of us in the Situation Room on 9/11 considerable comfort.
The Bush administration avoided some traps. In the days after 9/11, I also kept hearing that the United States must not go down the road of demonizing Islam or America’s Muslim citizens and residents. “We won’t repeat what we did after Pearl Harbor to Japanese-Americans” was the striking way Hadley put it, speaking in the West Wing corridors to NSC staffers later in the week of 9/11. The administration arguably did not do enough on this score, and hate crimes against Muslims in the United States jumped after 9/11. But it did make public efforts to keep that commitment: On Sept. 17, 2001, President Bush spoke at Washington’s Islamic Center and distinguished Islam from the terrorists of al-Qaeda, a message to the world, to Americans, and to his own administration that on his watch, the U.S. government would not cross the line of mass demonization or bigotry.
Other things went badly. In the aftermath of 9/11, I kept hearing that “it’s a new world” and that “old rules don’t apply.” Such thinking, understandable given the shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and fears of a recurrence, sometimes led to appalling decisions, like torture of some terrorist suspects and detainment of others without a sustainable legal basis. One result of such actions is that prosecution of the 9/11 plotters, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is still mired in legal wrangling a quarter century later, in part due to the questionable decision to try the plotters not in federal courts but in untested military commissions, and in part to the plotters having been subjected to torture while held incommunicado – not policies the United States should ever have condoned let alone implemented itself.
The U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that emerged from the 9/11 attacks have cast a long, dark shadow. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had ample cause, though experts debate whether alternatives to full-scale invasion might have been more effective. Starting in October 2001, the U.S. military overthrew the Taliban government that had sheltered al-Qaeda. But after some years of relative peace and stability, the Taliban came back. Afghanistan’s new leadership seemed unable to cope with the challenge on its own, and the United States was soon distracted by an unwise invasion of Iraq just two years later.
After troop surges, changed strategies under the Obama administration, and massive investments in financial and human terms, the United States eventually grew weary of its commitment in Afghanistan by the time President Donald Trump took office for his first term in 2017. The Trump administration negotiated an agreement with the Taliban under which the U.S. promised withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Biden administration essentially implemented it.
So, in 2021, the United States pulled out, abandoning in the process legions of Afghans who had fought alongside of and worked with Americans, even as the Taliban that they had helped fight surged back to power. The changes that 20 years without Taliban rule may have brought to Afghan society could in the long run have lasting and positive impact on the country’s future — many Afghans who lived under more-free, if flawed, governments are trying mightily to resist Taliban strictures. But as of now, the enormous U.S. and allied investment in Afghanistan appears largely to have failed.
Iraq: “The Bad War”
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had less justification — and thus much more opposition at home and abroad — than the war in Afghanistan. There was no connection between Iraqi dictator Sadaam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. causus belli that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell wrongly presented to the U.N. Security Council, turned out to be little more than U.S. eagerness to spin weak intelligence plus willingness to accept Sadaam Hussein’s bluff that he had WMD. Sadaam Hussein was a bad actor with a record of starting wars of aggression. But that wasn’t cause for the U.S. regime change war.
Even given the questionable basis for the Iraq war, the United States did not fight alone: forces from the U.K., Australia, and Poland were there alongside the United States on the first day, and other countries later contributed significant troops to the effort to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. The U.S. had a lot of political capital with its friends that it could draw on. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski later put it to me this way: “We didn’t buy the U.S. rationale for the Iraq war, but we did buy into the alliance with the U.S. We would be there for our ally.”
The Iraq war’s results were mixed. Although the United States and its coalition overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime, Iraqis experienced terrible years of insurgency, political strife, and fluctuations in the U.S. presence and its policies. Yet, Iraq has had governments with some democratic mandate and has gained a degree of stability, and coalitions of Iraqi and international and U.S. forces have fought off and mostly defeated major terrorist groups.
The costs of the post-9/11 wars – the “good war” in Afghanistan (that yielded little) and the “bad war” in Iraq (that yielded a mixed picture) — were enormous in Iraqi, U.S., and coalition lives and treasure, and in consequences. As with the Vietnam War a generation earlier, both wars generated bitterness in the United States, including (understandably) hostility to “forever wars” and general skepticism about U.S. leadership abroad.
Late in her tenure as secretary of state, Condi Rice remarked to me that the U.S. invasion of Iraq stemmed from its post-9/11 unwillingness to allow potential threats in the Middle East to gather unchecked. That struck me at the time and since as an honest assessment of her own intentions (though others had advocated a regime change war in Iraq well prior to 9/11), and I would generalize from it: the Bush administration was responding to a catastrophic terrorist attack on the United States. It got some things right and learned lessons from some of the things that it got wrong.
Walking Away from Hard-Earned Lessons
By unfortunate contrast, the Trump administration, particularly his second term, appears to be walking away from post-9/11 lessons, some of which were learned the hard way.
The May 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy, for example, posits that there are “three major types of terror groups: Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs, Legacy Islamist Terrorists, [and] Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including anarchists and Anti-Fascists.” Such a loose and partisan definition of terrorism is a problem. Drug cartels are a major challenge but calling them terrorists does not make them so. Using the term “legacy” to qualify Islamist terrorists suggests that the problem is confined to the past — when Trump administration officials speak of “legacy” institutions, as some do with respect to NATO, they usually mean they are no longer relevant.
Exclusive focus on “left-wing extremists” vs. the right-wing variety is bad policy that can lead to awful outcomes. In the 1970s, violent leftist groups — Italy’s Red Brigades, Germany’s Red Army Faction, and to a lesser extent the Weather Underground in the United States among them — engaged in bombings and assassinations. They were the real deal. Though violence can come from all parts of the political spectrum, current leftist movements that the Counterterrorism Strategy cites as terrorist challenges are generally not. “Antifa” is a loose movement and not an organization, much less a terrorist one. Advocates for transgender rights do not belong in a counterterrorism strategy paper and listing them there seems either political posturing, an act of intimidation, or both. Ignoring documented violent right-wing groups and actions is another example of partisanship trumping national security.
The best section of the administration’s CT strategy states, “The primary responsibility of the U.S. Government’s counterterrorism enterprise is to prevent a mass-casualty terror attack on American soil.” That’s clear and merited. It goes on to outline sensible actions to achieve this goal. But that language appears at the end of the paper, almost as an afterthought, and even that section includes the odd assertion that fentanyl is also a weapon of mass destruction. Those who encourage and profit from drug addiction are indeed adversaries. But stretching the definition of terrorism and WMD to include them weakens the entire enterprise. Indeed, key U.S. allies – like the U.K., Canada, and the Netherlands – have stopped sharing intelligence with the United States because it is abusing counterterrorism tools to go after drug gangs with lethal force.
These are not mere semantic objections: intelligence and other resources will be distributed according to policy priorities that the CT strategy lays out. Indeed, in the aftermath of the shooting by ICE of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January during a campaign to deport undocumented residents, the administration began investigating groups it considered left-leaning (so-called “agitators”), including labor organizations. Is that use of finite resources a decision based on true threats or on partisanship? The same question can be applied to the judgment of senior policymakers on national security issues. In response to reports of Iranian hacking against local U.S. water management systems, Trump dismissed these and instead inexplicably blamed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
One lesson of 9/11 is that top-level officials had not taken terrorist warnings seriously enough beforehand. In the Trump administration, a threat (real or imagined) from a leftist group would be taken seriously and acted on, but a true threat from a far-right group might not be. Indeed, intelligence professionals in federal agencies might hesitate before bringing politically unwanted threat information to the attention of senior policymakers. A sidetracking or even a delay of such warnings could get people killed.
Failing in Broader Ways
The current administration is failing the post-9/11 test in broader ways. The world is rough. Shocks and surprises will happen, whether major terrorist attacks, or wars started by aggressive tyrants like Russian President Vladimir Putin, or dangers we cannot foresee. When they do, having friends in time of need will be critical.
After 9/11, the United States could and did draw on the political capital that it had amassed over decades. It was on that basis that many U.S. allies fought alongside it in Afghanistan and even in Iraq. Tensions over the Iraq War damaged some of this, but in its second term the Bush administration acted to heal the Iraq War breach, and subsequent administrations did much the same. And though legacy detentions and trials at Guantanamo continued to create some strain, the Obama administration’s decisions to end the torture and rendition program and base its CT wars on stronger legal ground similarly helped mend some of the biggest rifts with key allies.
The second Trump administration, however, has cut far more deeply than the Bush administration ever did into the political capital of the free world: threats to attack Denmark over Trump’s annexationist claims to Greenland, inconsistent U.S. policy toward Putin’s Russia, gratuitous threats and fights with Canada, disparaging South Korea and downsizing U.S. contributions to a planned military exercise with that crucial Asian ally, suggestions that the U.S. is preparing to hollow out its commitment to NATO, tariff fights that sometimes treat Europe as a rival on the level of China, picking fights over culture or alleged European “censorship,” and other such steps have been costly and are continuing.
Trump was elected in significant part over Americans’ reaction to the long wars in the Middle East that the United States initiated after 9/11 and his promise not to start new ones. Trump, however, initiated an air and naval war with Iran without any of the trauma and challenge of 9/11. That conflict has so far has left the United States and the free world worse off, with the off-and-on closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the increase of Iranian attacks in the region, and the potential for new and perhaps big terrorist attacks.
The Iranian regime is a bad one and its end would benefit many, Iranians perhaps most of all. But for now, the Trump administration has merely repeated a post-9/11 error: a goal even if arguably worthy in the abstract may not be achievable given available resources and circumstances. And turning to the military first to achieve that goal may be the worst option in terms of human, financial, and strategic costs, something the administration may have indirectly acknowledged when it pivoted (for the time being) from reliance on military to increased economic pressure against Iran.
The Iran War also illustrates that the often chilly or even antagonistic U.S. approach to its partners and allies had costs. In 2002-3, the United States made a sustained if flawed case for attacking Iraq and it gained significant allied support. It made few or no such efforts before attacking Iran in 2026. Having little or no foreknowledge of U.S. intentions and unclear about U.S. objectives, even the most stalwart allies did not join in military operations and some of them limited U.S. use of their airspace for the war. Such reticence has infuriated Trump. But what did he and his administration expect? Draining political capital with friends and then surprising them have consequences.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the United States can take satisfaction at avoiding a repeat of the terrorist attacks that day and, for a time, learning lessons from its post-9/11 mistakes. The U.S. benefited from allied solidarity that day and for many years that followed. Those achievements are now at risk due to weaknesses in the Trump administration’s approach to foreign affairs and counterterrorism policy: its squandering of political capital with allies, its misidentification and politicization of threats, and its questionable launch of military operations against Iran.
So if 9/11 happened today, would the United States be able to count on its partners to come to its aid? Will partners trust the United States as a counterterrorism partner after its propensity to politicize thin domestic threats and treat criminal drug dealing as a new CT war? Hopefully, the free-world alliances between the United States and counterparts in Europe and Asia will survive the pressure and even threats from the Trump administration and adapt to deal effectively with their common and genuine adversaries, of which Russia is the most virulent and China the most profound.
The optimist in me thinks that these problems can yet be fixed or mitigated by a new administration committed to its founding principles and to its allies and partners that share them. Let’s hope that they will be without the United States — and the world — paying as high a price as on that Tuesday morning of Sept. 11, 2001.