Twenty-five anniversaries in, let’s drop the “clear blue September sky” line and recalling where we were when the attack happened. Nearly 3,000 Americans were killed that day, and the suffering of their families dulls over time but will never end.
Still, people use anniversaries to reflect on events both good and bad, and 9/11’s 25th has been and will be used to shape our consensus on what the terror attacks and the ensuing Global War on Terror were.
My piece in the Independent Review for the 20th anniversary says much of what I have to say about the world produced after 9/11.
In the absence of major international or domestic constraints, policy can become extravagant. The period from 2001 to the present represents a promiscuous waste of money, lives, and diplomatic attention, for which almost no one in charge of the policy has paid serious consequences…. Policies whose costs can be avoided, defrayed, or hidden are likely to be oversupplied.
I would add two additional points. As should any analyst, I think first about my own failures. Perhaps the biggest one is that I opposed the Iraq War in part because I thought at the time that radical Islamist terrorism was a huge threat to the United States and that invading would both distract us from fighting terrorism and make the threat worse. In 2002 and 2003, that was a widely held view among the few of us who opposed the war.
But there was one person who got the terror threat right while it was truly heretical to do so: my colleague John Mueller. John wrote an article in the fall of 2002 (!) arguing that
a case can be made that rather than foreshadowing the future, the attacks may turn out to have been a statistical outlier, a kind of tragic blip in the experience of American national security.
To say that this was ridiculed in 2002 would be an understatement. But John was right.
In 2026, there are opportunities to bet—er, “trade”—on almost everything on sites like Kalshi and Polymarket. Many people use these as a way to gauge likely futures. John was willing to put his reputation on the line with a prediction shared by almost no one at the time. Had we had prediction markets back then, John would have a fleet of Bentleys in his driveway today, and the entire US foreign policy establishment would be rattling a tin cup. It is worth hearing out the heretics sometimes.
Second, twenty-five years later, the GWOT is both over and never-ending. The public has lost interest in large-scale counterterror projects, although it continues to say worries about terrorism are top of mind. But the institutions (DHS, TSA, ODNI) and protocols (presidential drone killings unbound by courts or Congress) set up in response to the attacks endure. As I closed the 2021 article,
ending the other legacies of the post‑9/11 period will be difficult and many of these legacies may survive as nuts tightened onto the American ship of state by what Robert Higgs has famously termed the “ratchet effect.”
Giving governments extraordinary powers in times of crisis seems irresistible. But it is often worth resisting, because this ratchet only tightens.
