Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the US faces questions about the effectiveness and consequences of its "war on terror." The conflict led to significant military interventions, expanded surveillance, and a shift in global power dynamics, with critics arguing that the approach failed to address root causes of hostility and instead created new problems.
The "war on terror" has reshaped global geopolitics, cost trillions of dollars, and led to widespread conflict and instability, raising questions about the effectiveness of US foreign policy and its impact on international relations and human rights.
Twenty-five years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States is reflecting on the consequences of its subsequent "war on terror." The initial attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, could have been treated as a crime requiring international prosecution or a catalyst for a debate on the roots of hostility towards the US. Instead, the US political establishment, under President George W. Bush, framed the attacks as a result of hatred for American freedoms, a narrative that absolved US foreign policy of responsibility.
This premise underpinned the "war on terror," leading to invasions, occupations, torture, rendition, secret prisons, drone assassinations, and mass surveillance. Domestically, it resulted in the Patriot Act, expanded watchlists, racial and religious profiling, and a significant growth of the national security state.
Strategists believed the US had entered a unipolar moment after the Soviet Union's collapse, but the "war on terror" is seen by critics as a squandered opportunity. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, based on false pretenses, failed to achieve their objectives of remaking the Middle East and instead led to devastation, displacement, and the resurgence of groups like the Taliban. The project's conceptual failure, according to the analysis, was the belief that political legitimacy could be imposed by force.
The "war on terror" also damaged the philosophical underpinnings of American global leadership, creating a contradiction between its espoused values of democracy and human rights and its practices. The conflict consumed vast resources, estimated at $8 trillion by the Costs of War project at Brown University, and distracted the US from the rise of China.
The narrative of manufactured enemies also fueled authoritarian regimes, which used counterterrorism as a pretext to suppress dissent and justify emergency laws. While not the sole cause, the post-9/11 order intensified the contradictions that led to the Arab Spring uprisings. The subsequent counterrevolution saw the crushing of democratic movements in Egypt, fragmentation in Libya, catastrophe in Syria, devastation in Yemen, and the collapse of Tunisia's democratic opening, with an international order that preferred compliant authoritarians over genuine democracy.
A dangerous legacy of this era is the erosion of restraints on international law and human rights, with exceptions made for allies. Preventive war, torture, indefinite detention, and extrajudicial assassinations became normalized, undermining the US's standing as a champion of these principles.