9/11 and the story America likes to tell about itself

Most Americans learning history at a young age grow up believing three things:

First, that America is on the side of the good guys.

Second, that the bad guys often perceive all the arguing and disarray and indulgence that is interwoven with freedom as a form of weakness — and thereby dangerously underestimate American power and resolve.

And third, that the good guys always win in the end.

Yes, yes, of course — as one gets older and understands the path more deeply, it is clear how much the American story is filled with contradiction, complexity, contingency. Most honest people acknowledge that there have been plenty of occasions when American power was not on the side of the good guys, when this power did not achieve its aims, and that in a large and diverse planet the American perspective is not always going to prevail.

Yet on a day — a quarter-century after the 9/11 attacks — when many people are reflecting on one of the most searing imprints on the American experience, it is worth acknowledging how much of the narrative we grew up believing in grade school and high school is grounded in genuine history.

Ken Burns’s documentary, The American Revolution, released last year ahead of our 250th birthday, was a riveting reminder of how tenuous the country’s founding was. Even afterwards, many European elites did not expect democratic self-governance to last — especially in a country riven by slavery — and at key junctures leading up to and culminating in the Civil War it looked likely the skeptics would be right. Marx thought capitalist societies would be destroyed by internal contradictions, and it took the modern social state — and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States — to prove him wrong. In the 20th Century, leaders of totalitarian states from Germany to Japan to the Soviet Union thought the United States was too complacent, too disengaged from the world, too enthralled with material comforts and middle-brow consumer culture to fight and win a global clash of civilizations.

In each instance, however, after a lumbering and uneven start, the good guys won in the end. Adversaries fatally misunderstood American character.

How does this foundational American narrative hold up in the case of the violent pivot history took 25 years ago today?

If 9/11 is the modern equivalent of Pearl Harbor, we are now living through the equivalent of 1966. By then, World War II was emphatically in the past, securely enshrined as a triumph of free societies generally and U.S. power specifically. The once-young men and women keeping the country running were still in early middle-age — raising families, working on the factory floor, tending to suburban lawns, growing increasingly worried about Vietnam, watching Bonanza, selling insurance, mixing too many cocktails after afternoon golf. The “Greatest Generation” iconography crafted by President Ronald Reagan and Tom Brokaw would not come for another couple decades.

I suspect I am joined by many people — those of us, that is, who were at least in early adulthood in 2001 — in perceiving that 9/11 still feels profoundly immediate, not something in the distant past, and that it does not yet conform to a comforting American narrative. This is not because there is a scintilla of ambiguity of who the good guys were, or are. The murkiness flows from what constitutes a “win” and even more from ambiguity about what counts as “in the end.”

By the most literal accounting, the United States fought back and won. Osama bin Laden has been dead for 15 years, after an effort that spanned both the Bush and Obama administrations and was a testament to U.S. intelligence and military prowess. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, has been in U.S. custody since early 2003, currently at Guantanamo Bay.

Pulling the lens back one increment makes the situation a bit more blurry. Despite 20 years of war and about 6,500 U.S. military and contractor deaths, the Taliban is again in power in Afghanistan. There remains considerable journalistic and scholarly debate about what bin Laden’s strategic motivations were on 9/11. Some believe he expected the provocation would lead the United States to overextend itself militarily in the Middle East, arguably what happened, while others thought he wrongly calculated the United States would simply retreat in disgust. Bin Laden believed the United States was the “far enemy.” He certainly did not achieve his aims for the “near enemy”— the collapse of what he believed were corrupt, illegitimate Western-collaborating Middle East political regimes in favor of a new Islamic caliphate across the region.

At the same time, he surely would take satisfaction at much of what has happened in the United States and around the world in the past 25 years: the fraying and possible dissolution of the NATO alliance; the rise of authoritarianism, with popular support, in many parts of the world; a deep erosion among many Americans in support for the Israeli government; another Middle East war underway, in Iran; an American political culture that is more remorselessly divided than it has been in generations and a populace with shaken confidence about the future. Pew Research Center surveys this year found 69% of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country and 59% believe the United States’s “best years are behind us.”

The 9/11 attacks and the decade that followed — which includes the Iraq War and the 2008 financial meltdown — are probably not the primary causal factor behind most of these downbeat trends but they are at least adjacent to many of them.

Pulling back the lens further still, the reason 9/11 still feels like a contemporary event with a deeply unsettled aftermath is that it is part of a larger historical chapter that is far from over.

One leader who knows that is President Donald Trump. Whatever else one thinks about him, he is at bottom a transactional man: With the right combination of savvy and strength, he believes, a deal is always possible. He came into his second term saying, and seemingly believing, that a deal ending the Russia-Ukraine war could under his ministrations be achieved within days. Yet the war grinds on implacably. In office, he has raised the possibilities of grand bargains settling the Gaza conflict (by turning the area into a great real estate and resort destination). He has talked up his ability to make a deal with North Korea’s regime over its nuclear ambitions. It is impossible to count the number of times he has announced a breakthrough, or being on the brink of one, with Iran. By any measure, Iran has been militarily decimated — and may continue to be — but to Trump’s surprise, its surviving leaders keep fighting.

What the United States learned (or more precisely re-learned) September 11, 2001, is that we live on a violent planet where many people have worldviews in which they aren’t seeking deals or arrangements as these are understood in conventional Western terms. Osama bin Laden is dead but his radical spirit — in diverse incarnations — still animates the age.

In this sense, the historical epoch that began on 9/11 is much more akin to the Cold War than World War II. In both those cases the good guys — believing in democracy, pluralism, rule of law, individual dignity, basic decency — won in the end. Surely, they will once again. But it may take a while yet.