On September 11, 2001, a Tuesday morning, from his window in Lower Manhattan, historian Tony Judt saw "the beginning of the 21st century." For a long time, that date, immediately etched in our language, divided history from the present. Four planes turned into weapons killed 3,000 people and not only brought down two towers, but also a mountain of beliefs and the sense of invulnerability of the only superpower left after the end of the Cold War. The entire humanity watched it live, with astonishment on one side of the planet and fascination, if not joy, on the other, and with the shared certainty that something had broken irreversibly and that perhaps no one, anywhere, would ever feel completely safe again.
"In the 20th century, war was waged against civilians. In the 21st century, civilians will wage war. It will be the ultimate initiative based on faith, which will not require weapons, tanks, ships, planes, or missiles. Like other faith-based initiatives, it will elude the conventional state. It will only require planning capacity and the willingness to die for their beliefs. Everything else - machinery, technology, objectives - will be provided by civil society, its victim. The goal of this war will not be to achieve a specific objective, much less to achieve a final victory. It will be - in fact, it already is - simply to make its position clear," Judt wrote off the cuff.
At that moment, it seemed evident, indisputable, that the century had even changed in nature: from the End of History and the optimism of the 90s, with its promise of freedoms, unlimited economic progress, and the benefits of globalization, to an era marked by fear of terrorism and the relinquishment of rights for the promise of security. With rejection of the different, nihilism, wars without defined fronts, and a control that normalized through cameras, records, and arbitrariness in daily life. Everyone thought, we thought, that there was a before and after and that we were experiencing the most important event of our lives. Our Pearl Harbor. But 25 years later, the idea probably no longer holds, not in the same way. It was a Day of Infamy, but not the day that changed absolutely everything and opened the doors to a new world.
9/11 undoubtedly changed the United States and the world and defined at least a decade of international relations. In one of her most famous essays, Joan Didion, going against the tide at a delicate moment, denounced how the George W. Bush Administration deliberately promoted a "new unilateralism," an imperial America, shielding its discourse with what she called "fixed ideas" or "national pieties," phrases and frameworks repeated ad nauseam (the "moral clarity" of the president, the "you're either with us or with the terrorists") that served to block any uncomfortable questions or doubts about the logic or neoconservative political agendas behind the response to the attack. Something that, 15 years later, Donald Trump perfected with undeniable talent: mantras that the country has learned to tolerate without questioning, each one shielded with an arsenal of insults, euphemisms, and false claims.
After the attacks, trust in the federal government soared to 57%, the highest level in decades. But by 2005, after the handling of Hurricane Katrina, it had already halved, and has since remained low. Today, less than a quarter of Americans trust the government. Americans remain trapped in what Gallup calls a "trust pit," as average confidence in national institutions has been below 30% for five consecutive years. The latest measurement places combined trust in 14 key institutions at just 27%, with the military being the most valued (61%) and far ahead of the rest.
Political polarization has replaced the national unity of those days. In the last 25 years, the iconic moment of congressmen from both parties singing God Bless America on the steps of the Capitol has become a symbol of something unimaginable today, after what happened on January 6, 2021, and the proliferation of political violence. An NBC News survey on the country's 250th anniversary last July showed that "national pride" and faith in the "American dream" have declined, and only 33% say they are extremely proud to be American, the lowest figure since 2001.
Similarly, in a recent Emerson College/Nexstar survey for this 25th anniversary of the attacks, 45% of the population thought the country is less secure than before 9/11, compared to only 31% who believe it is more secure. And 42% believe that American power and influence have decreased in the last decade, something probably exacerbated by the war in Iran launched by an Administration that came to power thanks to the votes of millions of people seduced by the idea, key in the MAGA worldview, that the United States should forget about wars in distant deserts and focus on improving the lives of its nationals.
Even the memory of the attack itself is fractured. That same survey shows that a quarter of Americans still believe in conspiracy theories about the involvement of the United States government. President Trump himself, this Tuesday, repeated in front of the cameras an inexplicable lie that he has sporadically repeated for five years: his presence in the financial district area on the day of the attack and how he was helped by firefighters. Trump was in New York, but far away, and we know this because he appeared live on television that morning telling it from his office.
But at the same time, despite all the evils, the city has healed. New York now has, for the first time, an immigrant and Muslim mayor, something unimaginable in the years following the attacks. The attack devastated the World Trade Center and left the lower part of the island in ruins and with a trauma that seemed indelible, but now, a quarter of a century later, the population of Lower Manhattan has tripled, and more than 230,000 people work there, almost the same amount as before the fall of the Twin Towers, according to data from the Wall Street Journal. Tourism is booming, and business investment in new offices shows growing optimism. For many Americans, 9/11 is very distant or only mentioned in movies, series, and history books, as almost 40% of the American population was born after the attacks or is too young to remember them. And although it may seem unbelievable, the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three other main accused is set to begin, theoretically, next month in Guantanamo.
9/11 was a historic event of enormous proportions for hundreds of millions of people in every corner of the globe, for philosophical thought, for power theory, nation-building, international law, but over time, the certainty that it was the defining event of our lives has been nuanced. Other processes - economic crises, pandemics, the rise of new powers, technological revolution - compete to be the pivotal moment of the century and seem much more disruptive. "As personal memories fade, it seems accurate and necessary to ask the following question: Did 9/11 mark a turning point? Or was it a day that, however tragic, did not alter the course of history? The truth leans more towards the latter option," points out Richard Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Battle of Antietam, in the Civil War, was the bloodiest day in U.S. history, with over 23,000 dead, but the anniversary is barely known.
Authors like Haass, Fareed Zakaria, and Adam Tooze have been insisting for years and reiterating these days that while traumatic, media-saturated, and overwhelming, "looking back over the last quarter-century, it is evident that 9/11 was not a transformative event." Much more important have been the rise of China, the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise of conspiracies and protest movements, Russia's aggression against Ukraine, or the emergence of artificial intelligence. Not to mention the shift of the United States, renouncing the post-war order in whose construction it had played a fundamental role.
Seen in perspective, surely 9/11 was not the beginning of the 21st century, but perhaps as historian Andrew Bacevich argued, the "end of the American century" proclaimed by Henry Luce in 1941. Instead, Trump's victory, amidst a technological transformation that we are unable to assimilate, with the brutal decline of trust in experts, and all our leisure and information in the hands of the endless scroll, probably did certify, in absolute terms, the end of the 20th century.