Taha Özhan
A quarter of a century has passed since the September 11 attacks. Twenty-five years may be long enough to move beyond the immediate impact of such an event and discuss its historical significance, yet still too short to claim that its consequences have fully unfolded. In the autumn of 2001, there was almost a consensus that the attacks had changed not only America but also the world. Today, however, we are faced with a more complicated question. Did September 11 truly create a new world, or was it a rupture that altered the trajectory of a world already in flux, accelerated certain trends, and led to the squandering of the unique strategic opportunity America had gained after the Cold War?
The answer to this question may lie in the fundamental paradox that has emerged after twenty-five years. America remains the world’s greatest power, yet we are living in a period where it is itself destabilizing the very order in which it concentrated its power. The American economy, the dollar, technology companies, financial markets, military capacity, and global alliance network continue to provide Washington with capabilities that no other actor possesses on its own. Nevertheless, American power and the power of the American order no longer mean the same thing. While Washington’s capacity remains largely standing, the political legitimacy, institutional order, alliance logic, and claim to globality built around that capacity have become seriously devoid of meaning. Put more clearly, we are facing a Washington attempting to move from the American empire to the American nation-state. The twenty-five-year balance sheet of September 11 must primarily be read through this distinction.
The easiest, but most misleading, way to understand September 11 is to regard the attacks as a turning point that changed American foreign policy from scratch. Yet important elements of the strategy that emerged after 2001 were already present before the attacks. With the end of the Cold War, Washington had, for the first time in its history, become an unrivaled power on a global scale. The fundamental issue debated in the 1990s was not whether America was powerful, but what this unique power would be used for and within what limits.
The debate that took shape around the Project for the New American Century in 1997 remains important in this regard. Goals such as maintaining American military supremacy, expanding defense capabilities, forestalling powers capable of challenging Washington, and spreading a liberal economic and political order in line with American interests and values had been explicitly articulated prior to September 11. Nor was the idea of regime change in Iraq something discovered only after the attacks. Rather than producing the American strategic mindset, September 11 provided an already existing conception with an extraordinary perception of threat, a basis for social mobilization, and a ground for legitimacy. The notions of exceptionalism, chosenness, salvation, threat, paranoia, and fears of destruction within the American social and political imagination became reunited with the political language of this new era.
Therefore, September 11 represents both continuity in American foreign policy and a genuine structural rupture at the same time. The use of preemptive force, American exceptionalism, or Washington’s prioritizing of its own security over international rules corresponds to American history itself, rather than representing new elements or deviations. September 11 transformed these tendencies from exceptions into institutionalized practices and placed them at the center of global politics. The rest of the world, too, did not refrain from taking their share of “American exceptionalism” or from “stealing the fire.”
This transformation did not have only a foreign-policy dimension. The reflex of redefining itself in the face of threat, one of the fundamental elements of the American social imagination, turned into a powerful political energy after September 11. “Freedom,” “evil,” “civilization,” “homeland,” “security,” “axis of evil,” and “enemy” not only became ordinary components of the political vocabulary, but also enabled their use in the most vulgarized manner. Thus, terrorism ceased to be a specific security problem that had to be confronted and became a general category through which the world could be interpreted. Moreover, actors ranging from Russia to China and from Europe to the Middle East also saw this as a useful opportunity. They had no difficulty moving from the heavy, responsible, and serious world of geopolitics to the comfortable world of the “war on terror.” In the final analysis, almost everyone already had a “terrorist.” And for those who did not, the American “war” quickly provided one.
Brzezinski, a veteran name in geopolitical analysis, was one of the few who drew attention to this danger after September 11. He possessed enough insight to title his article, in which he criticized the practice of turning a problem requiring a struggle into an “object of war” and reducing geopolitics to the axis of the fight against terror, “The Terrorism of the War on Terror.” The severe consequences of the crisis that he described at the time as a “culture of fear” were experienced almost without exception. The “war on terror” had neither a specific geography nor a definable endpoint. Although terror was a method rather than an actor, it was turned into the object of war. Thus, it became easier for the exceptional to become permanent. The expansion of surveillance capacity, new domestic security institutions, extraordinary legal powers, targeted killings beyond borders, and the expansion of the president’s war powers did not remain merely temporary measures of the Bush era. Many elements became embedded in the American state’s enduring security repertoire, persisting under the Obama administration and those that followed.
Yet the security logic that expanded after September 11 did not remain within the borders of the American state. Washington’s central position within global financial, communication, technology, travel, intelligence, and legal networks also increasingly became part of security politics. The infrastructures of globalization that generated interdependence also began to produce capacities for surveillance, exclusion, imposing sanctions, and changing behavior. America of course did not establish these infrastructures after September 11. Its position at the center of the dollar, financial systems, technology networks, and security architecture was much older. But September 11 extraordinarily accelerated the use, domination, and weaponization of this centrality for political and security purposes. This structural centrality, which we previously discussed in the context of the “American Prison”, demonstrates that American power stems not only from the resources it possesses but also from its position at the center of the systems within which others are compelled to operate. In this sense, September 11 changed America. But perhaps more importantly, it weakened the political, legal, and moral restraints that had stood in the way of some tendencies America already possessed.
The American Strategic Deviation
One of the historical ironies of September 11 is that it made America feel most insecure at the very moment when it was strongest. In 2001, there was no Soviet-style rival facing Washington. Russia was economically and politically weak. China was growing rapidly but was not yet a strategic rival on par with the US on a global scale. Europe was helplessly dependent on the American security architecture. NATO was expanding, the fundamental institutions of the world economy were operating largely within rules shaped by Washington, and the central position of the dollar and American technology was not being questioned. At precisely this moment, America placed terrorism, rather than the balance of power among states, at the center of its global strategy.
The intervention in Afghanistan, that served as a direct response to the September 11 attacks, was a military operation possessing broad international legitimacy, supported by a world acting partly out of panic and believing it would end very quickly. Iraq, however, represented an entirely different threshold. The convergence of the war on terror with preemptive war, regime change, and political engineering exposed a deeper misconception regarding the limits of American power. Washington equated military superiority with the capacity to produce political outcomes. The ability to overthrow a regime and the ability to establish a functioning state in its place, winning a war and building an order, creating fear and producing legitimacy were treated as if they were the same thing. The new strategy, which normalized the unilateral and preemptive use of force, expanded American sovereignty while rendering the sovereignty of others conditional, and undermined the foundations of legitimacy of the very order America had established. The long-term success of American power had derived not only from superiority in power, but also from making this superiority more acceptable through alliances and multilateral institutions. The breaking of this relationship was a strong sign that erosion had begun along the axis of the American “empire.” America spent a significant portion of the unipolar period it possessed after 1991 fighting actors that were not its equals and, accompanied by Israeli provocations, attempting to reorganize the Middle East within a security paradigm. Meanwhile, the actual distribution of power of the twenty-first century was taking shape in other geographies.
The American Geopolitical Blindness
Only three months after September 11, China joined the World Trade Organization. There is, of course, no direct causality between these two events. But their timing is an interesting coincidence that summarizes the geopolitical story of the last twenty-five years. While America became immersed in the agenda of occupations, China integrated into the world economy at a historically unprecedented speed and scale, as the engine of global disinflation. The liberal assumption was that economic integration would, over time, also bring political convergence. Beijing’s participation in the world economy would not only make China richer; the expansion of the market economy would also encourage social and political liberalization. What actually occurred was a different process. Beijing combined the economic opportunities of globalization with state capacity, industrial policy, and political control. Production, technology transfer, infrastructure, export surpluses, and later critical supply chains became elements of China’s geopolitical power. This development may have been inevitable. However, the transformation of the American geopolitical agenda into a chaotic one prevented China’s highly aggressive economic growth from developing in a manner that would strengthen more gradual, balanced, and cooperative grounds for the rest of the world, and even for Beijing.
To see the rise of China as a consequence of September 11 would, of course, be historical determinism. September 11 did not raise China, but it forced America into a different focus precisely as China was emerging onto the stage. Washington’s allocation of its strategic attention, financial capacity, and political energy to the war on terror provided Beijing with an extraordinarily favorable geopolitical period. Just as debates regarding China’s role in shaping the new millennium were intensifying throughout the 1990s, the situation underwent a radical shift in axis due to the events of September 11. In other words, while America in 2001 was debating how to use its unrivaled power, in 2026 it is debating how to live with a rival that could be its equal. This alone is sufficient to see the tragic transformation. A similar but more complex transformation took place in relations with Russia. Moscow immediately interpreted Washington’s “wars against al-Qaeda and the Taliban” for its own purposes, claiming that it was “fighting al-Qaeda terrorists” in Chechnya. While providing serious intelligence support for the American war in Afghanistan, it also opened its twenty-first-century war ledger. Ultimately, this process reached increasingly further dimensions with the 2008 Georgia War, the annexation of Crimea and intervention in Donbas in 2014, the military intervention in Syria in 2015, and finally the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The Middle East and its immediate surroundings undoubtedly paid the heaviest human and political cost of the security order that emerged after September 11. Our region has continued to be a playing field for military interventions from outside since the First World War. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the dissolution of state capacity, fractures along ethnic and sectarian fault lines, Iran’s further deepening of regional instability through state-extension actors, the emergence of ISIS, the displacement of millions of people, Israel’s making its occupation more permanent on a scale not seen since its establishment, and the widening of the democracy deficit along the axis of the fight against terrorism deeply transformed the political and security architecture of the region.
One of the more permanent costs of September 11 was also that Islam increasingly came to be interpreted within categories of security and threat. The “war on terror” did not remain merely a struggle waged against particular organizations. It produced a global political language that turned Muslims and Islamic political movements into objects of suspicion, feeding Islamophobia and, particularly in Europe, anti-immigrant sentiment. The usefulness of this language was not limited to the Western world either. While authoritarian Arab governments legitimized the suppression of Islamic movements, the most vibrant organized political current in the region, through the discourse of “radicalization” and “counterterrorism,” they also produced a distinctive Arab Islamophobia and, more directly expressed, an “Islamist-phobia.” It also made it possible to conveniently ignore the heavy costs produced by the emergence of ISIS terrorism, which appeared under the conditions of the Iraq occupation and became an extremely useful instrument for dozens of intelligence organizations from both the West and the East. Thus, the security paradigm established after September 11 brought together, in different forms, the marginalization of Muslims and immigrants in the West and the criminalization of political Islam in the Arab world within the same threat discourse.
Europe experienced the same period differently. The Iraq War of 2003 initially caused a serious political rupture between Washington and France and Germany. Britain, Poland, and some European states taking the side of the United States made the divisions within the continent more pronounced. Yet this disagreement did not break apart the transatlantic order. NATO continued, the American military presence remained, economic relations expanded, and Europe’s fundamental security model did not change. On the contrary, the comfortable world of the “war on terror” concept could also be seen from Europe’s perspective as a “legitimate” excuse for postponing investment in an autonomous security capacity that would require it to assume serious responsibilities. Europe assumed that a world in which it could obtain cheap energy from Russia, cheap production from China, and security from America was permanent. Russia first revealed the fragility of this model in 2014 and 2022. Trump, meanwhile, showed Europe the painful reality in 2024.
However, Europe’s increased defense spending, the resurgence of debates on strategic autonomy, the quest to “de-risk” vis-a-vis China, and the discourse on technological sovereignty today should not be interpreted merely as a reaction to Trump. At most, these may be belated responses to the erosion of the material foundations of Europe’s post-Cold War model. Europe, which for years was considered a winner whenever America won, fell into a crisis of aimlessness and political paralysis when Washington abandoned the 1945 order and left it to the global arena.
America’s Internal Crisis and the Crisis of the Global Order
At this point, reading the global ruptures of the last decade through Trump’s personality would be as misleading as reading September 11 solely through Bush. Trump’s political style, his approach to institutions, his relationship with allies, and his transactional attitude toward the use of power are undoubtedly distinctive. However, Trumpism did not emerge from a vacuum. The social, economic, and geopolitical conditions that made it possible had been accumulating within American society for decades. With the provocation of the American social imagination after September 11, the pathological “isms” (isolationism, protectionism, nativism) mentioned by Bush emerged once again. The 2008 financial crisis further strengthened this ground and made the political center increasingly fragile. On such a ground, “America First” could become something more than a simple campaign slogan. Ultimately, 15 years after September 11, the emergence of Trump on this accumulated ground ceased to be an impossibility and, as Obama had claimed, a joke.
Therefore, it would be misleading to read Trump’s attitude toward NATO, free trade, multilateral institutions, or traditional alliances solely through his personal worldview. Trump’s radical language brought a more structural question that already existed within American society to the center of politics. Why should American society continue to bear the cost of the order that America established after 1945? For the same reason, it would be incorrect to view the economic nationalism of Trump’s second term, characterized by tariffs, the increasing intertwining of trade relations with allies and security relations, and the distancing from international institutions, merely as an aberration confined to a single presidential term. The real issue concerns Washington’s capacity to digest the new global political-economic alignment. America’s approach to globalization is now clearly shifting from efficiency toward resilience, from interdependence toward economic security, and from free trade toward strategic trade.
This transformation is not unique to Washington either. The European Union’s agenda of economic security and strategic autonomy, China’s policies of dual circulation and technological self-sufficiency, the financial sanctions imposed on Russia, competition over critical minerals, and the securitization of supply chains are all parts of the same structural tendency. Connections once thought to make war more difficult are today turning into instruments through which states exert pressure on one another. At this point, economic and financial “chokepoints” have directly transformed the new power politics, energy pipelines, payment systems, semiconductors, critical minerals, data infrastructures, and sea routes into geopolitical instruments and even weapons. What must be remembered here is that the weaponization of infrastructures (financial transactions, data flows, travel regimes, and technology networks) began with September 11 under the justification of the war on terror. Today, similar mechanisms are being used as weapons of great-power competition. For this reason, it would not be correct to read the global commercial, economic, and security ruptures of the Trump era merely as the “Trump shock.”
Perhaps the most significant consequence of the era shaped after September 11 is the gradual disappearance of the distinction between American domestic politics and the global order. Washington’s capacity to sustain the international order no longer depends only on the number of aircraft carriers, dollars, or military bases; it also depends on the willingness of American society to carry this order. One of the fundamental reasons for the resilience of the order established after 1945 was that American foreign policy produced broad legitimacy in domestic politics. Although NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods institutions, security alliances in Asia, and Israel were debated in different ways, there was a strong social consensus regarding the general framework. American economic growth made it possible to establish a reasonable connection between the costs of this order and social prosperity. Today, this connection has weakened. For a significant segment of American society, alliances can come to represent obligations that drain American resources rather than generating shared security; free trade, the offshoring of production rather than mutual prosperity; immigration, a loss of control rather than a source of American dynamism; and international institutions, symbols of constrained sovereignty rather than instruments of American influence.
Here, too, there is an interesting transformation in the idea of exceptionalism. Classical American exceptionalism, on the one hand, argued that America was different from other states, while on the other hand it assigned a universal mission to this difference. America was “exceptional” not merely because it was powerful, but because it was the bearer of a particular order. In the contemporary nationalist interpretation, however, the second pillar of exceptionalism is weakening. While the idea that America is different and superior continues to exist, the notion that this superiority creates an obligation to produce order for others is receding. Exceptionalism is thus shifting from mission to exemption, from global responsibility toward a narrower national interest. In other words, a transformation is taking place from an imperial imagination toward the logic of the nation-state. However, it is doubtful to what extent the current social and politico-economic structure of the USA, a nation that, in its 250th year, still stands with its “contiguous states” along the fault lines of the Civil War, can sustain this transformation.
From this perspective, the long journey of American political thought after September 11 is quite paradoxical. In 2001, America possessed extraordinary confidence that its values and understanding of security could be applied throughout the world. Twenty-five years later, a significant portion of American politics is moving closer to the idea that trying to solve the problems of the world has weakened America. This transition between an excessively outward-looking exceptionalism and a more inward-looking exceptionalism is not a simple ideological swing from Bush to Trump. It is a structural transformation produced together by Iraq, Afghanistan, the 2008 crisis, the rise of China, social polarization, and the political economy of globalization.
Has the American Empire Come to an End?
Here, it is necessary to approach the issue of “the end of the American empire” carefully. If by empire, what is meant is that America is the most powerful state in the world, the answer is “no.” American material capacity is still extraordinarily large. If global military presence is meant, again, it is not possible to speak of an end. In terms of the dollar, American technology companies, financial system, universities, and cultural influence, America continues to possess unique opportunities.
Moreover, American power does not consist only of the material capacity directly possessed by the state. One of the less visible dimensions of the American order for a long time has been its position at the center of an extensive infrastructure of dependence embedded in the everyday functioning of the world. Yet the historical success of this system did not derive merely from creating dependence. Hierarchy was often experienced as rules, asymmetric dependence as interdependence, the American security architecture as common security, and American-centered economic integration as globalization. The reason was not merely the success of American discourse. Because this order genuinely produced security, capital, technology, trade, and predictability, a significant part of the world became connected to the system not only out of necessity, but also by seeing its own interests within it.
For precisely this reason, hegemony does not consist solely of material capacity. A hegemonic order also requires the ability of power to keep the behavior of others within certain rules, consistently and relatively voluntarily. The distinctiveness of the American order lay in Washington’s reinforcement of its interests through institutions that produced, to a certain extent, common benefit. One of the things that changed after September 11 was that it increasingly became visible that this order also possessed an extraordinary capacity for discipline at the level of a prison. As the system turned into an American prison, Washington’s material and infrastructural power began to diverge from the authority of the American order.
During the Trump era, this tension became even more apparent. While America increasingly questions the costs and obligations of being a hegemon, it does not want to give up the privileges provided by its hegemonic position either. The former hegemon still occupies the center of the world’s most important infrastructures, but it no longer wants to legitimize this order and bear its costs as it did before. While rising China is approaching the capacity to challenge American power, it has not yet been able to propose a comprehensive and universal alternative order in which others can see their own interests. Moreover, it has given no genuine indication that such an imperial capacity could emerge. Therefore, the global order will have to experience tensions and growing pains of change between the American world and the world of America for an unpredictable period of time.
New Order?
The most salient feature of the system now emerging is the absence of a new world order on which consensus has been reached. What sets this new period apart is that states can readily move in and out of fluid alliances. India can develop strategic rapprochement with the United States against China while obtaining energy supplies from Russia. The Gulf countries can maintain their security relations with America while deepening their trade and technology ties with China. Türkiye can maintain its NATO membership while simultaneously establishing different partnerships with Russia, China, the Gulf, and the Global South. This picture aligns neither with the disciplined blocs of the Cold War nor with the unipolar liberal order of the 1990s. At the same time, economic relations are increasingly transforming into geopolitical relations. Global connections that once created interdependence are today turning into pressure points. Therefore, the struggle of the new era is waged not merely over who possesses greater material power, but also over who stands at the center of which networks and the extent to which they can translate other actors’ dependence on these networks into political power. From this perspective, the most distinctive feature of the new era is not chaos so much as the disappearance of a common center and a common political grammar.
The Twenty-Five-Year Balance Sheet of September 11
The true strategic cost of September 11 should be sought not merely in the wars it unleashed, but in how America chose to direct its unipolar moment. During the years of its greatest strength, Washington defined its security largely through the elimination of a non-state threat. It transformed terrorism from a security threat into one of the ordering principles of global politics. It attributed a political meaning to military power that it could not carry. It normalized the state of exception. It sought to resolve the tension between the rules of the international order it had established and its own freedom of action in favor of American power. Today, the world is helplessly watching the crisis of this transformation.
For this reason, the question that should be asked on the 25th anniversary is no longer merely, “How did September 11 change the world?” The real question is what America spent the historical opportunity it held after September 11 on, and what political, economic, and strategic legacy this choice led it to face the already-rising new world with? In the first decade, America placed its fears at the center of global politics. In the second decade, it tried to escape the costs of this choice. By the middle of the third decade, however, it is now debating whether the order it established will endure, or even whether its continuation serves American interests. While managing this process, it leaves the 1945 order abandoned but clearly signals that it will not allow anyone else to lay claim to it.
A quarter of a century later, the world began to emerge from the shadow of September 11 with October 7, an event just as striking as it was. Israel, which effectively took the American geopolitical language hostage with Semptember 11, began a genocide in Gaza a quarter of a century later, then attacked five more countries and led to the beginning of a major war with Iran. Israel’s destabilizing steps were followed by Washington’s declaring war on various countries, threats of war and occupation, assassinations of leaders, and its attack on Iran all these together bringing about the breaking of the American geopolitical axis formed by September 11. Moreover, for the first time, this rupture deeply shook the fault lines within America itself. In the coming years, anyone looking at America while examining global developments will also have one ear on the tensions taking place in American domestic politics.
For years, approaches analyzing US domestic politics through the lens of “paranoid American politics” were convinced that “American fears” did not shape Washington’s global positioning, particularly in the aftermath of the Cold War. However, at this juncture, September 11, which satisfied every American fear in the most perfect cinematic manner and realized Hollywood’s long-standing fantasy of America being destroyed by mysterious, unseen forces, no longer holds any capital to fuel American paranoia. America is now being considered politically as a country in the category of political instability. However, because it still maintains its economic, innovation, and global domination power, this instability is producing its costs with a delay. This still provides Washington with a comfort zone and buys it time. Yet if instability continues in this manner, the first expectation should be an increase in political chaos. This should mean that the institutional system under pressure from anarchic dynamics will find it increasingly difficult to carry this chaos with each passing day. Consequently, the coming years strengthen the scenario in which both American domestic political tensions and global geopolitical stress rise simultaneously.
The twenty-five-year balance sheet of September 11 is less a story of the collapse of the United States than a story of the transformation in the nature of American power. Washington has lost its capacity to transform its power into an order that is legitimate, predictable, and sustainable for others as well. September 11 did not create America’s unipolar moment as was predicted in its early years. On the contrary, it accelerated the consumption of this moment along the axis of fear, security, and war. A quarter of a century later, the world has entered an interim period in which neither the American order has completely ended nor has a new one been established in its place. Therefore, the fundamental question of the coming period will be not so much whether America will remain powerful, but how unstable the global system will become simultaneously with the increasingly severe crises of American domestic politics. Even more alarming is the fact that the neocon mindset which, twenty-five years ago, instead of clearing away the wreckage of September 11, triggered invasions based on lies that led to the deaths of millions and created a global catastrophe was actually more mature and responsible than the American mindset currently expected to clean up the wreckage that has accumulated over the past quarter-century!