A Quarter Century of Panic

L ike most Americans, I spent September 11, 2001, filled with both rage and dread.

I wanted the United States to find and kill whoever had planned this attack on my country.

I knew little about al-Qaeda, but whoever did this, I thought, must pay.

As the shock of that day wore off, I began to wonder, as so many others did in America and around the world, Now what? Saying this even 25 years later seems uncharitable, but after the attacks of 9/11, many Americans, and their government, panicked.

Worse, the United States institutionalized this panic in the form of new priorities, new programs, and new agencies, so that even when the fear subsided, the intemperate policies driven by that fear remained.

Over the next quarter century, America would spend trillions of dollars, pass draconian laws, create a behemoth of a new Cabinet department, militarize law enforcement, and embark on two major military campaigns.

These measures were taken because after 9/11, everything became terrorism.

Everything , as if we all now agreed that we could push aside all the other trouble in the world because we had finally found the Worst Thing Ever.

I say this as a criticism, but I was not exempt from the emotions and the intellectual detours they produced in the moment.

And I should have known better: I had spent most of my career studying long-standing problems of security and international relations.

Even so, I was one of the millions of Americans and others who believed that the world after 9/11 had changed forever.

We were wrong.

In the first days after the attack, the United States acted wisely.

Rather than run off on some half-baked crusade—that part would come later—American leaders vowed to bring the terrorists to justice.