A new age that wasn't

Bush called the war on terror a generational conflict. Within ten years, Al-Qaeda and Islamic militancy had largely receded from the world stage.

Defeated by Muslims, not armies

Militancy faded because it never won broad support among the people it claimed to speak for, not because anyone beat it in the field.

Al Qaeda lost at Tahrir

When Tunisians, Egyptians, Syrians and Bahrainis filled the streets in the early 2010s, they marched for democracy, not for Islam.

“Al Qaeda faced its greatest defeat at Tahrir Square.”

The war grew the thing it fought

Militancy thrived where the war on terror was waged. The Islamic State was born inside the American prison system in Iraq.

An ending, not a beginning

The confrontation between Al-Qaeda and America marked the true close of the Cold War, a decade after the Soviet Union was already gone.

Institutions without their cause

NATO, the UN and the international courts were built on fear of atomic holocaust. They ran on for a while without that fear, then the 1990s wars exposed the hollowness.

Old categories went obsolete

Balance of power, deterrence, great-power rivalry, hegemony. None of it applied to a war fought in civilian spaces against dispersed nonstate actors.

The ideological states fell

The war on terror finished off the Cold War's remaining ideological regimes in the Middle East: socialist Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Islamism died too

Islamism was itself a Cold War project of revolution and ideological statehood. In Iran and Afghanistan it was captured by the clerics it once set out to displace.

The mirror bin Laden held up

He said Western intervention would remake the Middle East in the West's image. Instead the West came to resemble the despotic clients it propped up.

Provoke, then watch them self-harm

The point of the attacks was to show that violence far short of an existential threat could push democracies into gutting their own citizens' liberties.

An auto-immune response

Emergency powers, surveillance, indefinite detention, torture, rendition. The effort to defend the political body corroded it from within.

From the margins to the center

Suspicion of Muslims, hostility to immigration, civilizational rhetoric and militarized borders moved from the fringe into mainstream Western politics.

The squandered unipolar decade

America spent its moment of dominance on the war. China's rise arrived a few years after the 2008 crash and a decade after the attacks.

“bin Laden won the war on terror much as he had predicted he would”

Socialism was propping up liberalism

Postwar social protections and political rights came less from beating fascism than from competing with a socialist alternative. When that pressure vanished, the settlement eroded.

The Allies were empires too

Colonial powers crushed nationalist movements in Asia and Africa while fighting fascism. Around three million died in the Bengal famine, worsened by wartime policy.

Colonial methods came home

Europe imported its own imperial repertoire of coercion, including medieval just war doctrine that resurfaced to justify pre-emptive attack and torture.

Globalization got discredited

The failed attempt at a unipolar order took free trade and mass migration down with it, clearing space for movements that sort the world into racial and cultural blocs.

Monroe in America, Christendom in Europe

American nativism reaches back to hemispheric control; Europe's reaches back to a myth of a homogeneous Christian continent. Both run on hostility to Muslim immigrants.

Fear of reverse colonization

Europe now borrows the defensive language of the people it once ruled: fear of settlement, demographic change, cultural swamping. Decolonization, not the war, is the century's central drama.