Osama bin Laden’s victory left the United States weakened, impoverished, and divided

By James J. Devine

Al Qaeda’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, killed nearly 3,000 people, destroyed the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon, and delivered an economic and psychological shock unlike anything the United States had experienced in generations.

The attacks were an atrocity committed by terrorists, but most of the damage that resulted was inflicted by the United States on itself.

Nineteen al Qaeda hijackers were never remotely powerful enough to conquer the United States, destroy its economy, defeat its military, or dismantle its constitutional system. What they could do was provoke America into doing things to itself. And it did.

Washington responded to Sept. 11 by embarking on wars that ultimately cost an estimated $8 trillion, invading Iraq despite its lack of responsibility for the attacks, occupying Afghanistan for 20 years, borrowing enormous sums to finance warfare, constructing a sprawling surveillance apparatus, embracing torture and indefinite detention, expanding presidential war-making authority, and normalizing extraordinary government powers that proved difficult to surrender after the emergency passed.

A quarter-century later, those decisions look less like a temporary response to terrorism than a turning point in American political history.

The national-security state created after Sept. 11 did not disappear with al Qaeda’s decline. Its surveillance capabilities, expansive theories of executive authority, militarized law enforcement, and culture of permanent emergency became part of the machinery inherited by every succeeding president.

That history takes on particular significance under President Donald Trump, whose second administration has pushed presidential authority toward boundaries that courts, lawmakers, and even some Republicans have challenged.

The Justice Department is again facing accusations of political weaponization, while Attorney General Todd Blanche — Trump’s former personal lawyer — has rejected the traditional conception of the department as independent from presidential control.

The irony is difficult to escape. Bin Laden wanted to weaken American power.

Instead of limiting the damage he could inflict, the United States spent a generation exhausting resources abroad and expanding coercive government powers at home — powers that can be used for purposes having little or nothing to do with the terrorists who justified their creation.

That may ultimately rank as al Qaeda’s greatest strategic achievement.

The terrorist’s arithmetic

Terrorism depends on leverage.

A weak organization attacks a vastly stronger adversary precisely because it cannot defeat that adversary conventionally. The objective is to produce a political reaction vastly greater than the physical force the terrorists themselves possess.

By that standard, Sept. 11 produced a staggering return on al Qaeda’s investment.

The terrorists used four hijacked commercial airplanes.

The United States responded with military operations and counterterrorism activities extending across scores of countries.

Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates the post-9/11 wars have cost about $8 trillion. At least 940,000 people have died directly from violence in the major post-9/11 war zones, according to the project, while researchers estimate indirect deaths resulting from destroyed infrastructure, disrupted economies, disease, and other consequences could bring the total to between 4.5 million and 4.7 million.

About 38 million people have been displaced.

Al Qaeda possessed nothing remotely resembling the military or financial resources necessary to impose those costs directly. Washington chose them.

Iraq: The colossal diversion

Nothing better illustrates the magnitude of America’s overreaction than Iraq.

Saddam Hussein did not order the Sept. 11 attacks.

Iraq did not carry them out.

Yet less than 18 months after the World Trade Center ruins stopped smoldering, the Bush administration was preparing Americans for an invasion of Iraq.

The administration presented Saddam as part of the terrorist danger confronting the United States and argued that his supposed weapons of mass destruction represented an intolerable threat.

American forces invaded in March 2003.

The predicted stockpiles of weapons were not there.

The consequences were.

The invasion overthrew Saddam but shattered the Iraqi state, produced an insurgency, intensified sectarian conflict, and created conditions in which al Qaeda in Iraq emerged as a formidable organization.

The United States therefore answered an al Qaeda attack by invading a country that had not conducted it — and helped create conditions in which an al Qaeda affiliate could flourish.

Few strategic errors could have served bin Laden’s interests more effectively.

American troops, intelligence resources, diplomatic attention, political capital and hundreds of billions of dollars were diverted into a conflict that Washington chose to begin.

Instead of concentrating overwhelmingly on the organization responsible for Sept. 11, America opened another front.

Afghanistan: a 20-year round trip

Afghanistan was different.

Al Qaeda had sanctuary there, and the Taliban had sheltered bin Laden’s organization. Military action against the people responsible for Sept. 11 therefore had a direct national-security rationale.

But destroying an al Qaeda sanctuary gradually became a vastly more ambitious project.

The United States attempted to construct a functioning democratic Afghan state, develop national security forces, establish institutions and transform a country whose political culture American policymakers repeatedly misunderstood.

The project lasted two decades.

Then the United States withdrew.

The Afghan government collapsed.

The Taliban returned to Kabul.

Washington had transformed a counterterrorism operation into America’s longest war, only to watch much of the political order it constructed disappear with extraordinary speed.

That outcome does not erase genuine improvements experienced by millions of Afghans during portions of those 20 years, particularly women and girls who gained educational and professional opportunities under the U.S.-backed government.

But the strategic ledger remains brutal.

The world’s dominant military power spent 20 years trying to establish a durable political system in one of the world’s poorest countries and left with the Taliban again governing Afghanistan.

The $8 trillion opportunity cost

Brown University’s estimate places the post-9/11 wars’ price at approximately $8 trillion, including war spending, increases in Pentagon expenditures, homeland-security costs, veterans’ obligations, and interest on borrowed money.

The number is so enormous that it becomes almost abstract.

But money measures choices.

Every dollar consumed by unnecessary warfare represents resources that could not simultaneously repair infrastructure, modernize electrical grids, educate children, finance scientific research, provide health care, reduce federal debt or remain in taxpayers’ pockets.

The wars were also unusual historically because Americans were largely spared an explicit war tax.

Washington borrowed heavily while fighting.

That transferred part of the cost to future generations and helped make permanent warfare politically easier because Americans could support military operations without immediately confronting their full price.

Bin Laden could not borrow trillions against America’s future.

Congress and successive administrations did that.

Fear built a surveillance state

The transformation at home may prove more consequential than the money.

Within weeks of Sept. 11, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act.

The American government subsequently developed surveillance authorities and technological capabilities that would have been politically difficult to imagine before the attacks.

The changes extended far beyond traditional wiretapping.

Government agencies developed or expanded mechanisms for collecting communications, metadata, financial information and other records. Counterterrorism helped justify greater secrecy, expanded watchlists, broader intelligence operations and closer integration between national-security agencies and domestic law enforcement.

Brown’s Costs of War project concludes that the post-9/11 era brought significant erosion of civil liberties and human rights, including expanded surveillance, indefinite detention, torture and increasingly militarized policing.

Some powers were subsequently restricted.

The architecture remained.

That is the danger inherent in emergency government.

Powers created to fight terrorists rarely arrive with an expiration date enforced by political culture.

The terrorist disappears.

The power remains.

From fighting al Qaeda to watching Americans

The consequences are no longer theoretical.

Surveillance techniques and legal authorities associated with the post-9/11 security state have increasingly been applied far beyond their original terrorism rationale.

Brown researchers say practices developed during the war on terror have been directed at migrants, protesters and political activists, while federal agencies increasingly obtain information from private companies and employ facial recognition, social-media tracking and other surveillance technologies.

The Trump administration has provided a stark contemporary illustration of how powers justified by one emergency can migrate into entirely different areas of government.

The Department of Homeland Security has recently faced allegations that it used administrative customs summonses to seek information concerning journalists, nonprofit organizations and unions without first obtaining judicial warrants. Civil-liberties advocates and former officials have criticized the practice as an attempt to circumvent normal judicial protections.

The line connecting Sept. 11 to every contemporary abuse is neither straight nor exclusive. American government surveillance predates 2001 by generations, and presidents of both parties preserved or expanded portions of the post-9/11 security apparatus.

But Sept. 11 dramatically shifted the boundary of what Americans were prepared to permit their government to do in the name of security.

Once moved, that boundary proved difficult to restore.

America’s tortured claim to moral authority

The United States spent generations presenting itself as a defender of human rights and the rule of law.

Then came Abu Ghraib.

Guantánamo.

CIA black sites.

Extraordinary rendition.

“Enhanced interrogation.”

The euphemisms could not conceal the reality.

The United States tortured prisoners.

It detained people without ordinary trials and transferred others into systems where abuse occurred.

The torture, mistreatment, and indefinite detention of human beings are among the central human-rights consequences of the post-9/11 wars. The damage was strategic as well as moral.

Every photograph from Abu Ghraib complicated American efforts to present itself as the defender of a rules-based international system.

Every abuse supplied propaganda to extremists.

Every departure from principles Washington demanded other governments respect made accusations of American hypocrisy easier to sustain.

Bin Laden could denounce the United States, but America supplied the evidence used to convict this nation in the world court of opinion.

The presidency became more powerful

Sept. 11 also accelerated a decades-long transfer of authority toward the executive branch.

Congress’ 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force gave the president extraordinarily broad authority to use military force against those connected with the attacks.

Successive administrations of both parties relied on expansive interpretations of presidential national-security authority.

The immediate rationale was terrorism.

The institutional consequence was a presidency increasingly accustomed to acting first and asking Congress later.

That history matters in 2026.

Trump did not invent the powerful modern presidency. He inherited it.

He inherited intelligence agencies with extraordinary surveillance capabilities.

He inherited a national-security establishment accustomed to secrecy.

He inherited emergency authorities accumulated across administrations.

He inherited a political culture in which executive action had increasingly substituted for legislation.

And he inherited a country conditioned for a quarter-century to accept extraordinary government powers whenever presidents invoked an emergency.

The danger of building exceptional powers for a president one trusts is that those powers eventually belong to a president one does not.

Then came Trump’s tyranny

Trump’s political success cannot reasonably be attributed to Sept. 11 alone. His rise had numerous causes: economic inequality, deindustrialization, racial and cultural conflict, partisan polarization, social media, institutional distrust, weaknesses in the American electoral system and failures by both major political parties.

But he assumed office in a country transformed by the post-9/11 era.

The Justice Department is not struggling with questions about its independence. It is operating under an attorney general who previously represented Trump personally, defended presidential authority over the department, and is using federal law enforcement to persecute the president’s political enemies.

Trump has also repeatedly tested the limits of executive authority in disputes involving tariffs, immigration and control of independent institutions, including after adverse court decisions.

Meanwhile, his administration has returned to aggressive unilateral tariffs, including a new 50% tariff against some Canadian imports imposed under an obscure provision of the 1930 tariff law that had never previously been used. Canada retaliated, escalating a trade confrontation with one of America’s closest allies.

The administration is simultaneously fighting Iran, threatening additional economic sanctions against countries that continue trading with Tehran and confronting rising bond yields and a federal debt exceeding $40 trillion.

Trump regularly presents this as evidence of American strength. There is another interpretation. The richest and strongest nation on the planet is not invulnerable.

A country that emerged from the Cold War as the world’s overwhelmingly dominant power spent the opening quarter of the 21st century dissipating immense resources in war, expanding government coercive powers, increasing its debt and damaging relationships that underpinned its international influence.

Trump inherited that weakened political culture and has pushed some of its most dangerous tendencies further.

A cult organized around one man

The greater danger is not Trump’s weak intellect, poor temperament, or personal immorality, however harshly his critics judge them.

It is institutional.

A constitutional republic is supposed to make the personal character of any one president less important by dividing power among institutions.

Congress writes laws. Courts interpret them. Prosecutors enforce them impartially. Civil servants administer them. Presidents execute them within constitutional limits.

When those barriers weaken, presidential character suddenly matters enormously.

Trump’s critics describe him as dishonest, narcissistic, vindictive, and obsessed with personal enrichment. Trump and his supporters reject those descriptions and portray his aggressive use of presidential power as necessary to break a corrupt establishment.

The relevant question for a democracy is not which psychological diagnosis best describes the president. It is whether institutions remain strong enough that the answer does not determine the fate of the country.

That is where the legacy of Sept. 11 becomes especially troubling.

America spent 25 years constructing government machinery on the assumption that extraordinary executive power would be directed against extraordinary enemies.

It did not adequately confront the possibility that someday those powers might be directed by a president willing to use government institutions against domestic opponents or for personal and political advantage.

Bin Laden could not have designed this future

There is a grim paradox in this history.

Bin Laden wanted Americans to believe their government could not protect them. Washington responded by creating a security apparatus that could effectively eradicate any semblance of liberty and justice enjoyed by citizens.

Bin Laden wanted to drain American resources. Washington squandered trillions of dollars.

He wanted American troops drawn into prolonged conflicts in the Muslim world. The United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and remained at war for decades, only to plunge itself into another quagmire with Iran.

He wanted to damage America’s international legitimacy. Washington supplied Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and torture.

He wanted to polarize the West and the Muslim world. American politics spent years treating Muslims as objects of suspicion while the wars supplied extremists with recruitment propaganda.

He wanted to expose what he regarded as American hypocrisy. Washington weakened some of the fundamental civil liberties and legal restraints it claimed distinguished American democracy from its enemies.

And he wanted to weaken the world’s dominant superpower.

Twenty-five years later, the United States carries more than $40 trillion in federal debt while confronting China, Russia and Iran in a dramatically more competitive international order. The Trump administration is simultaneously engaged in tariff disputes with historic allies, exacerbating tensions with global adversaries, and expanding confrontation with Iran.

Not all — or even most — of those developments can be blamed on Sept. 11, but they contributed to the formation of the world produced by America’s choices afterward.

The victory America handed its enemy

The most important distinction is moral responsibility.

Al Qaeda bears responsibility for Sept. 11.

The United States bears responsibility for what the United States chose to do afterward.

That includes decisions by Republicans and Democrats alike. Bush launched the wars. Congress overwhelmingly authorized the initial response. Barack Obama expanded drone warfare and preserved significant portions of the national-security apparatus. Trump expanded executive claims during his first presidency. Joe Biden maintained substantial surveillance and national-security authorities. Trump returned to office with the accumulated powers of all of them.

The post-9/11 transformation therefore cannot credibly be blamed on one party.

That makes the lesson more disturbing, not less.

The United States did not lose its restraint in a single coup.

It surrendered pieces of it incrementally, often with bipartisan votes, respectable legal opinions and assurances that extraordinary measures were necessary because extraordinary dangers demanded them.

The ultimate strategic achievement of Sept. 11 may therefore have been something bin Laden could never have accomplished himself.

He could kill Americans.

He could destroy buildings.

He could terrify millions.

But he could not compel Congress to spend trillions of dollars.

He could not order the invasion of Iraq.

He could not create Guantánamo.

He could not authorize torture.

He could not construct America’s surveillance infrastructure.

He could not transfer additional power to the presidency.

He could not undermine confidence in American institutions.

And he could not transform the United States into an authoritarian state.

Only Americans and their government could do those things.

Whether the United States has crossed that final threshold remains contested. Elections still occur. Courts still constrain presidents. Opposition politicians, journalists and civic organizations continue to operate. Calling contemporary America a dictatorship therefore goes beyond what those facts alone establish.

But the direction of travel is a legitimate subject of alarm.

The terrible irony of the post-9/11 era is that America mobilized overwhelming power to prevent its enemies from destroying its way of life while progressively weakening some of the institutions and restraints that constituted that way of life.

Bin Laden died in Pakistan in 2011.

The machinery America built because of him survived.

The wars continued.

The debts accumulated.

The surveillance expanded.

The emergency presidency endured.

And a quarter-century after 19 terrorists attacked the United States, Americans confront the possibility that the most enduring damage from Sept. 11 was not what their enemies did to the country in a single morning.

It was what fear persuaded the world’s richest and most powerful nation to do to itself.