Why We Need to Remember 9/11

National Review Online

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

On a perfectly clear morning 25 years ago, America changed forever.

 

At 8:46 a.m. on that day, a team of Islamic terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 76 passengers and eleven crew members, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It was followed 17 minutes later by United Airlines Flight 175, carrying 51 passengers and nine crew members, which terrorists steered into the South Tower. Less than 90 minutes later, both of those towers had collapsed into a massive pile of rubble.

 

Meanwhile, as Americans’ televisions were tuned to live footage of the burning buildings, American Airlines Flight 77, carrying 53 passengers and six crew members, was slammed into the Pentagon. And shortly after, United Airlines Flight 93, with 33 passengers and seven crew members, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa.

 

Today, we remember the 2,977 innocent victims who were the first casualties in what would become known as the War on Terror. We also remember the extraordinary heroism displayed that day, without which the horrific losses would have been far worse.

 

One of the most miraculous facts about that day was that at the World Trade Center, which may have had an occupancy of 19,000 people between the two buildings at the time, 99 percent of those who were below the point of impact of the planes survived. This achievement is owed to the extraordinary evacuation efforts of first responders, who ran into burning buildings, no doubt knowing that there was a good chance they wouldn’t make it out. In the end, 441 firefighters, police officers, and paramedics did not.

 

Then there was the civilian heroism displayed by the passengers on Flight 93, who had heard about what happened at the World Trade Center, overtook the plane, and ensured that it crashed in an empty field rather than into the U.S. Capitol or White House, one of which was believed to be the potential target. Passenger Todd Beamer’s remark to his fellow passengers, “Let’s roll,” overheard from a phone call, became a rallying cry as the nation fought back.

 

At the time, everyone expected another attack in short order. There was a network of highly trained terrorists imbued with radical Islamic ideology and determined to cripple America and bring down the West. There have been a number of subsequent attacks throughout the world (such as the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the 2005 London bombings, the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting and other attacks in Paris, and of course, the October 7 attacks in 2023). There have also been smaller-scale jihadi-inspired attacks in the​ U.S., such as the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and the 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting. But none of these attacks on U.S. soil were anything close to what happened on September 11.

 

Some argue that the lack of major terrorist incidents in ensuing years proves that the nation overreacted after  September 11. Clearly, though, increasing domestic security, pursuing more aggressive intelligence gathering, killing rank-and-file jihadis as well as their leaders, and disrupting and dismantling terrorist networks made it much harder to pull off a second mass-casualty attack. We know, based on terrorist plots that were foiled, that the failure of Islamists to pull anything off akin to 9/11 was not for lack of trying.

 

On ​September 11, George W. Bush was out of sight most of the day, as he was being safely moved from an event in Florida back to Washington. At the time, it was New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani who filled the vacuum in an exemplary way, soberly conveying the scale of the tragedy, offering practical information on rescue efforts, and delivering a message of defiance. It wasn’t until Bush visited rescue workers at the site days later that he emerged as a wartime leader. In perhaps the most iconic moment of his presidency, the crowd struggled to hear him and he shouted back through a bullhorn, “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

 

One thing worth stating about the initial response is that it defied Osama bin Laden’s impression of America when planning the attacks. The terrorist leader had often cited previous examples in which the U.S. had pulled back when dealing with losses, including after the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia.

 

The invasion of Afghanistan almost surely would have happened in some form or other under any U.S. president and was a matter of near-universal consensus at the time. The Iraq War was more controversial at the outset, but Congress voted to authorize the conflict. The decision-making in the run-up to the war is impossible to understand absent the context of September 11, which made it seem intolerable that Saddam Hussein would have weapons of mass destruction (as we eventually learned, the intelligence on this question was desperately flawed).

 

In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. got entangled in long engagements in societies we didn’t fully understand. Joe Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan handed the country back to the Taliban, while Iraq — after the expenditure of much U.S. blood and treasure — has emerged as a flawed democracy and a flawed security partner of the United States. The disillusionment caused by the wars had a large hand in electing Barack Obama and then Donald Trump.

 

Twenty-five years later, Islamism is still a threat, and the moral clarity in the immediate aftermath of September 11 is long gone; in fact, the third-worldist ideology increasingly ascendant in the Democratic Party has significant overlap with the worldview of the anti-Western forces arrayed against us.

 

One antidote to this poison is to remember what happened on September 11, and who did it and why.

Twenty-Five Years Later, We Must Rebuild

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

My mother called, of course. She would call to tell me about the weather where I lived, nearly 2,000 miles from her, and I would patiently (I hope) remind her that I was both the editor of the local newspaper and a man with windows and, as such, generally au courant on the weather. On that infamous day, as she watched the bloody events unfold in Manhattan and in Washington, she called to make sure that I was safe and to inquire how close I had been to the terrible scene. I told her the truth, which on an ordinary day might not have been all that reassuring but which should have settled the matter on September 11, 2001:

 

“Mom, I live in Philadelphia.”

 

There is a strange human emotional need to feel closer to important events—and especially to terrifying events—than we actually are. I suspect that feeling closer to the event makes us feel more like participants, which seems to put us in a stronger position than that of being people that things simply happen to. But, mostly, in reality, we are people that things simply happen to.

 

For the first couple of hours, my 9/11 unfolded in the same way it did for many other people. I heard that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center, and I pictured something about the size and shape of a Cessna turboprop. “Hell of a thing to not be able to miss,” I thought. And then I learned that it had been an airliner. I continued to assume that it was some kind of unlikely accident until I saw—I was watching the television news like everybody else—the second airplane strike the second tower.

 

From there, I spent the day in much the same way as the few thousand other Americans working in news media: I threw out what we had planned for the next issue and got to work. We looked for local connections, of course—that is much of what local newspapers do—but there were not very many, at least of the headline-generating kind. A few residents of our affluent suburb were semi-regular Manhattan commuters, but we did not identify any that had been killed in the attack that day. The story was different in Yardley, Pennsylvania, on the northeastern side of Philadelphia, where at least three residents died in the World Trade Center. Michael R. Horrocks, co-pilot of United 175, was from another suburb to the west of the city and died when his flight crashed into the south tower. Over time, the web of local connections would grow, as, indeed, such connections reached into communities across the country: a brother or a sister or a cousin who died in the World Trade Center, a colleague who lost her life when her flight was crashed into the Pentagon, a high school friend who had rescued men and women from the burning buildings and lived to tell the story. In time, these would be supplemented by the experiences of men and women serving in the military or intelligence agencies and deployed to Afghanistan. But for most of us, what touched us most directly was an agent of the newly constituted Transportation Security Administration. At some level, we wanted more. We did not want to be spectators.

 

Life did go on. And, yet, it is true that everything changed.

 

Beyond the literal bloodshed, the attacks were a cultural catastrophe for the United States, unleashing waves of paranoia, resentment, and sourness that have permanently defaced American public life. The effect probably was intensified by its timing, coming in the wake of the extended contestation of the 2000 presidential election and shaping a particularly ugly political period, the final months of which were consumed by the 2008 financial crisis.

 

Just as we feel a need to be directly connected to dramatic events, we also feel an evident need to believe that we live in remarkable times. Allow me to posit something different: We live in the most ordinary kind of times. Murder, war, economic and social upheaval, domestic insecurity, predatory authoritarianism, political corruption—these are the most ordinary things in the world. People sometimes speak about the damage done by “normalizing” Donald Trump and his brand of politics, as though these required normalizing, as though they were not absolutely normal in the same way poverty and malaria and child abuse are normal and have been for most people at most times.

 

What was unusual was the period that might be narrowly defined as running from November 9, 1989, to September 11, 2001—which is to say, from the fall of the Berlin Wall until 9/11—or perhaps more generously defined as beginning in October 1946, when the World War II draft came to an end and Americans began to enjoy the emerging postwar reality, which was defined by an American-made, American-led, and, at times, American-enforced world order based on economic liberalism and international democratic cooperation that merited—how easy it is to forget—the use of that much-abused word unprecedented.

 

We now talk a great deal, and generally stupidly, about “unity,” but there was little of that commodity to be had in those remarkable postwar years, certainly not among such figures as Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Sam Rayburn, and Barry Goldwater—every man on that list despised at least one of the others and had slight regard for most of the rest—but from the point of view of the degraded present, it is impossible not to see that each had more in common—a world more in common—with his most bitter political rival than any of them would have in common with such a contemptibly decadent figure as Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mike Johnson, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Chuck Schumer, or Ron DeSantis, each of whom is, in his own especial way, emblematic of the post-9/11 American condition.

 

With due respect for the efforts of the excellent men and women in our intelligence and national security agencies, the reason we have not had another 9/11-level attack is because no one has decided to inflict such an attack on the United States. As regards the original Al-Qaeda, that was, I am told, an unexpected benefit of the group’s ideology: Osama bin Laden et al. were disinclined to carry out another terror spectacular unless it could exceed 9/11 in scope and carnage, and it never had the opportunity. It is much more difficult to orchestrate a large and complex conspiracy than it is to fight an intifada. But the United States remains an open and liberal society offering a rich selection of soft targets, and anybody with a decent array of financial and political resources—to say nothing of the state power of Russia or China—could inflict five times the death toll of 9/11 on any given Tuesday, if they chose. We ought to consider it likely, if not certain, that someone at some point will choose to do that.

 

We are not ready. We are not ready militarily, logistically, politically, or financially. We are not ready morally. We are, at the moment, ill-prepared for even the ordinary challenges facing an ordinary liberal democracy: demographic pressure on public spending and the general economy, the burden of public debt, managing the movement of people, capital, and data in a technologically empowered, low-friction world.

 

Whatever kind of vandalism the populists may get up to, we will continue to live in a world that is technologically and economically integrated to a degree that would have been difficult to imagine in 1989, to say nothing of 1946. The trauma of 9/11, amplified by the financial crisis and aggravated by factors such as mass migration, deepened the socioeconomic rift between the so-called elites and Michael Brendan Dougherty’s emblematic disability fraudsters in Garbutt, New York. What we call, for lack of a better term, globalization presents itself to the former group mainly as a set of economic and cultural opportunities and to the latter group mainly as a set of economic and cultural burdens, real and imagined. And so the quadrille of American politics today is defined by the left and right wings of the so-called elite that alternately compete and coordinate with each other and with left and right wings of the considerably larger group of incoherent populists who believe that their lives can be improved by pillaging those who are financially better off and by inflicting ritual humiliation on those occupying superior social positions. As political conditions go, that is pretty normal, too: The arrangement would have been recognizable enough to Cicero or to Julius Caesar, a patricians’ patrician who knew something about coopting the plebs.

 

One short decade after that 9/11 telephone call with my mother, I was living in an apartment in Lower Manhattan from which I could watch, from my kitchen window, the continuing work on the tower at One World Trade Center. I got a phone call from someone claiming to be Donald Trump’s publicist—I assume it was Trump himself, in the persona of his imaginary friend “John Barron,” though I do not remember precisely—informing me that the celebrity game show host was planning to run for president in 2012 and was eager to speak with me about his economic ideas. Would I be interested in interviewing him? “Of course,” I said, thinking to myself: “This will be hilarious.” The interview did not happen—Trump abruptly decided against running. I thought of the episode as nothing other than a missed opportunity for me as a journalist.

 

These things can be unpredictable.

 

It was not necessary that the post-9/11 political reality would be one dominated by a honking bridge-and-tunnel demagogue (or two), with the president lying about how he spent that day, trying to intensify his personal connection to the events while waving around the promise of $5,000 checks with his name on them, a “Trump dividend.” It is only in retrospect that things seem to have the quality of inevitability. But one can see the shadow of the thing early in the post-9/11 era, for instance in the Kulturkampf fight over a proposal to build an Islamic cultural center near the ruins of the World Trade Center, the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, a controversy that helped to make a big figure out of Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld and which inspired Trump to stage a publicity stunt, offering to buy out the project’s investors. The Republican Party quickly lurched from millennial optimism to embrace a coalition of the fearful and resentful—people who had not thought much about free markets or regulatory reform, who had not read much Buckley or Hayek, but who knew who they feared and hated: Them. Things were more complicated for progressives, with their cultural and financial investments in elite institutions and the professional prestige conferred by them, but a politics of Them fit—and fits—easily enough with a politics of grievance-led redistribution and left-oriented economic resentment, all that dumb talk of the “1 percent” and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “allah-garks,” as he pronounces the word.

 

The politics of Them has been the dominant theme of American public life ever since.

 

More than a third of the U.S. population today is under 30 years of age. This is the only America they ever have known. They may have seen the new World Trade Center, which is, in a kind of perverse victory for continuity in aesthetics if nothing else, about as ugly as the old one, but its symbolic status is mostly lost on them. Those of us who are older want to tell them that this is not normal, but, of course, it is we who are the outliers, we graybeards with our books and our memories. This is not the “new normal”—it is just normal, from the wider historical point of view. What we should be trying to make them understand is not that this is not normal but that normal is not good enough. The thing to get at is the truth that finally confronts every philosopher and every alcoholic: that the great enemy cannot be put down on the battlefield because that is not where we meet him. We meet him at home, at work, in our most private thoughts, in the mirror. Today, on the anniversary of that terrible day, we will have flags and flags and flags and a barrage of treacly social media commentary. In an older age, we would have called for a day of prayer and fasting. And that is what is really called for—that is the beginning of the thing that needs doing, the long and uncomfortable work of renewal.

 

A quarter of a century in, it is time at last to begin the real work of rebuilding.

September 11 Has Become History

By Dan McLaughlin

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Where did 25 years go? If, like me, you lived through the September 11 attacks on the ground in New York (or Washington), the memory remains fresh and vivid. But time never stops marching on.

 

An entire generation has come of age with no living memory of September 11. There are college graduates in the workforce, and even on the National Review staff, who were born after that day. That feels surreal to me, much as it must have felt surreal for people who remembered Pearl Harbor to encounter the Baby Boom generation. But it is the way of the world. Eventually, everything stops being news and becomes history. History means words and pictures, not the smell of the air or the mood of the week. Things that changed everything only feel that way if you remember what it was like before those things changed.

 

That has a lot of implications both for commemoration and for the learning of lessons. It always has. I’ve argued before that the timeline of the building of Confederate statues and monuments should be understood generationally: Many of them were built by the sons and daughters of the Confederate veterans as they were beginning to die off. The pattern recurs; it explains why there was such a large boom in commemorations of the Second World War and its attendant horrors in the 1990s (think of Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List and the coining of the term “Greatest Generation”). The Vietnam War was run by men who had served in the Second World War, who couldn’t understand why the younger generation saw it so differently. One of the recurrent themes of the book I’m writing on the 1850s is that the tempo of wars and revolutions increased as the generation of men who remembered the Napoleonic Wars and would do anything to avoid reopening the Pandora’s box of general European war were passing from the scene. They were replaced by people impatient with the status quo.

 

Predictably, as has happened to past events such as the moon landing, the decay of shared collective memory of what happened offers fertile ground for conspiracy theorists to replace reality with their own narratives. This stuff has old roots in the mid-2000s — in anti-Bush and anti-war politics, in antisemitism, and most of all in the intersection of those impulses — but has taken on a whole new life with YouTube, TikTok, and other forms of non-written social media increasingly bombarding the generation that didn’t experience September 11 as a real event. Nefarious operatives such as Tucker Carlson exploit that opportunity for their own purposes. Douglas Murray has a bracing essay at the Free Press about this. There’s a desperate need on college campuses for the truth of what happened. Many college kids were not adequately inoculated against false 9/11 narratives in advance, in the way that the wisest Americans inoculated their countrymen and children as early as the 1940s against Holocaust denial. There are sources out there that do so, including the invaluable 2005–06 work of Popular Mechanics, but these are useful only to people aware of them.

 

On the other hand, if you were a twentysomething or so on September 11 — I was a month from turning 30 myself — the passage of a quarter century is a vivid reminder of quite how much life was taken from those who died, the bulk of whom were under 40. I’ve seen the two children I had then grow up, and had another five years later. I’ve had a whole second writing career since then, as well as the bulk of my legal career. It’s almost half of my life. All those firemen and traders and secretaries and travelers had a lot more life to live, and never got the chance.

 

Atrocities will do that. Anne Frank was five years younger than Jimmy Carter, who outlived her by eight decades.

 

Memory prefers the vivid to the coldly rational. I remember the doomed fire engines streaming down Manhattan’s avenues (closed to all other traffic) at top speed, their flags flapping in the perfect sunlight, as the rest of us were trudging on foot northward as fast as we could get away from danger. Those men had to know that many of them would not come home. My uncle, who as an FDNY higher-up had overseen many drills of the department’s protocols for responding to fires in the Twin Towers, has always said that he knew right away that the Fire Department was going to lose a lot of good men that day. The firemen were trained to go into danger and stay there until they got everybody else out.

 

I remember the forlorn hopes. The city was festooned with the pictures of missing family members. Almost none were ever found alive, and few were even found in condition to be buried.

 

I remember the smoke and the smell. We lived on a hill in Queens, from where you could see the towers, and then they were gone, but for a few days the cloud lingered, and so did the reek.

 

I remember the spirit of defiance. Nobody wanted to give an inch to the people who had taken so much from us. My law firm, through heroic efforts, was back to work the following Monday. We had nothing to work on — no files, no computers, no telephones. It was like Whoville on Christmas morning. But we were there.

 

I remember not knowing when it was over. It took a while to be sure that the Pentagon was the last attack (well, that and Flight 93). For weeks, there were additional scares — anthrax, bomb scares. Any tunnel was a place from which there could be no escape if it was brought down, and New York is nothing if not a labyrinth of tunnels, bridges, and skyscrapers.

 

The generation that knew Pearl Harbor has all but gone. We know that our own memories will go with us someday, too. We confront, once again, the question that Ronald Reagan faced when he left the Oval Office just shy of his 78th birthday. On his mind was the danger of forgetting where we have been and what it cost:

 

Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. . . . If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. . . .

 

We’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. . . . If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. . . . All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins.

 

It seems quaint today even to speak of talking at the family dinner table. But September 11 is now our history. Make sure it is passed on.

What September 11 Took From Us

By Mike Nelson

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

On September 9, 2001, Americans across the country gathered in front of their TVs for the first episode of a new HBO miniseries—a series that remains one of their most enduring successes. After the distinctive HBO logo and static played, but before the opening theme music that would later become iconic, audiences watched a series of short interviews with old men. These men had lived full lives as fathers and grandfathers and had succeeded in a wide range of careers. But despite these long personal histories, separate from one another, they were speaking about a relatively brief period that would prove to be the defining event of their lives. They were the paratroopers of Easy Company 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and between June 6, 1944 and May 8, 1945, they fought and defeated Nazi evil. We know them, of course, as the Band of Brothers.

 

Two days after this premier episode, a different group of paratroopers was culminating a brigade field training exercise on Fort Bragg when, roughly 500 miles away, the event that would set in motion the defining period of their history was happening—and changing the course of the world. September 11 was not only a shocking tragedy and an inhuman mass murder, it marked a delineation in history, a turning point from the path the world had been on, and a denial of what might have been. Like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or the fall of the Iron Curtain, there was the world before these events, and then there was the very different world afterward.

 

I was one of the paratroopers of 2^nd Brigade, 82^nd Airborne Division who had been in the field that day. We are not alone in saying September 11 changed our lives forever and set in motion a course of events that would define who we were for the rest of our days–just as their service in World War II defined who the men of Easy Company had been. We thought we would be off to war, almost immediately, to respond to this attack on the United States—in fact, we would have to wait 18 months until the invasion of Iraq to get “our war.” For many of us, September 11 began a new constant in our lives, of repeated deployments over the course of two decades, to the point where the deployments became “real life” more than the time at home between them, a phenomenon written about by Special Forces Team Sgt. Josh Thompson.

 

Some deployed once but had their lives altered by what they saw and did. Some, like my fellow Dispatch contributor David French, or Sen. Tom Cotton, or Pete Hegseth, decided to leave lucrative, stable, and safe careers behind to answer their country’s call, when nothing but patriotism compelled them to do so. Many did not return and, unlike the men speaking at the beginning of Band of Brothers, would not have long lives to reflect on their service. Many of us who served over the course of two decades remember exactly where we were on September 11; others were not born yet or were too young to remember, including Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, and Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui. Despite all being 8 months old or younger on September 11, they were five of the final 13 American casualties of the war that September 11 started. They were killed in 2021 at Abbey Gate during the evacuation from Afghanistan. These Marines had literally lived their entire lives in the shadow of the war on terror, and, ultimately, their life stories and that of America’s involvement in Afghanistan tragically ended together. Who knows what they might have done with their lives had September 11 never happened—a question that applies equally to all service members lost in the war and the thousands who died 25 years ago during the attacks.

 

The attacks affected thousands of families in New York, Virginia, and across the country. There were empty chairs at Thanksgiving dinner, representing those who had merely gone to work or boarded a plane as though it were any other day. Graduation parties and wedding ceremonies would forever feel incomplete because a loved one was missing. That scale of the loss of that day is hard to fathom. Any tragedy that claimed 343 firefighters would have been previously unimaginable, but that represented just about 11 percent of the human toll that day. September 11 shook us all to our core. But for the families of those lost to hatred and evil that day, it was not just a day of horror, fear, and anger but also incalculable grief, in some cases without confirmation of what had happened to their loved ones for days.

 

I had grown up as an Army brat, attended a military college, and then served in the Army. The war after September 11 had a bit of a siloing effect for me. Most of my college friends had gone into the military. All the friends I made after college were those I met in the military. The war was a constant and common factor in our lives, complete with too-frequent reports that a friend one hadn’t seen in years had been killed in combat. In 2011, when I was on my fifth deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, my younger brother was deployed to Iraq at the same time. I found myself anxious and worried because, despite my experience, my brother was in a situation I could not control, affect, or even have day-to-day visibility on. It was my first time experiencing the stress of the unknown borne by so many families in the United States.

 

The sudden departure from the post-Cold War new world order and relative stability of the ’90s has been attributed to a “failure of imagination,” that American intelligence and law enforcement services did not anticipate the means by which determined, malign actors could exploit the seams in our security network and use everyday civilian items (boxcutters and airplane tickets) to inflict the worst attack against the American homeland since Pearl Harbor—this one primarily against our civilian population. While the nature of the attack was something with which we were not prepared to contend, the larger issue was that we, as a country, did not take the threats against us seriously. Al-Qaeda, for its part, had not been hiding its desire to attack Americans. Al-Qaeda terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, killed American service members in Saudi Arabia in 1995, bombed two American embassies in 1998, and attacked the USS Cole in 2000. They went so far as to explicitly tell us their intentions with a declaration of war in 1996 and a fatwa against the United States in 1998. Despite all of this, we continued to believe terror would remain an unfortunate but manageable threat. We did not properly understand how destructive it could be, nor how much the subsequent effort to defeat it would set a new course for America around the world.

 

While we may wonder to ourselves what the world and our country would be like had it not been for September 11, a less theoretical and more practical exercise would be to ask ourselves what threats today represent the modern equivalent of al-Qaeda’s growing danger that was unleashed that day. What enemies and adversaries, while signaling their nefarious intent, are mistakenly believed to be manageable nuisances instead of actors bent on carrying out the next world-altering action? The number of adversaries is myriad, their intent and desire to disrupt the world order is growing, and the potential to invite attacks in the face of American insouciance and impulsiveness is real. If we are not vigilant now, we may find ourselves asking similar questions about the human lives lost on some other 25^th anniversary in the future.

 

I have now lived more of my life in a post-9/11 world than the one in which I grew up. But even without the passage of time, the attacks and the subsequent wars that resulted would still be what defined so much of my life and the lives of those close to me, just as it did to those men speaking in interviews on HBO. And, as much as I love and will constantly rewatch this series about the heroes who came before, one thing gives me pause. After the interviews, the opening credits play to the familiar notes of the series theme song. I cannot stand that iconic music. You see, that’s what would play at the beginning of every memorial ceremony held at 5^th Special Forces Group for those killed in the wars that defined my generation. It has come to represent those lives that, without the attacks of September 11, would not have been lost.

‘Sign Me Up’

By Daniel Foster

Thursday, September 10, 2026

 

The first thing anyone will tell you about that day is how beautiful it was. The kind of Tuesday you can go a whole late summer and early fall without getting one of. The kind that by rights should have been a Saturday. Pure blue with little white cotton balls, warmth without humidity, the mildest breeze. In the 25 years since, I can remember maybe two or three that were that beautiful. Honest to God maybe none.

 

It was so nice that my first-period physics class went outside to run some impromptu experiment or other on the football field, so we missed the first announcement over the loudspeaker. When we came back inside, there was a kid in the hall who mumbled the news. He didn’t seem too worked up. We figured a Cessna, something like that, just like everybody else did.

 

When the second one hit, there wasn’t any doubt. That’s when every channel preempted and started looping the first video that came in. It was senior year, Ramsey High School, Ramsey, N.J.

 

I don’t think they officially said we could leave, but a good number of parents who were in a position to do so came and picked up their kids. Most of us stayed, though, even the upperclassmen with cars. What else were you supposed to do?

 

We shuffled from class to class. With few exceptions, the teachers had the TVs on, muted, and none of them said much. Someone from the front office was covering my AP Spanish class — our teacher’s husband had been at work in the North Tower. He made it out.

 

My biology lab partner from the year before — her dad didn’t.

 

I had gotten my first cellphone, a little gray brick manufactured by the Siemens corporation, over the summer. I placed my first-ever phone call from school property and during school hours to my Uncle Richie, who worked in Midtown. I thought I should check in, just to be safe. We’re sorry. All circuits are busy now. Please try your call again later.

 

I want to say the first tower collapsed during political science class, on the nose as it sounds. I say that because I distinctly remember the voice of our white-haired social studies teacher — and defending state champion varsity-baseball coach — cracking as we watched it live. I don’t remember if it was an Oh God or an Oh no, just that it was some vocalized anguish in a register I had never heard from him before and never did after.

 

At lunch a few of us piled into my friend Ed’s piece of junk and went to the McDonald’s on the hill. That’s when we actually saw it, staring south and east down Route 17. The city skyline etched on the horizon, the righthand side of it enfolded in a wall of black smoke.

 

At a bank of plastic tables over Big Macs, one of the guys shook his head slowly and said, “Sign me up.” A few others nodded. I don’t think Ed nodded. But he served in Afghanistan all the same, working on helicopters for the Marine Corps.

 

I didn’t know it at the time, but I saw lots of Marines that day. Some soldiers and sailors and airmen too, but a disproportionate number of Marines. The soccer captain, a good-natured goofball, became an exceptional Marine infantry officer, commanding a platoon and then serving as XO of a rifle company. Ten years later, he and I sat across a bar just a couple of blocks from National Review and he told me things about — Helmand Province maybe? — that filled me with dread.

 

The closest thing my grade had to Zack Morris, a megawatt-smiled guy I’ll call Bryan, was enlisted, and I think he was in Iraq. He still pops up on my Facebook, either to post pictures of his kids or remembrances on the anniversaries of the suicides of his brothers-in-arms.

 

I can count off a dozen or so others in the few grades above me and the few grades below whom I didn’t know as well, but who turned their lives 90 degrees from whatever else they were destined to be to serve their country. So a lot of kids in Ramsey, N.J., said “sign me up” that day, and a lot of them actually meant it.

 

Of those who meant it, some never came home.

 

Staff Sergeant Eric D. Christian, a few years older than me, enlisted in the Corps not long after that day and endured an incredible five combat deployments before being killed in a “green on blue” attack in Afghanistan in 2013.

 

Sergeant Michael Reilly, class of 2000, worked on Marine helicopters like my friend Ed, though in Michael’s case in Iraq. He made it home, but the call of duty brought him to Engine Company 75 of the FDNY, and he died in a roof collapse in the Bronx in 2006.

 

Staff Sergeant Timothy R. McGill graduated a year before me. He deployed to Iraq in 2005, returning to Ramsey on his discharge. Duty called him as it did Reilly, and Tim reenlisted, this time in the Army, where he eventually became a Green Beret. On September 13, 2013, he was killed in a place called Gardez near the Pakistani border. He left Ramsey six foot six, and according to one of the obituaries, his once lanky frame had filled out to 280 pounds. “A gentle giant,” it says.

 

There’s a stretch of Route 17 that today bears his name, not far from the McDonald’s where some of the guys said “Sign me up.”

 

Twenty-five years later, I remember them and all the others, and the sublime sacrifices to which they consecrated themselves on that most sublimely beautiful of days.

Forever Wars Are Good, Actually

By Daniel Foster

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the phrase “forever war” — popularized by journalist Dexter Filkins in his book-length account of the early occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan — has hardened from a worry into a despair. A war that lasts forever is ipso facto one that failed. And that is the verdict, nearing consensus, of observers of the Global War on Terror: The United States overreacted, pointed its hegemony at the wrong targets and thereby squandered it, chased “nation-building” and sunk costs, and lacked the wisdom to know when to fold a losing hand.

 

But the truth is more complex. With al-Qaeda and its successors-in-interest destroyed, degraded, or contained; multiple echelons and generations of its leaders killed or incarcerated; governments that had coddled terrorists pressed into counterterrorism cooperation; and multiple terror plots disrupted, the more defensible verdict is that the United States muddled through the post-9/11 era. That through fits and starts, we figured out how to fight a new and very different kind of war. That we built armed forces, intelligence apparatuses, legal architectures, and geopolitical strategies to match it. That we made Americans safer at home by killing and capturing jihadis abroad.

 

We were able to do all this because we conducted and continue to conduct a number of low-intensity wars and quasi-wars against nonstate actors in weakly sovereign states — ignoring borders when we can and respecting them only when we must; using mostly airpower, special operators, irregular forces, and proxies; pivoting from regime change, occupation, and counterinsurgency to a more modest but no less lethal footprint that minimizes “boots on the ground”; and maintaining a mix of precision strikes, targeted killings, intelligence gathering, and support and influence operations that continue to this day in places as far afield as the Philippines and the Caribbean.

 

This way of fighting is expensive in real dollar terms, and in terms of political capital as well, but as the strategy and the tactics coalesced, it settled into a tempo, casualty rate, and psychic load Americans could absorb in exchange for a high level of control over events that protect vital U.S. interests.

 

None of this is to say that the United States didn’t make mistakes. It made many — some of them enormities and tragedies. Invading Iraq in 2003 was obviously one of them. For whatever it’s worth, I opposed it at the time, though as a college freshman my voice did not prove dispositive. Nevertheless, “the Surge” of 2007 was correct because the alternatives were worse. And it is undeniably true that Iraq today, while no Denmark, is a functioning and free-standing state that is neither a Ba’athist dictatorship nor a Salafi emirate.

 

Indeed, the disastrous early occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the harsh lessons and limitations of the “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency we tried there, led us in turn to the mature strategy that eventually produced tangible gains in those countries and elsewhere. In July 2003, General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, called the country a “terrorist magnet,” and he meant that in a good way, adding that “this is exactly where we want to fight them.” Vice President Cheney repeatedly made the same argument, saying the United States would face our enemies “with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq today, so we do not have to face [them] with armies of firefighters, police, and medical personnel on the streets of our own cities.”

 

And sure enough, Iraq did become a kill box, drawing jihadists from around the world, fixing them in a battlespace where our intelligence, firepower, and logistics could be brought to bear to detain or delete them before they could attack our allies and interests abroad, much less our people and infrastructure at home.

 

On September 10, 2001, the U.S. intelligence community was still in its Cold War hangover, with a reputation as a bloated, deskbound institution too reliant on gadgets and money. The country’s counterterrorism apparatus, led by the FBI, was unduly constrained by a law-enforcement-centered approach ill-suited to handling both the state-sponsored and transnational nature of the threat.

 

After 9/11 those institutions were reshaped into something much more capable and kinetic: a global behemoth of human and signals intelligence, and an elite force of manhunters, multilateral partners, and paramilitary operators.

 

Law changed, too. Our Islamist enemies exploited the seams between sovereign states. The 2001 AUMF and the legal architecture built around issues like rendition and targeted killing were attempts — some worthier than others — to prevent international norms we helped author and vouchsafe from being weaponized against us.

 

That machinery helped capture the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in 2003. It killed al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, Osama bin Laden in 2011, and Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2022. And even as it settled old business with the original architects of 9/11, it developed novel approaches to dispatching their successors.

 

The so-called Islamic State lost the last of its caliphate in March of 2019. Its key leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed by U.S. special operations forces that October. But the nihilistic movement that once held vast swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria was destroyed, ultimately, by a coalition of state and substate actors with whom we shared neither morals nor ideals but merely narrow interests. Ironically, the same foreign policy thinkers who chastised our delusion in imposing Western values on Middle Eastern peoples clutched their pearls at “arming the moderate rebels.” But it was such rebels, moderate in the relativistic if not absolute sense, who, bearing Kalashnikovs and M4 carbines and under American air and intelligence cover, helped send Al-Baghdadi to hell and Bashar al-Assad to Moscow.

 

The successes of this more modest, more sober phase of the Global War on Terror show why it was also a mistake for the United States to unilaterally withdraw from Afghanistan. The American political class, beginning under Trump and culminating with Joseph R. Biden, overlearned the harsh lessons of 2003 or 2006, getting locked into frameworks disanalogous with America’s position in 2021, which by then involved a fraction of the troop totals, expenditures, and casualties of those earlier phases. Biden paid for his shambolic retreat in the polls, but many in both parties still share his mistaken way of thinking. That it was unwise to send 150,000 Americans into Iraq to nation-build then does not entail that it is unwise have a few hundred or a few thousand Americans in various Middle Eastern countries now — to gather intelligence, influence clients, and kill bad guys.

 

This is the category error at the center of “forever wars” as a slur. America was not wrong to recognize the threat of transnational radical Islamism or to take dramatic steps to confront it. The folly was the scale of its original ambition, well-intentioned as it was, to remake vast swaths of the Islamic world into liberal democracies via huge occupying armies and open-ended political, economic, and civil-societal commitments.

 

But it turns out that nation-building is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for creating favorable arrangements for the exercise of American power. Sometimes it is enough to have a landing strip, a listening post, a handful of game militiamen or a pliable minister, some drones, and a SEAL team.

 

This version of the Global War on Terror will never result in the permanent eradication of all named enemies. At best, it will maintain an advantageous equilibrium indefinitely, punctuated from time to time by moments of greater promise or more acute peril. But what more is practicable, or required?

 

Whatever this is, then, it is surely something short of a forever “war.” Call it the continuation, by other means, of politics. And nobody ever really thought we’d be rid of that, did they?

Trump Breaks Glass, Joins Socialists, Embraces Bribery

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 10 ,2026

 

Painfully aware that, once the midterms are over, he risks being gradually consigned to irrelevance, President Trump has hit once again upon a Hail Mary plan for political success. That plan is bribery. Last night, after vocally condemning the rise of socialism in the United States, Trump pledged some of his own. “If the Republicans win,” he told a crowd in Dallas, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”

 

No, no, no, no, no.

 

Did I mention “no”?

 

The Democrats who have condemned this idea are, of course, ridiculous, for in trying to trade votes for cash, Trump is merely adopting their approach without the middlemen or the euphemisms. But that is not a defense of the move — which is, in every sense possible, catastrophic.

 

Let us start with the obvious moral problem that the money in question does not belong to those to whom Trump is promising it. Explaining his idea, the president described it as a “dividend.” But, of course, it is no such thing. A dividend is money a company pays to its shareholders, usually from its profits. The United States is not a company; the voters are not its shareholders; and, to put it lightly, there are no profits to be shared. There is no reason whatsoever that each adult in America should be sent money from the federal government; there is no reason that, if it is to be sent, that money should be equally allocated; and there is no reason to condition such a payout upon the Republicans winning the midterms. This isn’t tax policy or fiscal policy; it is a reckless, shapeless, irritable spasm, divorced from the nature and purpose of our government and from the Constitution that created it.

 

Practically, the idea is deeply irresponsible. “Dividend” would remain the wrong word if the United States had no debt, a budget surplus, and 5 percent annual growth. But now? We are $40 trillion in debt. This year’s federal budget deficit will exceed $2 trillion. Sending $5,000 checks to every adult would cost around $1.3 trillion — more than the entire federal discretionary budget for 2026, and equivalent to about ten years of revenues from the tariffs that Trump’s feckless vice president insists will pay for this latest foray. Last year’s tax bill corrupted the sensible reforms of 2017 by adding a patchwork of irrational exemptions and special treatments: deductions for people who live in fiscally profligate states; preferences for workers who earn some of their income from tips; an expansion of the entitlements that are bankrupting us; and more. Trump’s checks-for-everyone gambit would corrupt our already corrupted budget in a similar — and considerably more consequential — manner.

 

Politically, the act would confirm for all time that the second Trump administration has been a failure. Trump was returned to office because a majority of voters believed that he could get inflation under control and thereby lower prices. Instead, Trump has publicly called for aggressive interest-rate cuts and imposed tariffs on all sectors of the economy. Adding another $1.3 trillion in stimulus would without doubt make the status quo worse. The populists are fond of insisting that the choice is between them and the socialists. This morning, that contention seems preposterous. Leaving to one side that the deliberate stoking of inflation by a president who defines himself as an anti-socialist is likely to lead to a thermostatic increase in the socialists’ support, one must ask the obvious question: If this is populism, what need is there of socialism at all?

 

Pundits and partisans routinely suggest that Donald Trump’s great electoral insight was to recognize that the public does not like being asked to eat its vegetables and that it does not want to be reminded of the dire fiscal situation that now stares it in the face. Analytically, this may be true. But “is” and “ought” are often irreconcilable, and, irrespective of their desires, the voters will not be able to outrun mathematics forever. Now, as ever, the old maxims are true. The purpose of government is to secure liberty and to tax and spend only in the realms in which it has been empowered. A society that permits its government to extort it will be a society without virtue. And, as Dickens’s Mr. Micawber famously observed, debt always leads to disaster in the end. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness,” Micawber tells David Copperfield. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty-pound ought and six, result misery.” That applies in America in 2026, too — on both sides of the ledger.