Twenty-five years ago, the twin towers fell. For a brief moment, the world stood still. NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time. Le Monde declared, “We are all Americans.” It felt like a rupture—a before and an after. And in the quarter-century since, the question lingered: Was 9/11 the watershed that hastened the decline of the American empire and the West?
The honest answer is yes—but not in the way most people imagine. 9/11 was not the cause of decline. It was an accelerant. It was a hinge that opened a door history was already pushing against. The unipolar moment was never going to last. The rise of China and India was already underway. The rot in American institutions predated the smoke of Lower Manhattan. What 9/11 did was tempt the United States into a series of choices that turned a manageable relative decline into a costly, self-inflicted detour—and in doing so, it hastened the arrival of a more multipolar world.
Consider what followed. In the name of fighting terror, the US launched two long wars I saw up close and personal, expanded a global surveillance architecture, built a detention camp at Guantánamo that became a legal black hole, and embraced torture under euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation.” Iraq was invaded on false pretenses, destroying whatever moral authority the war on terror still possessed. Afghanistan dragged on for twenty years, only to end with the Taliban back in Kabul. The financial cost ran into the trillions. The human cost—US, Iraqi, Afghan, and beyond—is incalculable. And while Washington was fighting the last war, China was quietly becoming the world’s factory, India was liberalizing and growing, and the center of economic gravity was shifting back to Asia.
This is the crux. The decline of American hegemony was not caused by 9/11. It was already baked into the structure of the post-Cold War order. The unipolar moment of 1991 to 2001 was a parenthesis, not a destination. The United States accounted for roughly forty percent of global GDP after World War II; today it is closer to a quarter. China joined the WTO in 2001, the same year as the attacks. India’s economic reforms began in 1991. The tectonic plates were already moving. What 9/11 did was distract the United States from managing that transition wisely. Instead of investing in infrastructure, education, and alliances, it poured blood and treasure into the Greater Middle East. Instead of adapting to a multipolar future, it tried to arrest history with firepower.
The West, too, was fractured by the response. The Iraq War split Europe—old versus new, France and Germany versus the United States and Britain. NATO’s Article 5 solidarity gave way to bitter recriminations. The moral capital the West had accumulated over decades was squandered at Abu Ghraib and in the drone strikes that killed innocent civilians. The “rules-based order” began to look like a slogan rather than a principle. Meanwhile, China and India offered the developing world something different: investment without lectures, infrastructure without invasion, sovereignty without conditionality. The West’s model lost its monopoly on attraction.
Domestically in the US, 9/11 fed the politics of fear. The Patriot Act normalized surveillance. Islamophobia became a vote-winning tactic. The security state grew. And the seeds of MAGA —the idea that America was being betrayed by its own elites, that the country needed to be taken back—were watered by the forever wars and the financial crisis that followed. The 2008 crash, not 9/11 alone, was the hammer blow to faith in Western institutions. But 9/11 set the stage: it concentrated power in the executive, normalized emergency politics, and made permanent war a background condition of American life.
Yet to say that 9/11 hastened decline is not to say it caused collapse. The United States remains the world’s most powerful military, its largest economy, and the center of a web of alliances that no rival can yet match. The West is not dead. Europe, despite its dysfunctions, is still a regulatory superpower and a democratic anchor. The decline is relative, not absolute. It is the loss of unipolarity, not the end of relevance. And much of that loss was inevitable. The rise of China and India is not a rebellion against history; it is history returning to its older shape. For most of recorded time, Asia was the center of the world economy. The past two centuries of Western dominance were the anomaly. What we are witnessing is a reversion to the mean.
So was 9/11 the watershed? It was a watershed in the way that a heart attack is a watershed for a patient with clogged arteries. The disease was already there. The attack did not create it. But it forced a crisis, triggered bad decisions, and accelerated the underlying condition. The wars, the debt, the surveillance, the torture, the polarization—these were choices. They were not inevitable. A different response—restrained, multilateral, focused on rebuilding legitimacy—might have allowed the United States to manage its relative decline with grace and remain a leading power in a multipolar world. Instead, it exhausted itself in the pursuit of primacy.
Twenty-five years on, the lesson is not that America was brought down by terrorists. It is that empires often hasten their own decline by overreacting to shocks. The towers fell, and so did the illusion of invulnerability. But the deeper fall—the erosion of trust, the squandering of moral authority, the distraction from Asia—was self-inflicted. The empire was not killed on 9/11. It was given a reason to exhaust itself.
The task now is not to mourn a lost unipolar moment. It is to build a sustainable role in a world that is returning to its natural, multi-civilizational shape. That world will not be dominated by any single power. It will be shaped by those who can adapt, who can rebuild their own foundations, and who can accept that history does not end—it only changes direction. 9/11 was a hinge. The door it opened leads to a different century. Whether the West walks through it with wisdom or resentment is still, for now, a choice.
