25 Years After 9/11: Did the West Learn the Right Lessons?

The September 11 attacks transformed American security and launched the War on Terror. A quarter-century later, the West has become far better at stopping terrorists—but far less successful at defeating the ideas and narratives that continue to produce them.

By Dan Feferman

Twenty-five years ago today, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger airplanes in the United States and changed the world.

The innovation was as simple as it was monstrous. Rather than hijack airplanes to demand ransom, political concessions or the release of prisoners—as terrorists had done for decades—al-Qaeda transformed passenger jets, and the hundreds of innocent people aboard them, into guided missiles.

Two aircraft were deliberately flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, at the heart of America’s financial system. A third struck the Pentagon. Passengers aboard the fourth, United Airlines Flight 93, fought back against their hijackers before the aircraft crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

In a matter of hours, 2,977 people from more than 90 countries were murdered and thousands more were injured. It remains the deadliest foreign attack on American soil.

But the numbers alone cannot convey what happened that morning. September 11 bent the world’s imagination in its cruelty. It demonstrated that a relatively small terrorist organization, operating thousands of miles from the United States and possessing nowhere near America’s military or economic power, could use ingenuity, patience and the openness of a free society to inflict a strategic shock on the most powerful country on earth.

International security norms changed almost overnight. Airports became fortresses. Intelligence agencies were reorganized. Financial networks were scrutinized. Borders were hardened. The United States launched what became known as the War on Terror, invaded Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda and remove its Taliban hosts, and less than two years later invaded Iraq in a war whose relationship to September 11 was always far more contested.

The consequences were enormous. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that the broader post-9/11 wars ultimately produced more than $8 trillion in American expenditures and obligations. Its researchers estimate that hundreds of thousands of people died directly from war violence across the major post-9/11 theaters, including hundreds of thousands of civilians, while millions more died from indirect consequences such as disease, displacement and the destruction of infrastructure.

Two and a half decades later, it is worth asking not only what September 11 changed, but something more uncomfortable:

Did we actually learn the right lessons?

What America Learned From September 11

The first lesson was tactical, and here the record is considerably better than many people recognize.

The 9/11 Commission famously concluded that America’s greatest pre-attack failure was a “failure of imagination.” Al-Qaeda had developed a new kind of threat, while American institutions remained organized largely according to an older conception of terrorism. The Commission identified failures not simply of intelligence collection, but of information-sharing, management, policy and the ability to connect fragments of information sitting in different agencies.

America responded.

The FBI transformed itself from an organization heavily oriented toward investigating crimes after they occurred into a much more intelligence-driven national-security institution. Joint Terrorism Task Forces expanded dramatically. The National Counterterrorism Center was established specifically to integrate terrorism intelligence and strategic planning across government agencies.

The financial world changed as well. Within weeks of the attacks, the United Nations unanimously adopted Security Council Resolution 1373, requiring states to criminalize terrorist financing, freeze terrorist assets and prevent their financial systems from being used by terrorist organizations. The Financial Action Task Force likewise expanded its mandate after 9/11 and established international standards specifically targeting terrorist financing.

Commercial aviation was fundamentally hardened. Reinforced cockpit doors, passenger watchlist screening, intelligence analysis, air marshals, improved explosives detection and multiple layers of airport security turned the specific 9/11 model of hijacking an aircraft and seizing the cockpit into an extraordinarily difficult operation. According to a Federal Aviation Administration assessment, no terrorist has successfully breached a U.S. commercial flight deck since September 11.

Nor was this merely bureaucratic activity. Intelligence cooperation stopped actual attacks. In 2006, close British-American cooperation disrupted an al-Qaeda plot to destroy multiple transatlantic passenger aircraft using liquid explosives—a conspiracy that, if successful, could have produced another catastrophe on the scale of September 11.

Al-Qaeda itself was devastated. Osama bin Laden was eventually killed. Much of its senior leadership was killed or captured, its freedom of action was sharply reduced, and its ability to centrally organize spectacular attacks against the American homeland was substantially degraded.

Later, when ISIS attempted to go even further—seizing huge parts of Iraq and Syria and proclaiming an actual territorial caliphate—another international coalition formed. By March 2019, ISIS had lost the last significant territory it controlled in Syria. According to the U.S. State Department, nearly eight million people had been freed from territory once controlled by ISIS, although the organization survived underground and through overseas branches.

These are not small achievements. Twenty-five years without another foreign terrorist organization carrying out anything remotely comparable to September 11 on American soil is not an accident. The intelligence officers, policemen, soldiers, diplomats and financial investigators who prevented those attacks deserve credit.

But those successes also obscured the deeper problem.

The Limits of the War on Terror

Afghanistan initially presented perhaps the clearest case for military force. Al-Qaeda had planned the September 11 attacks from a sanctuary provided by the Taliban. As documented by the 9/11 Commission, the Taliban regime allowed al-Qaeda to train, recruit, indoctrinate, move personnel and build an international terrorist network from Afghan territory. Removing that sanctuary was a legitimate and necessary security objective. Iraq was different.

The Bush administration presented Saddam Hussein’s regime as part of a wider post-9/11 threat environment, particularly because of alleged weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that such weapons could eventually intersect with terrorism. But the 9/11 Commission later found no evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda had developed a collaborative operational relationship or that Saddam’s government had participated in attacks against the United States.

The distinction matters, because Iraq exposed one of the central strategic mistakes of the post-9/11 period: believing that destroying an enemy’s army, government or infrastructure necessarily destroys the political and ideological forces that created the conflict. It does not.

The United States could dismantle Saddam Hussein’s army in weeks. It could not manufacture a stable Iraqi political culture nearly as quickly. The collapse of the Iraqi state created space for insurgency, sectarian warfare, al-Qaeda in Iraq and eventually ISIS, while Iran steadily expanded its influence through political parties and heavily armed Shiite militias.

Afghanistan produced its own brutal lesson. Twenty years after the Taliban were driven from Kabul, they returned to power as the United States withdrew. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor as al-Qaeda leader, was later found living in Kabul and killed there by a U.S. strike in 2022—an extraordinary reminder of how incomplete the transformation of Afghanistan had been.

Israel would later confront variations of the same problem with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. The United States encountered it with Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and later the United States encountered it with the Houthis in Yemen.

As it turns out, defeating a non-state actor that refuses to fight like a state, embeds itself among civilians, survives military punishment and defines victory simply as remaining alive is incredibly difficult. The weaker side does not necessarily have to defeat you. For the weaker side, survival can become victory.

American counterinsurgency doctrine eventually recognized this. One of the most memorable lines in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual is that “some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot.” Security is necessary, the doctrine argued, but lasting success depends on legitimacy, political structures, information, economics and separating the insurgent from the population that sustains him.

RAND researchers reached a similarly important conclusion after examining 648 terrorist organizations operating between 1968 and 2006. Of the groups that definitively ended during that period, 43 percent ended through a political process and 40 percent through police and intelligence activity. Military force was the primary cause in only 7 percent. The researchers also found that religiously motivated terrorist organizations tend to survive longer than others.

Military force is sometimes indispensable. There are terrorist leaders who must be killed, bases that must be destroyed and populations that must be physically protected. But overwhelming military force cannot, by itself, defeat a religiously or ideologically inspired movement.

America learned this in Vietnam. The Soviet Union learned it in Afghanistan. America and its allies learned it again in Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is where the deeper lesson of September 11 begins.

Builders and Destroyers

I have described the conflict shaping the Middle East—and increasingly the wider international system—as a struggle between builders and destroyers. The distinction is not between Muslims and non-Muslims, or East and West. Nor is it simply between democracies and dictatorships. It is between political cultures and movements that ultimately measure success by what they create, and those that measure success by what they can destroy.

Builders invest their human creativity in creating functioning economies, universities, businesses, technology, infrastructure, institutions and opportunities for the next generation.

Destroyers can be incredibly creative too. They simply put their creativity and energies into tearing down their enemy rather than building themselves up.

For years, this dynamic could be seen with almost laboratory clarity along Israel’s borders. Israel built one of the world’s leading technology economies. Hezbollah accumulated an arsenal of missiles, rockets, tunnels and military infrastructure across Lebanon. Gaza received billions in international assistance, yet Hamas devoted extraordinary resources, engineering talent and manpower to rockets, subterranean military networks and an armed infrastructure embedded throughout civilian areas.

These were engineering achievements in their own way. Building hundreds of kilometers of underground tunnels is not technologically trivial. Neither is creating missile-production networks, communications systems, drone programs or clandestine financing structures. The tragedy is what all of that human talent was used to build.

The destroyers built the capacity to destroy. But over the last two decades, they also began building something else. And in this field they often outperformed the West. They learned to fight for hearts and minds.

The War for Hearts and Minds

The post-9/11 West spent trillions fighting terrorists militarily while dramatically underestimating the ideological battlefield on which terrorism reproduces itself. Iran understood it. Qatar understood it. The Muslim Brotherhood understood it. Russia understood it. China understood it.

They did not all share the same ideology or strategic objectives. Far from it. Russia is not the Muslim Brotherhood, and Iran is not Qatar. Yet each recognized something that Western policymakers too often treated as secondary:

Narratives are power.

Iran built an “Axis of Resistance” that was military, political and ideological simultaneously. Qatar developed extraordinary soft-power influence through diplomacy, media, education and global investment. Islamist networks developed mosques, charities, civil-society organizations, student organizations and advocacy institutions. Russia inherited and modernized the Soviet tradition of information warfare. China constructed its own enormous ecosystem of influence, censorship and narrative management.

This was not a single centrally directed conspiracy. It did not need to be. Different actors with different interests repeatedly discovered that the same themes were useful: American imperialism, Western hypocrisy, capitalism as exploitation, Israel as colonialism and “resistance” as a moral category expansive enough to excuse nearly any brutality committed in its name.

The vocabulary itself is older than many of the people now repeating it. As Mideast Journal has previously examined in The Propaganda Behind the Iran War Was Made in Moscow—Decades Ago, much of today’s language surrounding American “imperialism,” Zionism and revolutionary “resistance” was cultivated extensively by Soviet propaganda decades before TikTok existed. Iran subsequently absorbed and Islamized many of those themes.

This is where the strange alliance sometimes described as the red-green alliance becomes possible. The revolutionary far left and political Islam disagree profoundly about religion, sexuality, gender, economics and the organization of society. Put them in power together and their alliance might not survive a week.

But they share enemies: the West, capitalism, liberal nationalism, American power and, disproportionately, Israel.

Israel therefore becomes more than another foreign-policy controversy. It becomes the test case through which an entire ideological worldview is taught: colonizer versus colonized, white versus non-white, oppressor versus oppressed, West versus Global South.

Once every conflict is forced into that binary, morality becomes strangely asymmetric. Violence committed by the designated “oppressed” can be contextualized indefinitely, while the exercise of power by the designated “oppressor” becomes inherently suspect. That is a remarkably useful ideological weapon for destroyers.

Universities and the Ideological Battlefield

Nowhere should this concern Western democracies more than their universities. Universities are supposed to be among the great institutions of the builder civilization: places dedicated to inquiry, argument, evidence, scientific progress and intellectual freedom. Yet foreign authoritarian governments have recognized their strategic value as well.

The scale of Qatari involvement alone is striking. U.S. Department of Education disclosures released in February 2026 showed that sources associated with Qatar accounted for more than $1.1 billion in reportable gifts and contracts to American universities during 2025 alone, making Qatar the largest foreign source that year.

Earlier research examining Section 117 foreign-funding disclosures found that Qatar was the largest identified source between 2014 and 2019, at approximately $2.76 billion disclosed as of September 2020. The question, however, is not simply whether Qatar writes large checks. Wealthy governments invest abroad all the time. The question is what influence follows.

A peer-reviewed 2024 study in Frontiers in Social Psychology, building partly on research conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute and ISGAP, examined foreign funding, academic-freedom disputes and antisemitism across American universities. The researchers found that universities receiving foreign funding from authoritarian governments and members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation showed significantly higher levels of several forms of antisemitic and anti-Zionist activity in their dataset.

They were careful to emphasize that the research demonstrated association, not proof of causation, and that several questions required further study. That caution matters. So do the findings.

This is an important distinction because making the argument stronger requires resisting the temptation to make it larger than the evidence allows. We cannot responsibly say that every Qatari donation purchases a professor or manufactures a protest.

We can say that billions of dollars are flowing from authoritarian states into institutions that shape the worldview of future Western elites, that substantial sums historically went undisclosed, and that serious empirical research has now found relationships between certain sources of that funding and illiberal or antisemitic activity deserving much greater scrutiny.

Mideast Journal has previously examined these questions in How Much Does Qatar Donate to American Universities?, looking at the scale of the funding and the legitimate questions it raises about foreign influence in American higher education. Ignoring this is not tolerance. It is strategic negligence.

This Is Not a War Between Islam and the West

There is another temptation we should resist: reducing this entire phenomenon to Muslims in the West becoming radical while Muslims in the Middle East become moderate. The evidence does not support such a simple divide.

There are genuinely troubling indicators in Western countries. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 21 percent of Muslim Americans considered the way Hamas carried out the October 7 attack completely or somewhat acceptable, although a clear majority rejected it. Pew simultaneously found that only 5 percent of Americans overall considered the attack acceptable.

But the problem extends far beyond Muslim communities. Among all Americans under 30, Pew found that 34 percent considered Hamas’s reasons for fighting Israel valid, although 58 percent still said the way Hamas carried out October 7 was unacceptable. That is precisely why this should not be understood as some crude religious struggle. The ideological battlefield cuts through Western society itself.

At the same time, developments inside the Middle East are not linear either. Arab Barometer found a substantial decline in trust in Islamist political parties between 2013 and 2018, but subsequent polling showed support for a larger role for religion in politics rebounding in several countries.

Islamism has not disappeared from the Middle East. Far from it. The more meaningful distinction is that a number of Arab governments have come to regard Islamist ideological mobilization as a national-security threat and act accordingly. Countries such as the UAE and Morocco have not limited themselves to police action. They have also invested in promoting alternative religious institutions, clerics and interpretations of Islam emphasizing tolerance, coexistence and national identity. They understood something the West often seems embarrassed to acknowledge: Ideas cannot be defeated only by arresting the people who act upon them. Bad ideas must also be defeated by better ones.

What the West Forgot After 9/11

In a recent conversation I recorded with Iraqi political and Middle East expert Entifadh Qanbar for our Middle East Breakdown podcast, he made a point that deserves much more attention.

The West, he argued, has failed to understand the deeper narratives used by Iran and Islamist movements to mobilize supporters. It is not enough to rebut the latest falsehood. One must understand the historical story being told—the language of humiliation, colonialism, conspiracy, resistance and victimhood—and then challenge it at its foundations.

There is an important Cold War precedent. The United States did not confront Soviet Communism using tanks and nuclear deterrence alone. Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty carried information, Western arguments and the voices of dissidents into societies where governments monopolized information. Declassified U.S. assessments described Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty as significant instruments for reaching behind the Iron Curtain, while Soviet governments devoted enormous resources to jamming them.

Those broadcasts did not single-handedly destroy the Soviet Union. Nothing that complicated has a single cause. But the West understood that the struggle was ideological as well as military. It understood that people living under communism needed access not simply to American weapons, but to alternative information and an alternative vision of society.

Somehow, after September 11, we partially forgot that lesson. We became very good at finding terrorists. We were considerably less successful at discrediting the worldview that kept producing recruits.

What Should Replace the War on Terror?

Twenty-five years after September 11, another “War on Terror” is not what is required. What is required is something broader and more sophisticated: a sustained democratic hearts-and-minds strategy.

Not government propaganda. Not censorship. Not xenophobia. And certainly not a populist reaction that decides the answer to Islamist illiberalism is Western illiberalism. That would simply allow the destroyers to win by convincing the builders to begin destroying themselves.

The answer is to defend and explain the institutions that allowed builder societies to flourish in the first place: pluralism, freedom of inquiry, individual liberty, equality before the law, competitive markets, scientific inquiry, religious freedom, honest journalism and institutions capable of correcting their own mistakes.

The West should expose authoritarian hypocrisy relentlessly. When Iran claims to represent liberation, show young Iranians imprisoned for demanding liberty. When Islamist movements speak of human rights abroad, examine how they treat minorities, dissidents and women where they actually wield power. When Russia invokes anti-colonialism, examine its own imperial wars. When China denounces Western abuses, ask why free political speech is impossible inside China. When Qatar presents itself as the great champion of open discourse, examine where that openness begins and ends inside Qatar itself.

And when Western societies fail their own ideals—as they inevitably do—they should address those failures rather than pretend they do not exist. That credibility is precisely what separates information from propaganda.

In the same way that Qatar, Iran, Russia and China invest strategically in media, universities, culture, diplomacy and narrative, builder societies must take the ideological battlefield seriously. They must support independent media in authoritarian societies, empower reformist and pluralistic Muslim voices, invest in education and civil society, expose disinformation networks, enforce transparency around foreign funding and teach their own young people why the institutions they inherited are worth preserving. Because the ideological objective of the destroyer is rarely to offer a more prosperous model. It is to convince you that your own model deserves to be destroyed.

The Real Lesson of September 11

Francis Fukuyama was premature. History did not end with the apparent triumph of liberal democracy after the Cold War. Samuel Huntington saw something important in predicting that culture, religion and identity would become central sources of conflict. But the “clash of civilizations” is also too crude a framework for the world we actually inhabit.

There is no inevitable war between “the West” and “Islam.” Millions of Muslims are builders. Millions of Westerners increasingly traffic in the rhetoric of destroyers. The more useful dividing line runs through civilizations rather than between them. It is the struggle between those who want to build functioning societies and those who put their creativity and energies into tearing down their enemies rather than building themselves up. That is why this is not fundamentally about Israel. It is a civilizational battle between builders and destroyers.

And to win it, builders must understand the nature of the war they are fighting. It is generational. It is military when necessary, but military power alone cannot win it. It is political, intellectual, cultural, religious and informational. It must be fought in Gaza and Lebanon, Tehran and Baghdad—but also in Washington, London, Paris, Toronto and on the university campuses where the next generation of Western leaders is learning how to understand the world.

September 11 taught us how much destruction nineteen committed men could inflict when the world failed to imagine the threat they represented. Twenty-five years later, the question is no longer whether we learned to lock the cockpit door. We did.

The deeper question is whether we learned to confront the ideas, institutions and narratives that teach people to want to break it down in the first place. That is the true lesson of September 11. Have we truly learned it?

Dan Feferman is the co-editor of MiddleEast24 and the editor of MidEast.Journal. He is a former IDF strategy and intelligence officer, think-tank fellow and writer and research on Middle East and international affairs.