September 11 changed the world, but events since have changed it more

Imagine telling a New Yorker on the night of September 11, 2001, what her city, country and world would be like a quarter-century on.

The mayor’s office in City Hall, just a short walk from Ground Zero, would be occupied by a Muslim born in Uganda. Rudy Giuliani, who was venerated as “America’s mayor” because of the brave leadership he demonstrated amid the jagged ruins of the Twin Towers, would become a figure of ridicule. The reason he was held in such low esteem would surely be the most bewildering revelation: Giuliani ended up an adoring acolyte of the celebrity New York property tycoon who now resides in the White House, one Donald J. Trump.

It would take almost 10 years to hunt down and kill Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks and the leader of al-Qaeda, a terrorist network most Americans had not even heard of. The order to carry out the special forces raid on his compound in Pakistan, a supposed ally of the United States, would be issued by a black commander-in-chief by the name of Barack Hussein Obama, who on 9/11 was a little-known state senator from Illinois.

At a black-tie dinner in Washington the night before Bin Laden was belatedly brought to justice, Obama had shown little mercy in his mockery of Donald Trump, who by now was best known as a reality TV star. The joke in May 2011, which Obama illustrated with pictures shown on giant screens, was made all the more hilarious by its absurdist comedy: that “the Donald” would one day occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and emblazon it with his brand name and bedeck it with gold.

Ten years after the attacks of September 11, you might explain to that New Yorker, the US finally withdrew most of its troops from Iraq – wait, what? – where George W. Bush had expanded his “war on terror”. Wading into this Mesopotamian quagmire, on what turned out to be the false premise that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, became the worst strategic decision made by a US president since Vietnam.

So what became of Afghanistan, the staging post for the 9/11 attacks and the safe haven granted Bin Laden by the Taliban? Well, 25 years on, the Taliban would be back in power, and Afghanistan would return to being the only country in the world which formally banned girls from attending school beyond primary level and barred them from universities.

What of the leaders from that dark September day? George W. Bush, despite launching that “forever war” in Iraq, would be rewarded with a second term in office, and benefit from some generous historical revisionism. Compared with Trump, he no longer looked so much like a toxic Texan hopelessly out of his depth in world affairs, but rather a decent-minded statesman. His deputy, vice-president Dick Cheney, an arch-conservative often portrayed as a Darth Vader-like figure, would come to be seen as a moderate Republican after distancing himself from MAGA. In the 2024 election, Cheney would even vote Democrat.

The FBI director on 9/11, Robert Mueller, would become better known for leading an investigation into whether Vladimir Putin’s Russia had conspired with the Trump campaign to alter the outcome of the 2016 election. And what became of New York’s ambitious senator at the time? Hillary Clinton would never fulfil her dream of becoming America’s first female president.

Who would have thought a quarter-century ago that something which happened on December 11, 2001, would come to be regarded by some historians as more geopolitically noteworthy than September 11. That was the date of China’s admission into the World Trade Organisation, which fuelled its economic rise and provided a springboard to challenge the US for regional and global pre-eminence.

Likewise, a convulsion that occurred in New York in September 2008 materially affected the lives of more Americans than the terrorist attacks seven years earlier. The collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers triggered what Americans called the Great Recession, known here as the global financial crisis. That brought widespread economic misery, made the “American dream” look, for many working families, more like a chimera, and helped pave the way for Trump’s march to the White House.

Despite fears on the night of September 11 that mass-casualty terrorist attacks would become America’s new normal, no strikes of anywhere near commensurate scale would eventuate. In fact, more attacks would be carried out by homegrown far-right groups than Islamists.

For all the fears of weapons of mass destruction being used in major population centres – at the time, I had neighbours in Washington who questioned the wisdom of buying property in a city that could be hit by a “dirty bomb” – it was weapons of mass distraction that would wreak societal havoc. Touch-screen smartphones were popularised after Apple launched its first iPhone in 2007. Algorithms developed by social media behemoths in Silicon Valley had a dangerously radicalising effect. The sort of conspiracy theories that had been a fringe activity before 9/11 now entered the mainstream. By 2021, a poll suggested one in six Americans thought members of the Bush administration intentionally allowed the attacks to happen to justify military action in the Middle East.

Would another date, with shorthand such as 9/11, become the time stamp for a future attack on the US? Alas, yes. January 6, 2021, or “J6” as Donald Trump calls the attempt by his supporters, after he amassed them on the lawns of the National Mall, to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election by storming the US Capitol.

Surely, Donald Trump’s role in January 6 would have disqualified him from again holding high office, the baffled New Yorker might reasonably ask. Not at all. In 2024, he was re-elected as president, and would go on to launch another open-ended conflict in the Middle East.

How about the “nous sommes tous Américains” international goodwill that existed after 9/11? Well, the United States, in 2026, would be at economic war with Canada, and “America First” increasingly would mean America alone.

Nick Bryant was a BBC Washington correspondent on 9/11. He is now the presenter of Saturday Extra on the ABC’s Radio National and the author of the Substack History Never Ended.

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