What 9/11 did to us

Sept 11, 2001, was a Tuesday with sparkling clear blue skies. I was at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when my husband phoned to tell me that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. We presumed that a small aircraft had crashed accidentally, but soon realised that something far graver was happening.

We turned on CNN as the news spread among neighbours and the rush-hour crowds. My mother called, and we stayed on the phone (a landline still), gasping in horror as the first tower crumbled, then the second.

One of my brothers worked in New York; we had a family round-robin of calls to make sure he was okay. When the news came of an attack on the Pentagon, I realised that we were witnessing a targeted campaign against different centres of American life. I rushed to pick up our sons, aged four and two, from their daycare across the river.

That weekend, we would drive the 12 hours to Virginia for my father’s 75th birthday. All planes were grounded, but we felt an overwhelming need to hold each other close.

Driving down the New Jersey Turnpike in the dark, we could see the still-smoking ruins of the towers illuminated by searchlights—an eerie vision that our sons insist they remember.

A quarter-century later, we continue to dwell on the details of that day, many of which were permanently etched into our memories by the acid of shock and disbelief. The attack had raised so many questions: Who could have done this, and above all, why?

The answers, and our response, would reshape the country and its place in the world. I came of age in the 1970s, when the horrors of physical torture were often in the news.

Images of beatings, cigarette burns, electrodes attached to genitalia, mutilation, rapes, starvation, and other atrocities flowed in regularly from documentation of the Holocaust, Stalin’s gulags, the dirty wars in Argentina and Chile, and the killing fields of Cambodia, alongside searing evidence of American war crimes in Vietnam.

In 1976, the year of our bicentennial, Jimmy Carter was elected president, promising a fresh start after the war and Watergate. He insisted that human rights would become a permanent part of US foreign policy. Some Americans might still practice torture, but only illegally.

A commitment to the rule of law and basic decency, no matter what the “other side” might do, had defined us as Americans ever since George Washington insisted that British prisoners of war be treated “with humanity”.

But by 2003–04, we had invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and detained alleged terrorists without trial at Guantánamo and “black sites” in other countries, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

I found myself participating in debates over whether torture had suddenly become necessary. I was incredulous at first, invoking the now-tattered refrain, “This is not who we are”.

I pushed back against the endless hypothesising about what one should do if a detained terrorist knew the location of a bomb that would destroy New York City within an hour.

What I took to be a basic moral tenet of our national identity was often ridiculed as naive. Settled law turned out to be something squishier: rules that could be reinterpreted when the norms underpinning them eroded.

A quarter-century later, so much of what was once unthinkable—smearing the press as “the enemy of the people,” weaponising government agencies against political opponents, openly abusing public office for private gain, issuing physical threats against political opponents, riding roughshod over checks and balances—has become the new normal.

Though much of it comes from the current president, there are also cases where both sides bear blame. It has been a slow slide, with each major party justifying violations of law and norms with reference to the other.

The 9/11 attacks also injected a highly concentrated dose of xenophobia into our politics. Of course, US history has had regular cycles of anti-immigrant sentiment, often accompanied by violence.

But to many Americans in this century, the answer to the question that Fareed Zakaria posed in his celebrated October 2001 essay, “Why Do They Hate Us,” is that “they” all seemed to be Muslims. And far too often, this label became synonymous with any brown-skinned person wearing headgear.

President Donald Trump’s first-term effort to ban all Muslims from entering the US has evolved into a larger effort to portray anyone not resembling a 1950s-era white American as a threat.

Demagogues have long traded on stoking hostility towards a mythical “them”. Today, though, fear of “the other” has become the defining feature of our domestic politics, with each side arguing that a victory for the enemy, depicted as ethno-nationalists or socialists, will destroy our democracy.

The aftermath of 9/11 deepened many Americans’ sense that the rest of the world is simply ungrateful for the sacrifices we have made for world peace and prosperity over the decades. Like most countries, the US tends to notice what others do to us, while overlooking what we have done to them.

Today, this sense of grievance is embodied in Trump’s “America First” agenda. The breathtaking indecency and heedlessness with which the current administration pursues its policies have necessitated new paths for other countries, including long-standing US allies.

Yet there is strong domestic support for the idea that the US must play a different role in the world, rejecting the status of an indispensable power and focussing first on domestic needs.

This represents a paradigm shift. The foreign-policy consensus that guided us through the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st is gone for good.

As my family and I left Cambridge that Friday, Sept 14, we joined the flood of traffic down I-95, the superhighway running from Maine to Florida.

At noon, somewhere in Connecticut, we pulled over, alongside our fellow motorists, to observe three minutes of silence as part of a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance.

Nearby train stations, just an hour from New York City, still held the parked cars of commuters who would never return. We grieved—as Americans and as humans.

That day now feels very far away.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US state department, is CEO of the think tank New America, and professor emerita of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.

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