How will 9/11 be remembered on its 100th anniversary? Will it be seen as a dramatic but ultimately minor tragedy or as a turning point that altered the United States and the trajectory of world politics in fundamental ways? Will future generations see that day as a telling reflection of underlying trends, the catalyst for a series of catastrophic foreign-policy blunders, or as an isolated one-off event whose long-term impact was relatively modest?
It is impossible to predict exactly how 9/11 is going to be interpreted, of course; perhaps all we can say with confidence is that the meaning attached to it will vary depending on who is doing the interpreting. Americans will view it differently from Afghans, Iraqis, Saudis or Europeans, and for many people around the world it is likely to be little more than a historical footnote.
What looms large in our consciousness today is often irrelevant to others and especially once memories fade and more recent events command our attention.
Yet despite these unavoidable uncertainties, asking how 9/11 might be seen in 2101 is still a useful exercise because it helps place the event within a broader geopolitical context. I can think of at least two broad and radically different possibilities (plus a third wild card).
Ironically, which possibility comes closest to the truth has little to do with what occurred on that sunny Tuesday morning 20 years ago and much more to do with what has happened in response to it. Moreover, what happens in the next few decades is going to determine how 9/11 is remembered a century later.
Option one: Xi Jinping gets his wish
Imagine for a moment that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s fondest hopes are fully realised and that the next 80 years become known as the “Chinese century”. In this scenario, China’s economic ascendance continues apace, and it eventually casts as large a shadow as the US did during most of the Cold War and especially the unipolar moment.
China will not become a global hegemon exerting authoritative sway over every nation or dictating all world events, but it could control the commanding heights of key technologies, exercise de facto hegemony in its immediate neighbourhood, and have more influence on what other states do than any other power. It would have the loudest voice in most international institutions and the greatest ability to define the rules shaping most international interactions.
Were this scenario to occur, then 9/11 will be seen as a critical event that accelerated America’s decline. Not because of the damage suffered in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon or even the short-term economic consequences (from which the US recovered rapidly) but because of the calamitous ways that US leaders chose to respond to it.
According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the global war on terrorism has ultimately cost the US some $8 trillion. Even if spread over many years, this is a vast sum that could have been spent on research and development, infrastructure, education, healthcare, or any of the other ingredients of national power. Or it could have been left in taxpayers’ pockets and allowed them to live more bountiful lives.
Much of that sum was spent on wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with several lesser conflicts, wars that further destabilised already fragile regions and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, most of them foreign. The global war on terrorism was also a giant distraction from a host of broader strategic concerns, most notably China’s remarkable rise. It is no exaggeration to say that 9/11 — and especially the US response to it — was an enormous gift to Beijing.
Moreover, as Spencer Ackerman argues in his new book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, the response to 9/11 had profoundly negative effects domestically in the US. After a brief burst of rally-around-the-flag patriotism, the war fuelled domestic division, xenophobia, and a broader fear of people of colour, thereby reinforcing the white supremacists at the core of Trumpism (and increasingly, the Republican Party itself). US officials embraced torture and rendition as policy tools, lied to the country about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the progress they were making in Afghanistan, and no one was ever held accountable. As both Thucydides and James Madison warned, perpetual warfare corrupts even the healthiest political institutions, which is precisely what happened in the US.
Very importantly, this scenario also assumes that the US fails to learn the right lessons from the past 20 years and is unable to reverse the partisan death spiral that now threatens the core of its democratic system.
Instead of a reawakened sense of national purpose, renewed unity within an increasingly multicultural society, and a political elite recommitted to the common weal, the US devolves into a rancorous quasi-democracy where electoral accountability vanishes in a sea of gerrymandering, voting restrictions, and mythmaking by news organisations created and run not to inform the public but to favour one side.
Instead of a competitive marketplace of ideas and an empowered electorate, political power devolves even more to those with the biggest budgets, the most seductive lies, and the fewest principles.
In this unhappy future, Americans cease to work together to expand the pie for everyone and instead mostly end up squabbling over their respective shares. And if that happens, along with a few more foreign-policy blunders, it will be easy for China to blow past the US in the fast lane and fulfil Xi’s ambitious dreams.
If 9/11 is not seen as the death knell of American greatness, it will certainly be viewed as a catalytic moment that hastened its decline. Osama bin Laden’s ploy to goad the US into a self-destructive response will have been vindicated — but only because America fell into the trap he set.
Option one is not inevitable. There is another scenario.
Option two: American renaissance
Suppose instead that President Joe Biden’s fondest hopes are realised and the US gets its act together again. In this much brighter future, how will 9/11 be seen?
This scenario begins by acknowledging America’s enduring strengths, strengths that its citizens tend to forget amid all their self-inflicted wounds and recriminations. Unlike most other wealthy democracies, America’s population will continue to grow for the remainder of this century. Its economy remains an engine of innovation in many key sectors, even given shrinking R&D budgets. Indeed, some economic models forecast that US GDP will trail China by mid-century but regain the #1 position by 2100, largely due to more favourable demography.
And although geography does not insulate the US from all dangers, the country still exists in a far more favourable geopolitical environment than all other potential great powers (including China).
To be sure, this scenario assumes that the current feverish state of US domestic politics eventually subsides and that a new era of progressivism limits the corrupting impact of money in politics. Returning to a sensible, middle-of-the-road policy on immigration would once again enable the country to attract talented, energetic and entrepreneurial immigrants from other countries and gradually turn them into Americans, as the US has done erratically but successfully throughout its history.
White Americans adjust to their status as a plurality rather than a majority, aided by the greater racial tolerance that younger Americans already exhibit. Innovation continues to drive economic growth, fewer dollars are spent on unnecessary military capabilities or unwinnable and unnecessary wars, and political reforms reverse the current assault on voting rights and restore greater accountability in politics. Abandoning the futile quest for liberal hegemony, US grand strategy returns to the realist principles that guided it so successfully for most of the nation’s history. And so forth.
Meanwhile, imagine further that China stumbles. Dragged down by unfavorable demography (i.e. an increasingly large number of unproductive, ageing retirees), environmental damage, resource scarcity, and coordinated global opposition fuelled by Beijing’s bare-knuckle approach to diplomacy, China never quite manages to reach a position of primacy.
Perhaps Chinese leaders miscalculate as badly as US leaders did after 9/11 and end up squandering resources in a fruitless war of their own. Even if China’s current and future leaders avoid errors as grave as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, its economic growth rate slows, and the Chinese Communist Party has to focus most of its attention on containing social discontent.
Were all this to come to pass, the next 80 years will not be the Chinese century at all.
In this scenario, by 2101, 9/11 will be a distant memory for living Americans. Not entirely, of course, but it will be seen as an isolated tragedy that led to some unfortunate responses but did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world.
Lest this prediction seem fanciful, consider how often Americans take a moment now to “Remember the Maine!” The explosion that sank that unfortunate warship in Havana Harbor sparked a national uproar not unlike the response to 9/11 and helped drive the US into the Spanish-American War. We still hear a lot about the Depression, appeasement at Munich, Pearl Harbor, the Normandy landings and Vietnam, but the destruction of the USS Maine has slipped behind the veil of national amnesia.
If the US is able to renew itself over the next few decades, 9/11 will be seen as a minor tragedy that many Americans believe is best forgotten.
The wild card
There is, however, at least one other obvious possibility.
If the worst-case forecasts on climate change turn out to be correct — and it is getting harder to discount them these days — then the next 80 years will see a series of transformations in human life that will make both 9/11 and the global war on terrorism that it unleashed seem like a minor distraction. If coastal cities are inundated, island nations disappear, the Gulf Stream weakens, large areas of the world become uninhabitable due to deadly combinations of heat and humidity, and hundreds of millions of people begin to migrate in a desperate search for survival, then our descendants will have neither the time nor the inclination to reflect on a terrorist attack that occurred in the pre-dystopian era. At most, 9/11 will be seen as one of the many factors that kept the US and many other countries from taking action when they should have.
In sum, what 9/11 means to future generations depends less on what actually occurred on that day or on how the US and others responded and more on what the US and others do from this day forward.
I wish I were more confident that we will make the right choices.
A fair analysis except I’m not sure why the third case or possibility is labelled a ‘wild card’. It is near enough inevitable. There is nowhere near enough being done to shift the trajectory of global warming back to something managable. It requires concerted and comprehensive action by most governments almost immediately, because it must happen before the warming triggers events that put global warming completely beyond our control. There is no sign that governments will do this. They will continue as they have so far and that must deliver catastrophe. We are already seeing it and if you think the last few years have been bad, I suggest you cheer up, because soon it will be hard to believe things used to be this good.
You totally nailed it, Rat. And the crazy thing is that, by continuing on the way we are, we are turning our backs on a much cleaner, healthier and happier life. We follow our leaders over the cliff created by fossil fuels, when an emergency U-turn is required. We should all be looking forward with optimism, not the pessimistic dread society seems to have been self-hypnotised into. Out with the dirty, in with the clean. (Both industry and politics.)
Yes, came here to say that. Some level of three is a certainty not a wildcard, it’s just a question of how much. This is a perfect example of the media’s difficulty in catching up and reporting in accord with the science and now clear evidence. This article is better than most in even acknowledging it.
Yep the it is a pity that revolution has fallen out of favour inn western so called democracies.
Couldn’t agree more SSR. Interesting to note that one of the more erudite climate prices I’ve read in the last 20 years is that the weakening of the Gulf Stream would we Europe largely freeze over and lead to the next ice age.
would lead to …. oops, again.
It has been said history never repeats but it often rhymes, here’s one that is equal parts hopeful and pessimistic.
If we look back 100 or so years we see Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Arch Duke Ferdinand in an effort to promote Bosnian Serb independence. That went well. The First and Second world wars precipitated over 40 years of Soviet occupation and the utter depravity of the Serbian war. Austria was reduced to minor power status, and its protective ally Germany was pretty much destroyed and rebuilt over the ensuing century.
While the rest of the world has mostly had the sense to stay out of pointless wars, somebody learnt the lesson of WW1, America has embarked on a series of pointless, expensive forever wars. And most of the middle east has either been physically destroyed, or in the case of Iran economically constrained.
The future requires America t lick its wounds, swallow it’s pride, and like Germany, renounce warmongering imperialism and face the challenges of the future. Germany spent 50 years after WW2 becoming one of the worlds economic powerhouses. It’s manufacturing industry now sets the agenda in many industries.
America has what it takes to turn around. It already sets the agenda in many modern technologies especially around electronics. The American Government has started with drawing from the space race as American private industry takes over, and does it better and cheaper.
I’m with those who see the challenges of Climate Change as the main driver for the next 80 years. America dominates most of the industries that will thrive and mitigate Climate Change.
The wild card? The revitalization of American Manufacturing. There is enormous money being spent on robotics by the space and automotive industries, both American powerhouses. If this deliberately or accidentally creates a robotic textiles factory the last challenge of automation will be breached. It will provide challenges for America and disaster for Asia and Africa.
How will we be remembered in 100 years depends on how well we rise to the challenges. A world making progress to peace and prosperity and repairing environmental damage will be somewhat forgiving. A world knee deep in its own excrement fighting forever wars will curse us for raising the bar on self indulgent arrogance. 20 years on from 911 puts us 100 years on from the start of the great depression, we can succeed or fail but it will happen in the next decade or 2
If the world does not embrace a new world order of battling climate and environment change and live with each other the prognosis is not good. The biggest danger is US hawks, Australians included who are not prepared to cede or dilute total Anglocentric hegemony nor willing to meaningfully compromise with any rising peer. By their actions and words they demonstrate they believe a threat to their self centric interests are the only things that matter.
A while back I read a book entitled, “We Are Almost Certainly Wrong”, which points out that future generations inevitably regard the past with a mixture of pity, incredulity and mockery.