After 25 years, the United States may finally be closing a chapter that began with the attacks on September 11, 2001, and President George W. Bush’s declaration of a “war on terror” days later. Although “terrorism has not ceased” and “jihadism has not gone away,” al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the attacks, “is finished,” Audrey Kurth Cronin writes. So is the war on terror, the “guiding framework for U.S. foreign policy” for the last quarter century, Philip Gordon contends.
To mark this week’s anniversary, we’re sharing some of the best writing in Foreign Affairs that grapples with the conduct and consequences of that war. Just months after the 9/11 attacks, Michael Scott Doran warned that the United States was about to wade into a conflict whose “true dimensions” it did not fully understand. Decades of fighting would prove the warning prescient. What was more difficult to foresee then was how much the war on terror would change the world—and how steep a price Americans would pay.
Start reading below.
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