Terrorism & extremism, explained.
A new 9/11 Memorial Wall at One Police Plaza in New York, unveiled 9 September 2026 (Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)
Twenty-five years on, the Taliban are back in Kabul and the question of what 9/11 changed remains stubbornly open.
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9/11’s shrinking shadow9/11’s shrinking shadow
There is a growing discourse, mostly among people not born or too young to remember 9/11, questioning why this particular event still gets treated with such exceptionalism as a pivot point in world history.
After all, the past quarter of a century has delivered many other landmark events and major challenges.
Isn’t the rise of China, the global financial crisis, the Covid pandemic, global warming and the mass adoption of artificial intelligence just as, if not more, consequential in changing our world?
To understand the impact of the 9/11 attacks, one can’t consider only the events themselves, but also the context in which they occurred and the amorphous movement that conceived of them. It was the turn of the millennium, after the peaceful interlude of the 1990s, when people widely believed we had reached the “end of history”. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, crashed into the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania, it jolted that complacency. It was an audaciously planned, mass-casualty attack, playing out on live television, carried out by the most unlikely of actors – a gaggle of foreign militants trained in the mountains of Afghanistan with an archaic ideology and the outlandish goal of unseating the world’s remaining superpower.
An event 25 years ago that felt world-ending to the people who lived through it, but is now considered just another chapter in the history books.
It is this context, and the furious reaction that followed by the US as a giant Gulliver roused from slumber and lashing out – that has embossed 9/11 as distinct.
It remains imprinted on the psyche of many of us, but what long-term impact did it truly have? It’s a question we asked five years ago for the Lowy Institute’s interactive marking the 20th anniversary of the attacks: Did 9/11 change our world? (Opens in new window)
I put the question then to six experts and pushed each of them on their reasoning. Some argued the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror reordered global politics. Others contended its strategic effects were more contained than we assumed at the time, eclipsed by the rise of China, technological disruption and environmental impacts.
Now, with the Taliban back in Kabul and the terrorism threat more fragmented and diffuse, it’s worth revisiting whether an event 25 years ago that felt world-ending to the people who lived through it, but is now considered just another chapter in the history books, really did change our world.
About the author
Lydia Khalil
Lydia Khalil is Program Director of the Transnational Challenges Program at the Lowy Institute.
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