On September 11, 2001, in my second week as a new professor at Yale, I knew what the subject of the next class would have to be: the history of provocation. Terrorists had flown two passenger planes into the Two Towers and a third into the Pentagon; heroic passengers and crew had sacrificed themselves to prevent another attack on the national capital.
When spectacular terrorism comes, you have to think even as you suffer. Your suffering, though desired by those who caused it, is not the terrorists’ ultimate aim. They push you into a frame of mind so that you then hurt yourself even more. History is full of acts of terror.
The real question, I told the students, is what you do next.
You cannot prevent every terrible thing from happening. But your freedom begins with your response.
Sadly, Americans in power responded as the terrorists would have wanted; indeed, we exceeded their expectations, making the world much worse for ourselves and everyone else.
Americans let the terrorists set the terms: their violence and our violence. We had an opportunity to see 9/11 more deeply, and to react in a way that would have created a safer world for generations to come. And we did not take that opportunity.
The basic American policy response to 9/11 should have been to liberate ourselves from fossil fuels. Without our dependence on oil, we would never have been entangled in the Middle East in the first place. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, citizens of an oil kingdom that we helped to build, our “ally.” The right reaction in September 2001 -- as I wrote to a friend in the White House -- was to fund fusion and other clean energy sources. Had we done so, we could have headed off global warming, prevented further Middle East wars -- and indeed prevented the rise of Vladimir Putin’s hydrocarbon oligarchy and his invasions of Ukraine.
Today we face the reality of rising oceans, vast fires, and resource conflicts. We were given a chance to halt all of that.
But we did not take it. George W. Bush became president of the United States, despite probably losing an election to Al Gore, after the Supreme Court stopped the counting of ballots in Florida. Gore was an environmentalist who cared deeply about global warming. Had 9/11 happened during a Gore presidency, he would have intensified the search for safe energy. Gore was also a more experienced and competent person than Bush, who came from a political oil family and had done nothing notable himself. Had Gore been president, 9/11 might well not have happened. But it did happen, on the watch of the inexperienced oilman. Bush’s White House was never going to link the terror attack to its basic causes.
We did not do the right thing. Instead, Americans in power did what the terrorists wanted. They attacked us, said President Bush, because “they hate freedom.” And his reaction in domestic policy was to use the instruments of our own government to undo our own freedom.
The pertinent example was the formation of a Department of Homeland Security. It placed a grab-bag of agencies under a single authority, treating them all (for example, border management) as a matter of “security.” Yes, the bags of the terrorists should have been more carefully searched. Yes, international terrorism, which killed about 3,000 people that day, was a threat to be taken seriously. But other things made us insecure: for comparison, about 17,000 Americans were killed with handguns that year, about 19,000 died from drug overdoses, and about 21,000 from the lack of access to health care. Attaching the notion of “security” to one kind of threat made all the rest worse.
And security remains only one aspect of border management. Borders are also where we trade and become prosperous, and meet our friends and create relationships. The definition of the border as exclusively a matter of security prepared us for a domestic politics, the one we have now, in which our leaders tell us that we will be safe when we divide the people living in America into “legals” and “illegals,” us and them -- and build ever more concentration camps for them.
The notion of a Homeland, which echoes the Nazi fascination with Heimat, was just as dangerous. At the time, it was an exotic label for a government department, not really in keeping with American English or American institutional traditions. But the word “homeland” has since been normalized, in its essentially fascist sense. Under the current administration, we are instructed to think of a vulnerable “homeland” threated by some of the people who live there.
The current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, treats the armed forces as a site of culture wars, of us and them, of men against women, whites against blacks, while informing us that the future task of the troops is “homeland defense.” The point is that the armed forces are to become nothing more than the personal militia of a ruler, used to quash resistance to Donald Trump. He has not gotten there yet, but that is obviously what is on his mind.
Of course, it took more than the securitization of everything and the fascist fascination with a homeland to get us to a place where figures such as Trump and Hegseth would be in positions of power. One of the major causes for their rise was the second Iraq war—our invasion of that country in 2003—which was our chosen foreign policy response to 9/11.
And that war of choice was, again, just what the terrorists would have wanted. It was the worst possible response to their provocation. It left us traumatized and vulnerable to politicians such as Hegseth, Trump, and JD Vance, who would exploit the trauma of the war to come to power (only to deliver us more wars and make us vulnerable to more terrorism). But it would also lock us into a political economy in which the main components were military spending and debt. In the early 2000s, we still had a good chance to handle the issues of wealth inequality, social immobility, family insecurity that have only bedeviled us more in the two decades since. We chose instead to pour not just blood (mainly of others) but wealth into the sand. Although Bush was losing the war in Iraq in 2004, he managed to parlay it into a second term, and so the first decade of the twenty-first century saw the death of the American dream.
Americans believed, because they were told to believe, that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, and so as a people we did the one thing that one should never do, which is to follow the psychological script written by the terrorists themselves. But matters, sadly, were worse than this. In 2002, our elected officials became co-authors of that psychological script. The Bush administration consciously invented the connections between Iraq and the primarily Saudi terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. And the high degree of mendacity was itself a problem, since it led Americans to distrust their government, and enabled the rise of Trump and his ilk. But it also had consequences around the world. These invented pretexts were the reason for an act that violated the most basic precept of international law: the ban on unprovoked wars of aggression.
The war in Iraq, but quite specifically the lying, drastically reduced the chances for something like a world legal order in which democracies could thrive together.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, an era of democracy seemed to be opening. If we look back a dozen years from 9/11, we see the Revolutions of 1989, the end of communism in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany in 1990, and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Those revolutions not only added to the number of democracies in the world; they brought to the world new ideas about freedom, having to do with truth and solidarity. In the preparation for the invasion of Iraq, Americans used arguments about democracy: just as liberation had been possible in Eastern Europe, so it was possible in the Middle East. The situation was, of course, very different; it is one thing to resist a dictatorship with civil society, as in Eastern Europe, and quite another to have a dictatorship overturned by a foreign invasion, as in Iraq. And of course, the East Europeans had ideas about what would come next; the Americans in Iraq had none, imagining that simply destroying one regime would suffice to bring about another.
But many of the most interesting East European dissidents, for example Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia, had a certain vulnerability: they trusted Americans. And so they were brought along on a propaganda tour of big lies that, had they not been so pro-American, they might have recognized from their own experience. The result, sadly, was the end of East European confidence in their own ideas of liberation.
If we look forward about a dozen years from 9/11, we see the first Russian invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 are closer now in time (eleven years) than is the first Russian invasion of Ukraine to the present moment (twelve years). Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 for domestic reasons; a corrupt hydrocarbon regime could not deliver order and prosperity, and so delivered instead a foreign war which was meant to bring Russians together in a vision of past and future glory. It would be wrong to say that the American invasion of Iraq caused the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russians themselves have to take responsibility for their own crimes. But the American war certainly made life easier for the Putin.
In 2013 and in early 2014, I was warning that Russia could invade Ukraine and seize Crimea, which is indeed what happened. One of the reasons for my concern was the surreal propaganda deployed in Russian media. Although it was far wilder than the American propaganda of 2002 and early 2003, it did have something in common: it made no sense, it was self-contradictory. The Americans said that they wanted to fight terrorism by overturning an Iraqi regime that, although horrible, suppressed the Islamism that was behind 9/11. They claimed an army could bring democracy just by overturning a regime. And it was clear at the time that this wasn’t just a mistake; there was perverse joy in the aggressive nonsense. The Russians escalated all of this: the Ukrainians were all gay, and they were all Nazis, and they were all Jews. Their state did not exist, claimed Moscow, but it also oppressed Russians. Though it was itself an authoritarian regime, Russia claimed it would bring democracy to Ukraine, which was in fact already a democracy. And so on.
In Moscow, Putin had concluded that what great powers did was invade other countries with the help of extravagant lies. And the fact that the United States had in fact done so made it harder both to describe Russia’s action and to respond to it.
In Ukraine, where I traveled right after the war started to run a big international conference, it was not difficult to understand what was happening: one country was invading another. Not long after the invasion began, I took part in a public discussion in Prague. Emotions were high; there were people with t-shirts emblazoned with Russian fascist slogans in the crowd. One of them took the microphone and asked: why did Russia have to obey any rules, when the Americans had not done so in Iraq in 2003? I answered that rules were rules, and that the American invasion had also been illegal; two wrongs did not make a right.
The young man’s question exemplified the Russian approach: there was no truth, there was no right and wrong, there were no rules. It arose in Russia and from the internal logic of an oligarchic regime. But we had made these kinds of arguments easier to make. In 2014, the American response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was anemic. President Barack Obama had inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Europe seemed like a distraction.
In late 2021 and early 2022, as Russia was preparing its second invasion of Ukraine, the shadow of Iraq still loomed. Two decades before, Americans had used their security services to lie about the reasons for their own invasion of Iraq. Now, they used their security services to share the truth about Russian plans for an invasion of Ukraine. In general, they were not believed, although the facts were clearly on their side. And of course, they were right: on February 24th, 2022, Russia undertook a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. No doubt there were psychological reasons for such disbelief: it is hard to believe in something so terrible, and in something that will require responsible decisions from those in power. But it was easier to doubt the American truth in 2022 because of the American lies in 2002. Because we had worked so hard to delude people about Iraq, it was easier for people to doubt us about Ukraine. As a result, everyone was less prepared than they might have been when the big war (as the Ukrainians call it) came.
We are commemorating a quarter of a century since 9/11. I was in New York the night before and came back early in the morning to New Haven; when I learned what had happened, I went back to the train station and tried to go back to the city: but the station was closed. I went to a pizza joint and thought about what to say to my students in the next class. I wanted to teach them about Eastern Europe; that was my job. I didn’t want to cancel class; I wanted to somehow meet the challenge of what had just happened. And so I talked to them about how provocation works.
In Russian and East European history it is a major topic; I was writing a book about some of the operations. The Russian imperial secret services, and then the Soviet secret services, had perfected the art: rather than moving directly, provoke the other side, get them to do what you want for what they think are their own reasons. Hit them, but hit them with spin; get them to come around to where you want them, and to hurt themselves. This is very much how the Russian secret services still function. They supported Trump in every election because he was the way that Americans could most hurt and weaken themselves.
Terrorism, I said in the classroom in September 2001, twenty five years ago, can also work as a provocation. The provocateur need not be the state; it can also be the terrorists working against the state, trying to get the state to do something that hurts its own people. The weaker side can touch the vulnerabilities of the stronger. It can induce the stronger to act against its own interests.
Our failure to see this, of course, is the history of these twenty-five years. We were provoked, and we did what the terrorists wanted. And so, along with them, we have made a world in which terrorism is so normal that we hardly know when to use the word; it has become a propaganda cliché that state terrorists such as Putin and Trump use to define their enemies. And they are themselves, of course, state terrorists. The Trump phenomenon is unthinkable without 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. He was also helped by Russian support on social media. Then Trump himself normalized terrorism by seeking to stay in power by the use of force in January 2021.
Putin’s war in Ukraine is obviously a criminal war of aggression; the rape of women and the kidnaping of children are obvious war crimes, as is the mass execution of activists in occupied territories. All of this might be considered terrorism, although other labels also apply. But what is most obviously terroristic is the daily launch of drones and missiles at Ukrainian civilians.
I am writing this underground in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and the air raid sirens are sounding for the third time tonight. Distant Russians are sending lethal projectiles into Ukrainian cities, in violation of every law and every norm of war, in violation of basic decency.
The Ukrainians will shoot down most of the drones, but the missiles simply fall and explode and kill -- Ukraine now has very little missile defense. This is because Americans have chosen to deny them Patriot missiles. In part this is the solidarity of terrorists; Trump is sympathetic to Putin, his emissaries were just in Moscow praising Putin’s “goals.” In part it is a side effect of our own latest war: the commemoration of 9/11 in the United States will take place during yet another illegal and nonsensical war in the Middle East, this time Trump’s doomed war of choice against Iran.
This war, like the war of 2003, made no sense from the start, and has had many of the same consequences -- over the scale of weeks rather than years. But it also means that the United States has pointlessly (and sometimes murderously) fired munitions in the Middle East that might have saved lives in Ukraine.
Trump’s Iran war enables Putin’s war in Ukraine. The terrorists are in power and they stick together.
And why is the United States still fighting a war against Iran? The war is lost and it is very unpopular. Why does Trump, knowing all this, stay in it, with the American midterm elections just weeks away? He worries out loud constantly that his power will be hindered if his party loses.
So how can the war possibly help him?
One possibility is that he is hoping for a second 9/11: that if he keeps firing missiles at Iran, the Iranian regime will do him the favor of taking murderous action inside the United States. And then he can try to suspend elections, or deploy more American troops in more American cities, and stay in power indefinitely. Many of the American agencies who would be expected to prevent a terrorist attack are now run by people who have no relevant experience and are something worse than incompetent. That is one way of wanting the terrorists to win: fight yet another a big war in the Middle East, strip down your own defenses, and hope for the worst. Iran might do such a thing; or, under the cover of the ongoing war, Trump might claim that Iran has done such a thing. His Hungarian friend Viktor Orbán tried exactly this ploy in the last Hungarian election.
Given all the provocations and lying and terror since 9/11, it would be foolish not to be mentally prepared for these circumstances.
And the answer, then as now, is the same: you cannot prevent every terrible thing from happening. But you can choose how you react. Your freedom begins with your response.
Whether we are preparing ourselves for some new terrorist event, or whether we are simply contemplating the last twenty-five years, the lesson is exactly the same: do not do the thing that the terrorist wants you to do. Think about what the terrorist wants you to do, and make sure to do something else.
I am underground right now, in a physical cellar, as physical projectiles fly; but in some broader historical sense I am in a trap we set for ourselves and chose to walk into, in the last twenty-five years. Too many of us, especially those of us in power, have acted as if we wanted the terrorists to win, and indeed have become terrorists themselves.
From where I sit, back against the wall, the obvious, audible terror is Russian. In these the dark hours of early morning, though, I am smiling. I recall Ukrainians whom I met these last few days and nights here in Kharkiv, families bringing their dogs to an underground bar for a lecture, a drone operator shyly reading her poetry, onetime businessmen explaining their command principles in bunkers. I think of people not doing what the terrorists want, in truly trying circumstances, when the terror comes almost every day, people not giving in and going along, but thinking for themselves about the future.
That is what I believe that we, as Americans, have to do today, on this terrible anniversary. We will be told by the Trump regime that the lesson of 9/11 is to listen to authority, to let terrorism dictate self-destructive policy, and then to associate patriotism with self-destruction. We should, instead, learn a lesson from the past, from the history of terrorism as a whole, from the experience of those dreadful days -- but also from our own failures in the last quarter century.
Do not let terrorists who hold state power tell you how to react to terrorism.
Do not be provoked, do not enter the mental world of the terrorist, foreign or domestic; think for yourself. And do that thinking in the future: not as a reaction to some orchestrated horror, theirs or ours or anyone’s; not amidst a cloying nostalgia in which we were always right because only others can do wrong; but in the hope that we can make this quarter century better than the last.
Commemoration is a singular chance to reflect. Americans in power will try to use this anniversary to that everything happened exactly as it had to, and that we should bow our heads rather than use them.
We went along twenty-five years ago. We should not do so again. Thinking about the last quarter century, we can choose to think differently.
And what we failed to do then we can do now. We can think of our security as part of our freedom, as our education and our health and ability to realize our best selves. We can turn from sources of energy that kill to sources of power that enliven. We can love our country but recognize that our only homeland is a common one, the earth itself.
TDS, Kharkiv, Ukraine, 10 September 2011
PS I edited this in the morning in a café which was, delightfully, open.
Thank you for this perceptive articulation of the folly and tragedy of our response to 9/11.
It is extraordinarily painful to me to think about the world we could’ve had if Al Gore had become president. He helped lead the little known Presidents Council On Sustainable Development (PCSD) that President Clinton launched in 1993 and which was led by Carol Browner who ran the EPA under Clinton. Here’s the link to all the documents related to the massive effort to plan the transformation of American society into one devoted to a sustainable future. The final plan “sustainable America“ details how America could be brought together - through a massive educational effort - as one culture devoted to a sustainable future.
One of the great journalistic tragedies is how little attention this transformational planning project got in the press. Fortunately, the documents remain online for people to discover and hopefully be inspired by. It was a time when the government actually planned to make things much much better than they were…
https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/PCSD/Publications/index.html