The world has changed dramatically in the quarter century since September 11, 2001 — and many of those changes can be traced back to the policy decisions made in the wake of the attacks that day, from the passage of the USA Patriot Act, which reshaped domestic surveillance and privacy laws, to the launch of the Global War on Terror, whose impact is still being felt today.
“The impacts on U.S. foreign policy, intelligence, and counterterrorism have been especially profound, and they continue to evolve,” Amaney Jamal, dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, said at a panel discussion about 9/11 earlier this week. “We seek to understand 9/11’s enduring legacy, the lessons learned from that time period, and the future of national security.”
Razia Iqbal, the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor and a lecturer at Princeton SPIA and a former BBC News journalist, recalled the horror and shock of that day.
“For people of my generation, we will always remember where we were and what we were doing when those planes were rammed into the World Trade Center,” she said.
In the first of two panels on 9/11, Iqbal said the focus would be how those events continue to shape American foreign and domestic policy.
As a diplomat who was studying in Rome, Elizabeth Richard recalled the sense of international solidarity and united purpose that came out of 9/11. Richard retired in 2025 as a career Foreign Service officer who last served as coordinator for counterterrorism, leading the U.S. State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau.
“That has stayed with me until now, probably formed how I feel about alliances and the importance of alliances,” Richard said.
The panelists noted other ways that the long shadow of 9/11 can still be seen today. Spencer Ackerman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter and the author of “Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” said many of the mechanisms of counterterrorism introduced after 9/11, such as information sharing among law enforcement agencies and the launch of the Department of Homeland Security, have remained in place and are now being wielded in other ways, such as immigration enforcement.
“Are we safer from jihadi political attacks inside the United States? We are,” he said. “But we’re far less safe from counterterrorism.”
Colin P. Clarke, executive director of The Soufan Center, a nonprofit that focuses on global security challenges, highlighted foreign policy decisions following 9/11 that have had a long-tail impact, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He said that declaring a war on “terrorism” was broad and misguided from the onset.
“It would have made a lot more sense to declare a global war on Al Qaeda, because that’s a defined enemy, and there could be some kind of a finite endpoint there. But then the Taliban became part of the war,” he said. “We spent trillions of dollars, spilled tremendous blood and treasure, to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.”
Clarke also added that he wants to offer grace to the policymakers who were deciding how to act with limited information in the wake of a tragedy.
“It’s easy to get things wrong, and it’s easy to sit here 25 years later and say, ‘You did that wrong,’” he said. “There are a lot of decisions that were taken for the right reasons, even if the outcome might not have gone that way.”
The conversation eventually turned to the erosion of democratic principles in more recent years, and the panelists debated how influential the post-9/11 era has been on the current moment.
“I don't think that 9/11 and the structures that we built and the emergency powers that we did brought us to where we are today,” Richard said, citing dynamics such as the rise of social media, a fragmented news environment, and greater economic pressures on everyday Americans. “There are fundamental issues here in America that have led to this kind of environment. Political leadership have decided to take advantage of it for their own political purposes, and they are using the tools that we never disassembled.”
Watch the recording of this event here. The second panel, “9/11 @ 25: Iraq, Afghanistan, and America’s Longest Wars,” will be held on Wednesday, Sep. 23, at 4:30 p.m. Register here.
Princeton SPIA's 9/11 @ 25: Legacy, Lessons, and the Future of National Security Dean's Leadership Series event.
Left to right: Razia Iqbal, John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor and Lecturer; Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize-winning national security journalist; Author of "Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump;" Elizabeth Richard, Fmr. Coordinator for Counterterrorism, U.S. Department of State; Fmr. U.S. Ambassador to the Lebanese Republic; and Colin Clarke, Executive Director, The Soufan Center.
Photo by, Charles R. Plohn/Fotobuddy