War

9/11 Turbocharged America's Worst Foreign Policy Impulses—but Didn't Change Its Direction

The United States' shift toward aggressive interventionism was well underway before the 2001 attacks.

Emma Ashford | From the August/September 2026 issue

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(Illustration: Midjourney)

Like many others in the Washington, D.C., or New York metro areas, my experience of 9/11 was horrifying and yet unremarkable at the same time.

I was a 16-year-old British student spending a year in an American high school in Arlington, Virginia, just a few miles from the Pentagon. That Tuesday morning dawned like any other. It was sunny and warm; D.C. was experiencing its traditional third or fourth blast of summer heat well into September. In second period, someone flipped on the TV, which was showing images of a plane disaster in New York. Tragic, but hardly cause to break routine. The band teacher flipped it back off and returned to teaching.

It wasn't long, though, before things went off the rails. While walking to my next class, there was a commotion down the hall: someone screaming, the hysterical sound bouncing off the tiled corridor. I would later learn that a girl was trying to reach her parents at work in the Pentagon—and failing. By the time the principal made the announcement that school was closed, rumors and panic had begun to spread throughout the student body.

Things after that are a disconnected blur. Waiting in classrooms for parents to come and collect students without transportation; some arrived crying. My mother managed to get a phone line and briefly call me. She was trapped on a Metro platform, the trains disgorging all their passengers and going out of service. Even the television news was frenetic and unclear: Another plane was headed for the White House. No, it was headed for CIA headquarters in McLean. There are car bombs downtown. The president has been taken to a secret location. One classmate's father, who worked at the Pentagon, saw the crash in his rearview mirror as he drove to a dentist's appointment.

My mother finally made it to school and took me home. It would take several more hours for my father, who worked mere blocks from the White House, to arrive: Like many others, he had been forced to walk out of Washington, across the bridges, and through miles of suburbs to get home.

These experiences remain etched in my mind, horrible enough to be fresh even all these years later, and yet they were in no way unique. In the days, months, and years to follow, I would hear so many distinct variants of the same story: a group of students on a trip who'd seen the plane as it descended toward the building; a classmate whose father was whisked away by government helicopter to some unknown location, leaving them to wonder where he was; a think-tanker whose child attended an on-site daycare at the Pentagon. I kept thinking back to that last story after I became a mother myself. Could I even imagine the panic and terror of a parent in that situation?

It's tempting to look back at the shock and horror of 9/11, a trauma shared by much of Washington's foreign policy class, as the genesis of many foreign policy mistakes that would follow. Hurt people, as the saying goes, hurt people. And as the events of the following years unfurled—the toppling of the Taliban, the invasion of Iraq, the internments at Guantánamo Bay, the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, and so on—it became tempting to blame it all on that singular day of pain and horror.

But as we approach the 25th anniversary of the attacks, it's important to understand the limits of that story. The events of 9/11 undoubtedly had a major impact on foreign policy. Yet this impact was less a change of direction and more an intensification of already existing trends. The 9/11 attacks would create a permissive political and psychological environment for a particular foreign policy vision, but it did not set America on the path to liberal interventionism and forever war all by itself. For that, we must look back into the 1990s.

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