From the moment they occurred, the terror attacks of  Sept. 11, 2001 were seen as inaugurating a new age of asymmetric violence and warfare. President George W. Bush described the war on terror that followed as a generational conflict. 

Yet, for all the transformations it produced, Al-Qaeda and Islamic militancy more broadly have, in my view, receded within a decade. Not so much because it was defeated on the battlefield but because it was unable to gain much support among Muslims. When popular uprisings swept the Arab world in the early 2010s, protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the region took to the streets not in the name of Islam, but democracy. The Arab Spring, more than any military victory, signaled the decline of militancy. Al Qaeda faced its greatest defeat at Tahrir Square.

Islamic militancy flourished principally on the battlefields of war on terror, in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, a trajectory epitomized by the emergence of the Islamic State from within the American prison system in Iraq. While Islamic militancy still survives in pockets of weak or fractured states, elsewhere it has petered out into the province of petty criminals or psychologically disturbed individuals. What, then, does its brief and brutal career mean for world history?

The End of the Cold War

The dramatic arrival of Al-Qaeda and Islamic militancy in the global public sphere in the early 2000s did not mark the beginning of a new chapter of global history. Perhaps that confrontation between Al-Qaeda and America signaled a historical ending: the true conclusion of the Cold War. By the fall of 2001, the Soviet Union and the bipolar world had been dead for a decade.

The Cold War survived in the institutions and practices it had created: NATO, the United Nations and its conventions, international courts and the multilateral institutions established to knit together a divided world through systems of deterrence, development and compromise born of the fear of an atomic holocaust. For a while, these institutions appeared capable of operating without their founding cause, but that hope proved illusory. In the 1990s, wars swept across the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and Africa. Al-Qaeda arose at the confluence of post-Cold War globalization and unipolar violence.

With its emergence at the turn of the millennium, Al-Qaeda, I argue, brought the Cold War to a definitive close by overturning its central presuppositions. The war on terror rendered the familiar categories of the Cold War—the balance of power, deterrence, great-power rivalry, and hegemony—increasingly obsolete. Fought in civilian spaces against nonstate actors dispersed around the globe, the war on terror also ended up destroying most of the Cold War’s remaining ideological states in the Middle East, including the socialist republics of Iraq, Libya, and Syria. 

Al-Qaeda's emergence also marked the end of Islamism, which was itself a Cold War movement dedicated to revolution and the creation of ideological states. Islamism’s only durable strongholds, Iran and Afghanistan, came to embody its takeover by clerical establishments of the kind it had once sought to displace. 

The war on terror also weakened the liberal state, another creature of the Cold War, whose animating purpose had been to pose capitalist liberty against Communist dictatorship. Osama bin Laden used to claim that Westerners thought their interventions in the Middle East would remake the region’s states in the images of their own, but instead it was the Americans and Europeans who came to resemble their despotic and corrupt clients in the region. 

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