The fortress we built after 9/11

Twenty-five years later, we forgot our greatest strength was inside.

It’s still the one question that unites almost everyone on this anniversary, no matter where they stand on anything else: where were you when the planes hit? Who did you call? That’s about the only thing left we all still ask each other the same way.

I decided to sleep in the morning of September 11 because Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Peru. I was walking out the door when the assignment desk called about the first plane, and my first instinct was that it had to be some kind of air traffic control failure - the idea that something so monumental could be happening simply hadn’t occurred to me. I heard about the second tower in a cab on the way to work. By the time I reached the State Department, people were evacuating, and because I was a reporter, I did what reporters do: I ran toward the building everyone else was running out of, until Diplomatic Security practically carried me out.

I spent hours trying to walk the half mile to the Foreign Press Center as the security perimeter around the White House kept expanding, then spent the next 24 hours there with the State Department press corps. We knew almost immediately that America had changed. We couldn’t know that a quarter century later, Americans would look at each other with more suspicion than they look at the country’s actual enemies.

The government’s response built an enormous security architecture - the TSA, intelligence reform, hardened cockpit doors, expanded surveillance, two wars, a homeland security bureaucracy - all of it requiring legislation, money and years of bureaucratic effort. The collective national response required far less: strangers trading knowing looks on the street and the subway, flags on houses that had never flown one, Bush’s approval rating hitting 90 percent within weeks, a level no sitting president has reached since.

We spent the next quarter century institutionalizing the security lessons of September 11, but never tried to institutionalize the resilience of September 12, and that resilience has since drained away. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken just before this year’s anniversary found 61 percent of Americans now see domestic extremists as the bigger ideology-driven threat, versus 34 percent who point abroad - a sharp flip from a decade ago, when foreign terrorism still outranked domestic. The same poll found most Americans still regard 9/11 as a unifying moment, even as they say the country has grown less unified since.

Polarization and terrorism are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable is intellectually lazy - domestic terrorism is one ugly symptom of a much bigger disease. The real vulnerability is that Americans no longer trust each other, or their own institutions, enough to agree on what’s true, which makes political violence easier to justify and foreign manipulation almost effortless to execute.

In the days after the attacks, Bush went to a mosque in Washington and said Islam was a religion of peace, that the terrorists had perverted it - an effort to draw a line between the attackers and the millions of Muslim Americans who had nothing to do with it.

That instinct largely held for years. It holds less cleanly now. Rhetoric that treats an entire faith as suspect, once confined to one party’s fringe, is turning up closer to the mainstream, and so is rhetoric, mostly from the other direction, that flirts with the idea America had it coming. Neither view was remotely acceptable in 2001; now both get argued about rather than simply rejected, depending on who’s talking. This year, with the midterms approaching, that same partisan lens has been applied to the anniversary itself, with part of the official commemoration used to draw a line from September 11 to the current, contested war with Iran.

That drift is real. In 2001, most Americans processed the day through a shared American identity first. In 2026, a lot of us run it through a political filter first, and get to the American identity second, if we get there at all.

Abraham Lincoln asked, in his 1838 Lyceum Address, where America’s destruction could possibly come from. Not from a foreign army, he argued, since no power on earth could cross the oceans and march to the Ohio or the Blue Ridge. If America was ever destroyed, it would have to happen from within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis has been a little obsessed with that warning. He spent four decades thinking about how America’s enemies might defeat it, commanded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran the Pentagon - and keeps coming back to the possibility that the country he spent his life defending might do the job itself. In 2020, he invoked Lincoln to describe an America where “suspicion or contempt” was replacing trust and politics was paralyzing the country. A year later, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, he returned to the problem from a national security angle: America had gotten better at defending the homeland even as the collapse of trust inside it created a vulnerability our adversaries could exploit.

We had a strategy for Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, reorganized the intelligence community, and built an entire cabinet department to protect the homeland - but never a strategy for the homeland turning on itself. That’s where the hand-wringing about national unity stops being sentimental and starts being strategic: societal resilience is a component of national power, not just a civic nicety.

Ukraine had roughly 196,000 soldiers before Russia’s full-scale invasion and, within a few years, nearly 900,000 including reservists, while civilians kept power plants running and companies built drones and fought off cyberattacks. Israel was tearing itself apart politically before October 7; after the attack, it called up 360,000 reservists, some of whom showed up before they were even summoned. Neither country stopped arguing with itself - they just didn’t let the arguments keep them from showing up when the country needed them.

None of this argues for a rerun of September 12. That unity was bought with 2,977 lives, and no one sane should wish for the invoice to come due again. Americans didn’t agree before the attacks or after them; democracy was never supposed to mean unanimity, and anyone selling that version of unity is selling something else too.

We are far better than we were on September 10, 2001, at hardening a cockpit door and tracing terrorist money. But every American who becomes convinced that half the country is stupid, evil or dangerous becomes that much easier to manipulate, and that is the harder question Lincoln left us with, the one Washington doesn’t much want to answer: what protects a nation from itself? Not enforced consensus, and not a grief-soaked memory of unity that catastrophe manufactured, but the discipline to argue fiercely, lose elections, shrug off propaganda and still know we’re on the same side.

Oceans don’t protect us anymore, not when a laptop in Shanghai or a troll farm outside St. Petersburg travels faster than any army could. But Lincoln’s point hasn’t aged: our adversaries don’t need to create America’s divisions, only to find the fault lines, press on them, and let us do the fighting.

We built a fortress after September 11 to keep America’s enemies out. Twenty-five years later, we need to remember that America’s greatest strength was always what’s inside it.

Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

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