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Sept. 11 Changed the World Order. But Not for the Reason We May Think.
The terrorist attacks 25 years ago consumed U.S. resources and attention, and left the country unable to address the bigger threats to its economy
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When the World Trade Center towers crashed to the ground 25 years ago, they triggered a seismic wave that seemed to smash the world order.
It was now “a different world,” President George W. Bush warned Congress. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared: “It was before 9/11 and after 9/11.” Vice President Dick Cheney added: “That day changed everything.”
They were right, with a caveat. The attacks were a monumental tragedy. The world order did change. But it was the aftermath—the U.S. response to 9/11, not the terrorism itself—that made the difference.
Deep Dive
Ask HTSept. 11 marked a shockingly successful attack by a stateless and relatively small group of Islamist militants. The U.S., though, launched a massive military response: a War on Terror. It attacked two countries, one uninvolved with 9/11. The rhetoric was so sweeping, Washington borrowed language from World War II and the Cold War. America was now confronting an Axis of Evil.
Consumed by the War on Terror, the U.S. had less capacity to address other global priorities such as the pivotal rise of China and an increasingly hostile Russia. That inattention to shifting global forces was what really changed the world.
U.S. leaders were “certainly distracted” and “we continually found ourselves sucked back into the morass of our misadventures in the Middle East,” William Burns, who served in several administrations and later became director of the CIA, said in 2019. “Imagine if a bigger part of the time, energy and resources spent on the Global War on Terror had instead been spent on giving form to an affirmative vision for America’s role in Asia.”
“China and Russia have welcomed” the War on Terror, the scholar Robert Kagan wrote in 2008, “because it has distracted the United States’ strategic focus away from them.”
Strength and optimism
Recall America’s standing just before 9/11. It was a time of strength and optimism. The U.S. had won the Cold War and enjoyed international dominance. Its victory over Iraq in the first Gulf War still resonated: a U.S. military so powerful it could crush threats far away, in short order, and with few American casualties.
That optimistic mindset shaped pre-9/11 strategy. Many U.S. leaders believed bringing nations into the global economy would make them more like the West and less likely to go to war. China and Russia were central to that plan.
“The more we bring China into the world, the more the world will bring change and freedom to China,” said President Bill Clinton. Washington championed the integration of China and welcomed Russia into the G-7 group of nations, making it the G-8.
There were practical considerations, too. China promised more than a billion new customers for U.S. companies. Russia’s vast supply of gas and oil helped power Europe and the global economy.
Optimism notwithstanding, warnings still abounded. “Unfortunately, a policy of engagement is doomed to fail,” the scholar John Mearsheimer wrote in his 2001 book, “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.” “If China becomes an economic powerhouse it will almost certainly translate its economic might into military might and make a run at dominating Northeast Asia.… In short, China and the United States are destined to be adversaries as China’s power grows.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser, was equally emphatic in his 1997 book “The Grand Chessboard”: It “is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America.”
Shortly after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and the hijacked United Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pa., the U.S. launched its War on Terror. It invaded Afghanistan to rout al Qaeda, which had executed the attacks. In a historic intelligence failure, the U.S. also invaded Iraq in part to seize weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.
Two long wars ensued, killing more than 7,000 U.S. servicemembers and hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi military personnel, police, and civilians, according to a Brown University study. The conflicts—a complex mix of war and nation building—cost the U.S. several trillion dollars and roiled South Asia and the Mideast.
They also absorbed the attention of successive administrations. Foreign policy continued on many fronts. But as the world slipped back into great-power rivalry, the U.S. appeared caught out.
“While the U.S. was heavily involved in the Middle East and South Asia…the geopolitical balance moved against the U.S. in both Europe and East Asia thanks to the emergence of a more aggressive Russia and a more capable and assertive China,” Richard Haass, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in 2021.
When Russia invaded Georgia (during George W. Bush’s presidency) and then seized Crimea (during Barack Obama’s presidency), Western responses failed to prevent further expansionism. Russia later launched a full-scale war against Ukraine. Many analysts say the West should have imposed much tougher sanctions on Russia, and done a better job arming vulnerable neighbors, among other measures.
“Russia’s war against Ukraine is what failed deterrence looks like,” writes Ben Hodges, former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe. “We were not ready or united in recognizing that Russia was a real threat.”
China and the WTO
As for China, by this time a true geopolitical sea change had taken place. It was unrelated to terrorism.
It happened on Dec. 11, 2001, while the U.S. bombed the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan and President Bush led a worldwide commemoration marking the three-month anniversary of 9/11.
On this day China officially joined the World Trade Organization.
China’s entry to the WTO, championed by Washington and American business among others, further opened the country’s economy to global trade and gave China greater access to foreign markets. The impact was swift. Chinese exports swamped global markets. Foreign companies piled into China and shifted more manufacturing to this lower-cost locale. Factories in the U.S. and other nations closed and jobs were lost.
Accusations from companies and governments soon grew louder. They said China was stealing intellectual property, pressuring foreign companies to transfer technology in exchange for market access, manipulating its currency to support export growth, subsidizing its state industries to give them an unfair advantage in global markets, and violating or circumventing other WTO commitments.
The speed of China’s subsequent ascent stunned nations. Annual merchandise exports rocketed to $3.58 trillion in 2024 from $266 billion in 2001. Its share of global merchandise exports rose to 15% from 4%. Economists called the upheaval The China Shock.
With economic wealth came military muscle. China militarized the South China Sea, building artificial islands and outposts and challenging its neighbors. It commissioned its first aircraft carrier in 2012, its second in 2019 and its third in 2025. At their recent meeting in Beijing, China’s leader Xi Jinping warned President Donald Trump of the dangers of the Thucydides Trap—the tendency for war to erupt when a rising power threatens a dominant one.
A missed moment
Many diplomats and scholars argue that the U.S., distracted by its wars, missed this critical moment to confront China and manage its rise. It was slow to crack down on China’s trade practices, using WTO safeguard clauses and other sanctions. The U.S. could have built alternative trade groups and withheld membership from China until its behavior changed, they contend. America should have bolstered its military presence and coalitions in the Pacific. These scholars acknowledge that China would eventually have made its economic mark regardless. The question was how fast and how disruptive the process would be.
During this period Bush administration officials missed several key regional meetings in Asia, such as summits of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. “Where is the U.S. leadership?” a Singaporean official asked during an interview in 2006.
The Obama administration announced a pivot to Asia and tried to build an alternative trade group, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that would initially exclude China. By then, though, many Americans had soured on trade deals. Domestic politics killed U.S. participation in the plan.
The Trump and Biden administrations deployed tariffs and export controls and blacklisted Chinese companies. But China was long past its inflection point. Its state-capitalism model, massive manufacturing ecosystem, long-term investment outlook, and ability to work around Western restrictions had become too effective. It kept growing.
To be sure, China’s trajectory was set in motion decades before 9/11 when it began economic liberalization in 1978. Washington wasn’t alone in helping China build economic power in the following years. Perhaps the greater enabling force all along has been Western business.
“For three decades,” Shane Tedjarati, a former executive with Honeywell and Deloitte in China, wrote in May, “Western corporations pursued a strategy that was rational quarter by quarter and cumulatively self-defeating: the systematic transfer of manufacturing capacity, operational know-how, engineering discipline, and indirect market access into China, in exchange for lower costs, higher margins, and short-term shareholder returns.” The painful result: “the construction of the very competitors now arriving at the door.”
Globalization in retreat
America’s failure to address the dislocation resulting from China’s rise fed another post-9/11 fracture in the world order: anger in America toward globalization. The wars, immigration, and an unrelated financial crisis that forced millions of Americans out of their homes further darkened the political mood. By 2025, only 17% of Americans trusted the government to do the right thing, according to Pew Research.
This discontent contributed to an undercurrent of isolationism and nativism, helping fuel the rise of Donald Trump’s America First movement. Many supporters question or reject much of the existing multilateral, rules-based global order—NATO, European alliances, the WTO—believing it doesn’t work for them.
Little of this was entirely new. Automation, outsourcing and foreign competition were already reshaping blue-collar America when U.S. manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979. Jobs were moving to Mexico, Taiwan and other cheaper labor markets. The Japan Shock battered the U.S. auto industry before the China Shock.
But the discontent gained louder political voice in the years after 9/11. Similar tumult, driven in part by China’s ascent, has spread to Europe, and with it a rise of right-wing politics, xenophobia and attacks on international organizations, notably the European Union. Anti-globalism has gone global.
Those who lived through the 9/11 attacks feel that the day rocked the world. It did, most profoundly through decisions America made after 9/11, along with interventions it didn’t make.
The new century is dominated by longstanding forces. Globalization, social upheaval and great-power rivalry are tectonic shifts that were in motion before the terrorist attacks. Sept. 11 alone didn’t create this world order. But the day and its aftermath played a defining role, one marked by tragedy, miscalculation and consequence.
Write to reports@wsj.com
