Twenty-five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the US is still working out what kind of danger it is meant to guard against. In 2001, the answer was clear enough: foreign terrorists, organised abroad, striking the homeland. A quarter century of wars, laws, agencies and public argument later, that answer no longer holds on its own.A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that US citizens today rank domestic extremism and mass shootings well above foreign terrorism as the biggest threat to their safety, a sharp turn from the fear that dominated the years right after 2001. The US Department of Justice describes an institutional machine built for counterterrorism that must now also handle cyberattacks, ransomware and foreign interference. Seth Jones of CSIS goes further, arguing that the United States has entered an “end of sanctuary,” where drones, missiles and cyber operations from China, Russia and North Korea matter more to homeland security than any single terrorist network. The state that emerged from 9/11 is large, expensive and still standing. Whether it learned the right lessons is a major question.What followed from the 9/11 reportThe 9/11 Commission’s final report was unusually blunt about own allies of the US. It said plainly that Pakistan’s army and intelligence services had long been unwilling to confront Islamist extremists, and that many officials sympathised with or supported them even while Islamabad also assisted Washington against al-Qaeda. It made a similar point about Saudi Arabia, noting that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers came from Saudi society and that money raised there, often through charities, ended up funding extremism abroad. These things meant that the very countries the United States relied on to fight the war on terror were also part of the problem.What followed did not resolve that contradiction so much as live with it for two decades. Afghanistan is the clearest case. The Taliban were removed from power within weeks in 2001, but the mission drifted between destroying al-Qaeda and trying to build a modern state, without settling on which one it actually was, as Barack Obama later admitted in his memoir. He wrote that Marines would clear an area of the Taliban only to see the gains lost because local governance never followed, and that billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts often went to some of Kabul’s least trustworthy operators.Robert Gates, who had watched the Soviet Union bleed in Afghanistan in the 1980s, warned Obama that vague goals would guarantee failure. Obama also recorded what a government review under Bruce Riedel had concluded: that Pakistan’s intelligence service was helping the Taliban even as Washington paid Islamabad billions in aid, and that no amount of US effort in Afghanistan could succeed while that continued. Twenty years later, that prediction proved accurate. The Taliban returned to Kabul in August 2021, and the government that replaced Ashraf Ghani included several men on the United Nations terrorism list. Judged by its own founding purpose, the Afghan war did not succeed.Iraq turned out worse in some ways. The 2003 invasion and the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army and purge Ba’ath Party officials left hundreds of thousands of trained, armed men with no jobs and a grievance. Out of that mess grew al-Qaeda in Iraq, and later the group that called itself Islamic State. Daniel Byman, who worked on the 9/11 Commission staff, has said plainly that Iraq made the terrorism problem worse rather than better, and that many domestic security measures adopted after 9/11 look unnecessary in hindsight.Libya followed a similar pattern after 2011: NATO’s air campaign removed Muammar Gaddafi but left no plan for what came next, and the country split into rival power centres, becoming a route for weapons and fighters into the Sahel. Syria’s civil war, fed by the spillover from Iraq, gave Islamic State the space to declare a cross-border “caliphate” before it was eventually broken up. Bruce Hoffman’s own verdict is worth noting: the United States prevented another externally organised attack on the scale of 9/11, which is a real achievement, but it did not defeat the ideas behind jihadist violence, and al-Qaeda’s franchises now stretch from North Africa to Southeast Asia.How the response spread the problem furtherThe war on terror did not stay contained to the countries where US troops fought. Weapons looted from Libyan stockpiles reached the Sahel and strengthened groups such as Boko Haram in Nigeria and JNIM in Mali. Drone strikes in Yemen pushed some local tribes toward al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula rather than away from it. In Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas, extremist networks adapted and survived rather than disappeared.None of this means the Arab Spring of 2011 was caused by 9/11 – it was a home-grown revolt against decades of local dictatorship and poverty. But the US has a habit of propping up friendly autocrats in the name of fighting extremism. This, coupled with the disillusionment that followed the Iraq war, formed part of the background against which those uprisings happened.There is also an uncomfortable truth about how liberal democracies conducted this fight. When the United States bypassed the United Nations Charter to invade Iraq, and built a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay outside the reach of ordinary law, it sent a signal well beyond the Middle East – that a country could ignore international rules as long as it called the effort counterterrorism. Governments elsewhere took note. Amitav Acharya has argued that this period exposed the real limits of US power and hastened the arrival of a more crowded, less US-centred world order.Far-right politics, migration laws and the language of securityThe domestic legal systems built after 9/11 spread almost as widely as the ideology it was meant to fight. The USA PATRIOT Act, passed six weeks after the attacks, allowed bulk collection of phone and internet records and let agencies demand private data from banks and companies without a judge’s prior approval. Britain followed with control orders that could restrict a person’s movement on suspicion alone, rather than after a conviction. France, after the 2015 Paris attacks, eventually wrote emergency search-and-seizure powers into ordinary law through the 2017 SILT Act, handing the Interior Ministry authority once reserved for judges. India strengthened its Unlawful Activities (Prevention Act) (UAPA) after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, making it far harder for the accused to get bail.These laws fed a second, more troubling development. The folding of migration into the language of existential threat. Agencies built to track foreign terrorist networks, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement of the US, were later turned toward large-scale domestic deportation drives. Refugee flows caused in part by the wars in Iraq, Syria and Libya gave European far-right parties a ready audience, and leaders in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere built platforms on defending a “Christian Europe” against Muslim migration.None of this is to say that every immigration debate since 2001 is a direct product of 9/11. But the trend of treating a refugee or an asylum seeker as a potential security risk first and a person second took shape in this period, and it has outlasted the wars that gave rise to it.Twenty-five years of a kess orderly worldThe rules that once organised international relations – respect for sovereignty, reluctance to invade another state without cause, a rough deference to the United Nations – took real damage in this period, and not only from the United States.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and repeated sabotage operations against European infrastructure, China’s growing military reach, and years of civil war in Syria, Yemen and Libya, Hamas’s attack on Israel and the Gaza genocide, the US-Israeli attacks on Iran all belong to a world where restraint matters very little. Francis Fukuyama has pointed out that the gap between the military strength of the US and its ability to achieve anything political with it became one of the challenging features of this era. Joseph Nye made a related point – that reliance on military force at the expense of alliances and legitimacy cost Washington the “soft power” it once had.John Mearsheimer’s criticism runs from a different direction, He said that “the United States has fought seven wars since 1989 but this strategy has led to a string of disasters and is the main cause of the growing instability around the globe.” He also wrote elsewhere that trying to build democracies by force in Iraq and Afghanistan drained resources and attention while China’s rise went largely unchecked. These are not identical arguments, but they agree on the same conclusion—the state grew stronger at home while its influence weakened abroad.A lesson still waiting to be learntThe strongest lesson of these twenty-five years is that military power without a realistic political plan produces long wars and short-lived results. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria each show a version of the same mistake – removing a regime is far easier than building whatever is supposed to replace it. A second lesson concerns the state’s own citizens. Laws written for a narrow emergency became permanent fixtures of governance in the United States, Britain, France and India, and rarely get returned once the emergency has passed.Far-right movements that used the fear generated after 9/11 to gain power now face the same choice democracies faced in 2001 – whether security requires abandoning legal restraint, or whether restraint is what makes security durable in the first place. Twenty-five years on, the US state has built a robust domestic security apparatus and a far less certain claim to global leadership. The lesson has been very clear for some time. Whether it gets learnt is still an open question.K.M. Seethi is director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension and academic advisor to the International Centre for Polar Studies at the Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU) in Kerala. He also served as ICSSR senior fellow, senior professor of international relations and dean of social sciences at MGU.