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. 

One of the goals of Al-Qaeda’s campaign of terror was to precisely achieve that by showing how even violence falling short of a conventional war and posing no genuine existential threat was sufficient in provoking Western democracies to dismantle the civil liberties of their own citizens, exposing their claims to freedom as hypocritical. As the war on terror dragged on, Al-Qaeda’s leaders portrayed the anti-terror laws and the increasingly militarized conduct of the U.S. and its allies not as signs of resolve and strength but as displays of weakness and proof of the shallowness of Western liberalism. Bin Laden might have been disappointed by Al-Qaeda’s inability to mobilize enough Muslims around the world to overthrow their dictatorships, but the U.S. and its European allies, which sustained those authoritarian regimes, sadly behaved much as he had predicted. 

A sacrificial, if not nihilistic, movement whose iconic figure was the suicide bomber, Al-Qaeda had little interest in conquest and government. One of its major objectives was to provoke Western states into attacking their own democracies, in a kind of auto-immune response to terrorism, in which the effort to defend the political body corroded it from within. In that particular sense, bin Laden was perversely successful in dragging America and its allies into expensive wars and weakening their liberal norms as they chose widespread use of emergency powers, surveillance, indefinite detention, torture, and rendition. The war also brought suspicion of Muslims, hostility toward immigration, civilizational rhetoric, and border militarization from the political margins to the center of Western public discourse.

America’s preoccupation with the war on terror did squander its unipolar decade. It wasn’t a coincidence that the rise of China—and the China shock—came a few years after the Great Recession of 2008 and a decade after the 9/11 attacks. The cultural and political landscape of Europe and America today—characterized by polarization, populism, and a pervasive distrust of institutions—can be understood, at least in part, as the legacy of the response to the 9/11 attacks by Al-Qaeda. By this measure, my assertion would be that bin Laden won the war on terror much as he had predicted he would.

What sustained the liberal order

The rise of populism and far-right politics in America and Europe has generated great laments for the corrosion of a golden age of liberalism and progress following the victory of the Allied powers against fascism in World War II. The flowering of postwar liberal democracy owed less to the defeat of fascism than to the Cold War, when the existence of a socialist alternative compelled Europe and North America to emphasize social protections, greater equality, and meaningful political rights.

Thus, the crisis of liberal democracy after 9/11 might be better understood not simply as a blowback from the war on terror, but as an aftershock of socialism’s collapse. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, that pressure disappeared. Though liberal institutions survived formally, the social and economic settlement that sustained them had begun to erode.

During World War II and in its immediate aftermath, the Allies were hardly exemplars of liberal standards. Several allied powers were colonial empires engaged in the violent suppression of nationalist movements in Asia and Africa even as they fought fascism. Nor can any account of Allied conduct ignore the firebombing of German cities or the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Although the war in Europe and the Pacific dominates debates about Allied misconduct, the colonial character of World War II may tell us more about the origins of our present moment. Colonial armies fought in every theater and constituted some of the forces deployed during the war. At least a million soldiers fighting in the British and French armies against fascism were Muslims. Civilians in territories like India, though far from the principal battlefields, also suffered immensely during the war. The Bengal famine, in which some three million people, Hindus and Muslims, starved to death, was, as many have argued, caused in part by wartime disruptions to grain supplies and by imperial policy.

Europe didn’t only take men and material from the colonies for the Great War, but also a repertoire of its illiberal practices in the colonies. The Nazis drew upon precedents established in colonial wars waged by European powers. The Allies, in turn, brought home methods of coercion that had previously been largely confined to their empires. Among them was the revival of medieval doctrines of just war, which subordinated contractual obligations to unilateral claims of moral authority—doctrines that resurfaced during the war on terror to justify pre-emptive attacks and torture.

World War II should be understood not simply as liberalism’s triumph over tyranny but also as a source—and continuation—of Western illiberalism, much like what came to the surface after 9/11. It was the Cold War that provided the real foundation of mid-century liberalism. One might even argue that the post-9/11order, from which today’s far-right movements partly emerged, has its roots in World War II’s struggle for global hegemony, a contest suspended for the duration of the Cold War.

The war on terror represented a failed effort to impose a unipolar order on the world, one that could no longer rely on the economic instrumentality of globalization alone. And its failure also discredited the globalization associated with free trade and mass migration. In its place arose far-right movements in Western Europe and North America dedicated to dividing the world into racial and cultural blocs, divisions often defended in the language of the struggle against terrorism and Islam.

In America, this political vision harks back to the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine; in Europe, it reaches further, to the myth of a culturally homogeneous Christian continent. In both cases, the animating force is not social conservatism alone but hostility toward immigrants, and toward Muslims in particular. Its deeper history may therefore lie in decolonization, which transformed immigration into a defining political reality distinct from the colonial systems of slavery, indenture and managed labor migration that preceded it.

Asian and African decolonization not only overlapped with the Cold War but was, in many important ways, made possible by it. As the rival superpowers courted newly independent countries, they helped secure what sovereignty many of those states possessed. Yet decolonization, no less than the Cold War, also made possible the European Economic Community and, eventually, the European Union. Europe emerged from World War II with most of its colonial possessions more or less intact. It was only decolonization that allowed the continent to cohere into a new kind of economic and political unit.

The long aftermath of decolonization

Immigration has a double history in America, proceeding from two waves of decolonization: the 19th century independence of Latin American countries and that of Asian and African nations in the 20th century. American anti-immigrant politics consequently differs from the European version, remaining more closely bound to the Monroe Doctrine and its vision of hemispheric control. 

Europe may possess the older political history, but its encounter with immigration is more recent, starting with labor migration to help with European reconstruction after World War II and expanding again in the wake of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War weakened the sovereignty of many postcolonial states, producing new waves of migration as those countries faced economic pressure or were drawn into conflict. It also reduced European countries from strategic partners in the Cold War to increasingly dependent allies—a relationship laid bare by the war on terror, which expanded American power while disproportionately rewarding American companies.

The end of the Cold War, made visible through 9/11 and its aftermath, has also transformed Europe’s understanding of its past. While World War II is still invoked, especially by liberals, it no longer occupies its former place as the 20th century’s defining event and the founding moment of the international order now coming apart. 

The ascendance of immigration—and, with it, race and culture—as the central political concern on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that decolonization has displaced the war in the historical imagination. Narratives about the struggles against fascism or Communism still shape Western identities, but political debate is increasingly dominated by fears of what might be called “reverse colonization.” 

Europe’s unwillingness or inability to reckon with colonialism may explain its strange, even pathological identification with the anxieties of its former subjects. The fear of foreign settlement, demographic change, and cultural swamping all echo the language once used in colonized societies of Asia and Africa, where the Christian West was regarded as precisely such a threat. This switching of places is apparent in portrayals of Islam as both an alien and more virile force than Western liberalism, a force whose supposed cohesion and will to dominate must be countered by weapons of solidarity and domination.

European politics has thus increasingly begun to appropriate the defensive posture of the peoples Europe once ruled. Perverse though this identification may be, it reveals the extent to which decolonization—itself part of the Cold War’s history— has become the century’s central historical drama. This switching of places is especially true of Islam seen as an alien but also more virile force than Western liberalism, one whose power thus needs to be countered by its own weapons of solidarity and domination.

For all the spectacle of its asymmetric attacks, Al Qaeda—and Islamist militancy more broadly—never had more than some tens of thousands of committed supporters worldwide. These movements did not emerge from some hermetically sealed Islamic history. They belonged to global events and narratives, which gave them what influence they possessed. The disproportion between their small numbers and enormous consequences cannot be explained primarily by technology, mass media or even the war on terror. It arose from the institutional and political vulnerabilities exposed by the Cold War’s belated conclusion.

We now live amid the detritus of the end of the Cold War and are able to recognize decolonization as the crucial event of the 20th century. Its legacy animates both movements seeking greater inclusion and campaigns promising to restore a national unity defined in racial or cultural terms. More than three decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse, we still live in the wake of the Cold War, an aftermath that first revealed its force in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on New York and Washington, D.C.