Everyone who was in Washington DC on September 11, 2001, remembers how crisp and beautiful the sky was that morning. I began my own day with the usual routine. After parking outside at the Ellipse at 0630 I went for a workout at the White House gym, grabbed a coffee and bounded up the marble stairs of the Old Executive Office Building to begin my day as director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council staff.
I was only six months into the job and still entered the compound every morning giddy from all the symbols of history, power and purpose. The one thing I had never felt was vulnerable – but that would soon change.
After my intelligence briefing, which in retrospect featured nothing about terrorism, I welcomed a delegation from the Japanese prime minister’s office to discuss delicate issues around US bases in Okinawa. My Japanese counterpart appreciated White House attention to a local problem related to the alliance and we had a cordial exchange until we heard a murmur from another part of the office suite – a plane had struck one of the World Trade Centre towers.
What a tragic accident for the people of New York, my Japanese guest offered politely. Then colleagues entered, ashen-faced. A second plane had struck the other tower. This was a deliberate attack. Moments later a uniformed Secret Service officer came running down the hallway yelling: “Everyone evacuate the building – NOW!”
Most of us gathered across Pennsylvania Avenue in Lafayette Park awaiting the all-clear as if this were a fire drill. But then two US Air Force F-16 fighter jets streaked overhead. We realised then that the White House was also a target as we were relocated to other parts of the city.
From our remote offices we worked hard trying to find information, co-ordinate with allies and do all the other things officials do in such moments – but underneath the displays of grit and determination we were disoriented and felt wholly unprepared for the crisis. I can still feel the dread that overtook us as we watched the twin towers collapse on television while a plume of smoke rose above the Pentagon out the window. With three attacks and thousands already dead in a single morning, we braced for what might follow.
That was when I received a call from deep below the White House. Prime Minister John Howard of Australia was still in the US after a bilateral summit and had informed the president that he would ask cabinet to invoke the ANZUS Treaty. Tony Blair was working to do the same with NATO.
It was an incredibly emotional moment. I had taught diplomatic history for years and always explained that the ANZUS Treaty was negotiated for the defence of Australia. It never occurred to officials or historians that it would first be invoked in the defence of the US.
I was instructed to tell the Japanese ambassador that “other close US allies” were invoking our mutual security treaties in response to the terrorist attack. I spoke with the Japanese political minister who was a lawyer. “But our treaty with the United States does not provide even theoretically for the defence of the United States,” he said somewhat confused. “I know,” I replied.
After a pregnant silence he said he would immediately inform Tokyo. On receiving the message, prime minister Junichiro Koizumi told his staff that Japan would follow Australia’s lead and do whatever it could to help America defeat the terrorists. He then broke all post-war precedent in Japan by sending refuelling ships to the Arabian Sea, funding reconstruction in Afghanistan and later putting Japanese Self-Defence Forces personnel in harm’s way in southern Iraq.
I slept very little that night and went into the office early the next morning resolved to do everything in my limited power to help the country recover and fight back. I began receiving thick dossiers every morning tracking terrorist threats across the Indo-Pacific.
We fully expected a future of relentless bombings against innocent civilians in shopping malls, churches, buses and aeroplanes. Many on both sides of politics believed history would judge our administration and our generation in this fight the way it had measured our parents and grandparents in World War II. The attacks on innocents in Madrid, London and Bali only reconfirmed the danger. We braced for more violence and turned all our energy to crafting a strategy with our allies that would restore a saner world.
A world redefined?
Twenty-five years later the national and international consciousness about September 11 seems stunningly shallow to those who lived through it. Students I teach at the University of Sydney and before that at Georgetown University in Washington seldom think of 9/11 as a defining moment in world affairs.
Some have learned that it was the spark for the Iraq war, which they are taught was a great disaster in world history. On the fringes some have accepted conspiracy theories that the attack was an inside job by the CIA. The tragedy, shock and heroism of that day are barely evident in popular culture.
We would have anticipated none of this. We now know the defining problems of our generation have more to do with climate change, geopolitical competition and artificial intelligence than terrorism. But the 9/11 attack was nevertheless a shock to the system and one we should not forget.
For me there are at least four lessons worth remembering on this anniversary.
Heroism matters
We live in an era when true heroes are being eclipsed by those who seek fame through angry tweets and demonisation of their fellow citizens. We would do well to remember that 25 years ago hundreds of average people demonstrated extraordinary heroism.
The passengers on United Airlines flight 93 fought the hijackers with food carts and Coke cans until the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field before the terrorists could reach their intended target in Washington (very likely the White House). First responders rushed into the twin towers to save lives and 400 died as the towers collapsed. A piper friend of mine in New York was given two months’ leave so he could play at all the funerals of fallen police and firefighters. I later met one of the two pilots whose F-16s had streaked from Andrews Air Force Base to protect the White House. She told me they took off without any ammunition and were calmly planning over the radio how to best crash their jets into any approaching airliner to defend those below. Arizona Cardinals safety Pat Tillman left the National Football League to join the Army Rangers, later falling on the battlefield in Afghanistan. In the White House I was joined by veterans of earlier administrations who left their high-paying finance jobs on Wall Street to go back to work on a bureaucrat’s salary to help fight the war on terrorism.
Whatever one believes about the wisdom or even morality of US policy, the selflessness of so many in that moment merits commemoration this week. That goes for the many allied soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers and aid workers who put themselves in harm’s way.
Analytical precision matters
In 2001 we thought the US and the world were entering a new era comparable to World War II or the Cold War where total victory was the only option. This was a bipartisan view in Washington and one shared by America’s closest allies including many in Australia.
Famed historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote in Surprise, Security and the American Experience (Harvard University Press 2004) that Americans, when attacked, would expand their security obligations. Adversaries thought surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941 or on South Korea in 1950 would cause American retreat, he noted, but instead those attacks triggered a ferocious response and the expansion of the American security perimeter to the Western Pacific.
Toby Keith’s country-western anthem for American vengeance after 9/11, Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue, has the memorable refrain: “You’ll be sorry that you messed with the US of A/ ’cause we’ll put a boot in your ass/ It’s the American way.” We did. A lot of boots.
How should history judge that response? Some commentators in the US are arguing this week that the whole war on terror was imagined. That is wrong. We were collectively right about the risk of a new era of terrorism and then acted to prevent it.
That this era is not defined by global terrorism should be considered a success of policy and not a failure of analytical imagination.
Indonesia did not become the next failed state and terrorist haven, as leading academic experts in the US and Australia warned at the time. Citizens use planes, trains, shopping centres and cinemas today without fear of bombings. This was because of the effective application of military force, intelligence, diplomacy and development assistance.
That this era is not defined by global terrorism should be considered a success of policy and not a failure of analytical imagination.
In other respects, however, there was massive over-imagination of the threat. The underlying structure of international relations did not fundamentally change because of 9/11 as many predicted.
The Bush administration was wrong to posit that the common threat of terrorism could bring the US, Russia and China closer together. The Obama administration was equally mistaken to argue in its first National Security Strategy that the common threat of climate change would have the same civilising effect on the great powers.
We should learn not to project our own hopes and fears on to our rivals and adversaries. Beijing and Moscow saw opportunities in the wake of 9/11 and took them out of self-interest. But there was no change in their interpretation of the forces of history or their own revisionist aims.
There was also over-imagination by the intelligence and policy communities about the capabilities of the terrorists. Having failed to connect the dots that led to the attacks on 9/11, the CIA and counterpart services around the world frantically connected too many dots in the wake of the attack.
The spectre of weapons of mass destruction replacing box cutters (which were used by terrorists to hijack planes that day) was too horrible to tolerate. The crisis reinforced groupthink. The Iraq war was not an imperialist oil grab, as revisionists argue, but it was predicated on faulty intelligence analysis. As the deputy director of the CIA at the time, Mike Morell, has since passionately argued, the intelligence community must have more checks and balances and take a collective deep breath at such moments of crisis. That lesson was internalised by the US intelligence community and other Five Eyes partners and it is worth reteaching to younger analysts who may not have even been born yet.
Allies matter
After 9/11 America’s closest allies rallied to our side. Most Americans may not know exactly how they helped but they seem to know they did. For the past 25 years public opinion polls in the US have shown consistently high support for ANZUS, NATO and the alliances with Japan and South Korea.
President Donald Trump’s gratuitous mocking of Canada and Denmark runs against that grain and is deeply embarrassing for those who know that Canada lost 165 soldiers in Afghanistan and Denmark lost 43 – higher per capita casualty rates than the US suffered itself. Canadians and Danes deployed because the US came under attack and not the other way around.
US alliances weathered the subsequent protests over the Iraq war and will survive the deep distrust towards the current administration one finds in public opinion polls around the world. Today support for alliance with the US is at 93 per cent in Japan, 97 per cent in South Korea and 82 per cent in The Philippines despite Trump’s personal unpopularity.
In Australia public support for ANZUS rises and falls five to 10 points depending on the President or the events of the day but remains constant at about 80 per cent. Paul Keating, Hugh White and others will continue yelling that the alliance is over, but the public is not buying it and there is no evidence that the Albanese government is moving to anything like a plan B without the US.
At a technological, operational and intelligence level US alliances in the Indo-Pacific today are far more integrated than they were before 9/11 in part because of the intensified co-operation that began during the now largely forgotten war on terror.
President Donald Trump’s gratuitous mocking of Canada and Denmark runs against that grain and is deeply embarrassing for those who know that Canada lost 165 soldiers in Afghanistan and Denmark lost 43 – higher per capita casualty rates than the US suffered itself. Canadians and Danes deployed because the US came under attack and not the other way around.
US alliances weathered the subsequent protests over the Iraq war and will survive the deep distrust towards the current administration one finds in public opinion polls around the world. Today support for alliance with the US is at 93 per cent in Japan, 97 per cent in South Korea and 82 per cent in The Philippines despite Trump’s personal unpopularity.
In Australia public support for ANZUS rises and falls five to 10 points depending on the President or the events of the day but remains constant at about 80 per cent. Paul Keating, Hugh White and others will continue yelling that the alliance is over, but the public is not buying it and there is no evidence that the Albanese government is moving to anything like a plan B without the US.
At a technological, operational and intelligence level US alliances in the Indo-Pacific today are far more integrated than they were before 9/11 in part because of the intensified co-operation that began during the now largely forgotten war on terror.
US alliances in the Indo-Pacific today are far more integrated than they were before 9/11 in part because of the intensified co-operation that began during the now largely forgotten war on terror.
The first shot of the next war?
In retrospect there was a dispassionate logic to allies such as Australia rallying to America’s side 25 years ago. Governments from London to Tokyo were as shocked as the Americans that New York and Washington had come under direct attack. This represented an assault on the epicentre of the global system of alliances that underpins order and stability.
In that sense the attacks on 9/11 did usher in a new era of international relations – not one predicated on the threat of terrorism, as we thought at the time, but one in which several actors will seek to erode or destroy the American-led post-war order. We continue to share that vulnerability and a collective responsibility to make the alliances and the international system more resilient. Most of the attention in Australia’s media recently has been on the domestic American political threats to that order but these pale in comparison to what is coming from outside. We can see the evidence from Ukraine to the Korean Peninsula and the South China Sea.
At our best we displayed heroism and solidarity 25 years ago. We were overconfident in our analysis and have become less certain since. Going forward we will again need heroism, solidarity and steely-eyed analysis because the assaults on the American-led order that began on 9/11 have changed but are not going away. Indeed, they are multiplying.