WHO WON THE WAR ON TERROR?

This battle will take time and resolve,” President George W. Bush declared on September 12, 2001. “But make no mistake about it: we will win.” For much o! the next two decades, pursuing victory in the “war on terror” would serve as the central #xation o! American foreign policy. Yet even as the United States invaded two countries and launched drone strikes in others, as governments around the world erected vast security structures and attackers plotted with mixed success to evade them, as jihadi groups rose and fell and rose again, a basic question was never answered: What would it mean to “win”?

Drawing on thousands o! al Qaeda documents seized in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Nelly Lahoud reveals that the other side struggled with the same question. The 9/11 attacks were meant, in bin Laden’s words, to “destroy the myth o! American invincibility.” Ultimately, Lahoud writes, “bin Laden did change the world—just not in the ways that he wanted.”

One factor he failed to anticipate was the overwhelming U.S. response. “By any measure,” writes Ben Rhodes, “the ‘war on terror’ was the biggest project o! the period o! American hegemony that began when the Cold War ended—a period that has now reached its dusk.” The vast scale and consequences o! that project, Rhodes argues, continue to shape U.S. foreign policy, as Washington imposes the same us-versusthem construct on new threats.

American counterterrorism, meanwhile, has settled into what Daniel Byman calls a “good enough doctrine,” meant to “manage, rather than eliminate, the terrorist threat”—with a degree o! e"ectiveness that few imagined possible in the aftermath o! 9/11. Other outcomes would have seemed equally surprising. Thomas Hegghammer traces how the #ght against jihadi terrorism fueled “the steadily growing coercive power o! the technocratic state.” Cynthia Miller-idriss traces how it fueled a di"erent strain o! extremist violence: 2020 saw a record number o! domestic terrorist plots and attacks in the United States, and “two-thirds o! those were attributable to white supremacists and other far-right extremists.”

“I! the goal o! the global war on terror was to prevent signi#cant acts o! terrorism, particularly in the United States, then the war has succeeded,” Elliot Ackerman concludes from his survey o! the expansive use o! U.S. military power in that war. “But at what cost?” In the last few years, terrorism may have vanished from the top tier o! American national security concerns almost as quickly as it appeared. Yet the costs continue to accrue—leaving the question o! what winning means as unsettled now as it was on September 12, 2001.

For two decades, pursuing victory in the “war on terror” has served as the central fixation of American foreign policy.