25 years ago today, tragedy struck the United States. Two planes struck both World Trade Center towers in New York City, one plane flew into the Pentagon in Virginia and a fourth plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
Nearly 3,000 lives were lost, history was forever changed, and the America we know now continues to be shaped by the actions of government leaders following this attack.
Jeffery Engle, history professor and the David Gergen Director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, joined NTX Now's Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning to discuss where the United States is at, 25 years after the Sep. 11 attacks.
These interview highlights have been edited for length and clarity. To hear the conversation in full, click the 'listen' button above.
How would you summarize how America has grown in the world over the last 25 years?
I think, unfortunately, we've seen the fruition of some of the worst predictions, some of the more dire predictions, and some of more dire warnings from the 1980s and from the 1970s.
I think 25 years later, we want to think about 9/11 as a breaking point in history, but I think if we take a broader view, 9/11 actually reveals a lot of the broader problems that the United States is seeing today. For example, in the 1980s, a lot of good work done by people like Paul Kennedy and others on the rise and fall of empires. One of the points that these theorists pointed out was that empires over time stop investing into things that made them strong in the first place. They stop investing in infrastructure. They stop investing in industry. They stopped investing in particular in education, and they start investing more and more in military.
Why? Well, because they have a technological advantage, they're more worried about losing than they are about gaining new things. Over time, 9/11 demonstrated in the aftermath that the United States really came to rely upon its military force as the driving force of its foreign policy.
We began investing less because we were spending more overseas, and we presumed that our military was dominant, because by all apparent signs it was, until suddenly it wasn't. Now, in 2026, we're seeing how the military power that we thought would keep us on top for the 21st century is actually not as powerful as we'd hoped.
Did the terrorist enterprises behind 9/11 know this would be part of the fallout and the outcome of their attack?
We did exactly what Osama bin Laden hoped we would do. He hoped that he would be able to spur the United States to engage in a series of long term expenditures of resources and time in the Middle East, which would rile up parts of the Middle East against American interests, which would fray our alliances and which would cause us to spend our blood and treasure much quicker than we were.
He won 9/11 in that sense, in that when you do exactly what your enemy hopes, it should at least give you pause. We did exactly what our adversaries and the evil men of 9/11 wanted us to do.
Now again, I lived through it. I was not suggesting a different strategy at the time, but the purpose of being a grand strategist at the level of presidential politics is to be able to think outside of the week in front of you and the day in front of you and the month in front you, in order to see the long-term consequences of your actions.
Can we course correct and if we don't, what does the worst case scenario look like?
Unfortunately, I think we are course-correcting in the wrong direction. Going back to the theories of imperial overstretch and empire construction and destruction, the ways that states build themselves up over time is by investing in science and by investing education, by investing in infrastructure, and not by investing in our military.
Frankly, that's not what our current administration is doing. They are cutting education expenditures, they're cutting a lot of science expenditures, they're doubling down on military expenditures. This is not a Biden issue. This is not an Obama issue. This is not a Trump issue. This is the generational issue.
It strikes me that we must course-correct if we want the United States to continue to be a major player if not the dominant player of the 21st century, but we seem to be doing exactly all the things that you should not do in order to make sure that you have long-term strength, mainly because they're emotionally satisfying now.
Every administration invested in science first and education first, some more than others, but everyone still valued it. That's not what we're doing today.
Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning are the hosts of KERA's NTX Now. Got a tip? Email Miranda at msuarez@kera.org or Ron at rcorning@kera.org.
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