A Quarter-Century of Fear Bought Less Security Than Americans Were Told

A new history of the war on terror lands five days before the 25th anniversary of September 11th, and its verdict is unsparing: the framework that organized a generation of American foreign policy is finished, even though the fear that built it never fully earned its keep. Reviewing Peter Bergen’s “All the Presidents’ Wars” in Foreign Affairs, Phil Gordon traces how the expectation of another imminent attack shaped two decades of decisions in Washington, from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to a permanent architecture of surveillance and detention that outlasted the threat it was built for. Bergen, one of the last Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, argues the anxiety that gripped policymakers after 2001 routinely outran the actual capability of al-Qaeda and its successors, producing wars whose costs in blood, treasure and civil liberties dwarfed the harm they prevented. The book reads less as an argument that terrorism no longer matters than as a ledger of what a security state built on worst-case assumptions actually delivered. Gordon credits Bergen’s sourcing, which the review says ran from bin Laden’s own associates to the White House Situation Room, while pressing him on whether the same fear-driven logic has simply migrated to new targets, from great-power rivalry to the risks of artificial intelligence. The timing is pointed: the piece publishes as Washington approaches the anniversary with no consensus on what, if anything, replaces the war-on-terror framework as an organizing principle for American power. That vacuum is already visible in the Strait of Hormuz, in Gaza, and in a Pentagon that spent the summer quietly redrawing its own war plans. Bergen’s history matters less as a verdict on the past than as a warning about how easily the same reasoning could restart under a different name.