In 1995, I worked on the 65th floor of the World Trade Center for Dean Witter. A childhood friend worked several floors above at Cantor Fitzgerald. On September 11, 2001, he never came home. Twenty-five years later, I still recall how unremarkable that building seemed back then—and how it became the first scene of a war most Americans never realized they were already losing.
The comfortable narrative blames one administration. But the fuller, more uncomfortable truth is that during much of the 1990s, the entire country treated the Cold War's end as a permanent peace and tuned out. That complacency is the real lesson we must carry forward.
The Cost of the Peace Dividend
The numbers tell a stark story. Active-duty troop strength dropped from roughly 1.8 million in 1993 to 1.4 million by 2000—a cut of about one-third from 1990 levels. Brookings scholar Michael O'Hanlon, not a critic of the Clinton Pentagon, noted the administration slashed forces about 15% deeper than George H.W. Bush had planned. Readiness was uneven: Army equipment and aviation improved, but Air Force mission-capable rates slipped. Heritage called it a hollow force in the making; Brookings called it the most successful drawdown in history. Both were describing the same military.
None of that excuses the counterterrorism failures. Osama bin Laden was a known, escalating threat before 2001, and the government missed chances to eliminate him. The honest account isn't that a weak president let a terrorist live. It's that a legally cautious, capture-first policy—shaped by a Ford-era assassination ban—turned terrorism into a criminal justice matter. Thin intelligence, fear of civilian casualties, and political risk aversion compounded the problem. The tragedy of 9/11 becomes repeatable if we drift back into those fallacies.
One rebuttal: a bigger defense budget wouldn't stop nineteen men with box cutters. True, but readiness isn't just about carrier groups and troop counts. It's a mindset—an unrelenting hunt for the next threat, not a nostalgic guard against the last one. A military reorganized around a peace dividend had less bandwidth, not more, to chase an enemy that didn't fit its files.
A Structural Failure, Not a Partisan One
The 9/11 Commission understood this. Its bipartisan report didn't blame one person. It found a system built for nation-states failing to detect a borderless terror network operating within the country it was supposed to protect. That's a structural diagnosis. The fixes were structural too: a Director of National Intelligence, a National Counterterrorism Center, and rules letting the FBI and CIA share information.
Here's what should worry you: Congress just passed another stopgap to keep the government open through December, having completed only three of twelve spending bills; the Senate has passed none. We are, once again, a country confident that the next threat will look like the last one—but it rarely does.
Public Doubt Grows
The trade we made after 9/11 was real: more screening, more surveillance, less spontaneity at airports, ballgames, and office lobbies. A quarter century later, Americans aren't convinced it worked. A new Emerson College/Nexstar poll finds 43% think the country is less safe than before the attacks, against 31% who think it's safer. Forty percent believe terrorists have more capacity to hit us today than in 2001. We accepted the security state on a promise of lasting peace, and a plurality of us don't feel we got it.
I don't have a tidy fix, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims one. But from a fiduciary's perspective, an institution that stops updating its threat model is getting ready for the next threat to take it by surprise. Twenty-five years ago, we were that institution.
The same complacency shows up closer to home. Four years of open borders brought gangsters and traffickers into our neighborhoods. Socialism is on the rise nationwide—gaining ground where it would have been laughed out a generation ago—because too many have lost sight of what makes this country worth defending.
My old office tower is gone. My neighbor is gone. The only tribute worth giving either of them is to keep the country's defenses—physical and cultural—current, not nostalgic.
