25 years after 9/11: An attack on America, capitalism or the world?

On Tuesday, 11th September 2001, I was flying back from Nice, France, after a conference. We arrived home and switched on the television. What we saw was horrific. At 8:46 that morning in New York, 13:46 in the UK, the first aircraft crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, a second aircraft hit the South Tower, and any thought that this might have been some terrible accident disappeared.

We all know the story as we all watched the news coverage in shock as the scale of what had happened gradually became clear. We knew immediately that this was no singular event, but none of us could have imagined how profoundly that morning would change the world.

The thing is that I knew the World Trade Center well. I had visited regularly and particularly enjoyed having cocktails at Windows on the World, looking out over the whole of New York from the highest floors. It was an extraordinary place, and the idea that those familiar towers could simply disappear was almost impossible to comprehend.

But my memories of that day are far more personal than memories of a building.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, I still find it difficult to think about the World Trade Center simply as an historic event because I knew people who were there. Friends at Waters were hosting a conference at Windows on the World, on the 106th floor of the North Tower, that morning.

They died.

Other friends were having breakfast downstairs.

They escaped.

They were in the same building, on the same morning, separated by little more than floors and circumstance, and yet one group came home and the other did not.

That has always stayed with me because it reduces one of the defining events of our lifetime to something intensely human.

We remember the aircraft hitting the towers, the smoke pouring into that extraordinary blue September sky and the almost incomprehensible sight of those enormous buildings collapsing, but inside those buildings were thousands of people who had simply gone to work.

My friends were not participating in some great geopolitical struggle that morning. They were attending a conference or eating breakfast. Thousands more were sitting at desks, answering emails, making telephone calls, drinking coffee and thinking about whatever they were going to do that evening.

It makes me wonder, particularly on the twenty-fifth anniversary, what exactly the terrorists believed they were attacking. Was 9/11 an attack on America, an attack on capitalism or an attack on the world?

Clearly it was an attack on America. The symbolism of the targets was unmistakable, and the message was brutally simple:

Bring down American power and American capitalism.

The Pentagon represented American military power and the World Trade Center represented American economic power. These were targets chosen precisely because the world recognised them and because their destruction would be witnessed globally. The attackers were not simply trying to murder people. They were trying to destroy symbols.

The World Trade Center was also unquestionably a symbol of capitalism, but even that description feels too narrow.

Its very name tells us something more important: the World Trade Center.

The towers represented international commerce, globalisation and the extraordinary network of relationships that had developed between companies, countries and people. Those working inside them came from around the world and represented different nationalities, religions, cultures and professions. Some moved billions of dollars around global markets, whilst others cooked breakfasts, cleaned offices, maintained lifts or welcomed visitors through reception. All of them were part of the same extraordinary human ecosystem.

Well, it didn’t work.

America remains a global superpower. Capitalism remains the dominant global economic system. International trade continued and the world became more, rather than less, interconnected. The attacks changed the world profoundly, but they did not destroy the world they were intended to attack.

That is why, twenty-five years later, I increasingly think 9/11 was an attack on something larger than either America or capitalism. It was an attack on the idea of an interconnected world.

Trade is often discussed as though it is simply about money, but trade is fundamentally about relationships. People cross borders, exchange ideas, build companies, create friendships, employ each other and become dependent upon each other. Money moves alongside those relationships, but money is not the relationship itself. The World Trade Center physically represented that idea. It was a place where the world came together to do business, and doing business ultimately meant people meeting people.

There are legitimate arguments about capitalism, globalisation and American power, and there were then just as there are today. Capitalism creates enormous prosperity but also inequality. Globalisation creates opportunity but also disruption. American economic and military power has generated both admiration and resentment around the world. Those debates matter, but they become meaningless when ideology turns into the murder of someone who happens to be eating breakfast or attending a conference.

Perhaps that is what makes my own memories of that morning so difficult. Friends having breakfast downstairs survived whilst friends attending a conference upstairs died. The difference between those outcomes was not ideology, nationality, politics or belief. It was geography and chance: where you happened to be in a building at a particular moment on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning. A lift journey, a meeting time or a breakfast table became the difference between coming home and never coming home, without anyone making those everyday choices imagining they might determine whether they would still be alive a few hours later.

There were thousands of versions of that story on September 11, 2001. People survived because they missed trains, changed meetings, swapped shifts or happened to be somewhere else at precisely the right moment. Others made equally insignificant choices that placed them in precisely the wrong place. Behind the number of people killed that day are thousands of individual lives and millions of consequences for the husbands, wives, partners, children, parents, friends and colleagues who were left behind.

Twenty-five years later, that is what I believe a memorial to 9/11 should remember. We should remember the enormity of what happened, but more importantly we should remember the ordinary humanity inside those extraordinary images. We should remember the people who went to work expecting to come home, the emergency workers who went into buildings whilst everyone else was desperately trying to get out, and the families who discovered that morning that history can suddenly arrive in the middle of an entirely ordinary day.

So, was 9/11 an attack on capitalism, America or the world?

For me, it was all three, but the last matters most. The terrorists attacked symbols of American power and global capitalism, but the people they murdered represented something much bigger: a world in which people from different countries, cultures, religions and backgrounds could work together, trade together, eat breakfast together and build things together. That was what the World Trade Center represented to me before 9/11, from those evenings looking across New York from Windows on the World, and it is what it represents to me now.

Twenty-five years later, the towers are gone and I still think about my friends who were inside them that morning. Some came home and some did not, separated not by anything they believed or anything they had done, but simply by where they happened to be.

The people I knew are why I remember 9/11, but twenty-five years later there is another question worth asking: did it change anything?

Of course it did. It changed America. It changed foreign policy, security, surveillance, air travel and the relationship between governments and their citizens. It led to wars whose consequences are still being debated today. It changed countless families forever and created scars that will never disappear.

One of the most profound changes came through the USA PATRIOT Act, passed just weeks after the attacks. For the financial world, this transformed the fight against terrorism into a fight conducted partly through banks and the movement of money. The Act significantly expanded financial institutions’ legal responsibilities for identifying their customers, monitoring transactions, sharing information and detecting money that might be connected to terrorism.

The principle was simple: if terrorists needed money to operate, then follow the money. In many ways, 9/11 therefore changed the role of the bank itself. Banks had already spent decades fighting money laundering, but they now became an even more important part of the security and surveillance infrastructure of the state. The existing AML, KYC and financial-crime architecture expanded enormously, and its influence over how banks operate continues twenty-five years later.

But did it achieve what the attackers wanted?

America survived. Capitalism survived. The global financial system survived. International trade continued to grow, and technology connected the world more deeply than anyone standing in the World Trade Center in 2001 could have imagined. Money, information, businesses and people continued crossing borders. The interconnected world did not retreat. In many ways, it accelerated.

Perhaps that is the strange legacy of 9/11. The attackers demonstrated that an interconnected world was vulnerable, but they failed to destroy the idea of an interconnected world. Twenty-five years later, as I remember friends who went to the World Trade Center that morning and never came home, perhaps the question is therefore not simply what 9/11 changed, but whether those who carried out the attacks achieved what they intended.

They changed the world enormously and inflicted an almost unimaginable human cost. But America remained. Capitalism remained. Global trade remained. The connections between people, countries and economies became deeper rather than weaker.

So, twenty-five years later, perhaps that is the question worth leaving unanswered:

Did they achieve anything?

No.

The net:net is that 9/11 changed almost everything, but failed to destroy the thing it was intended to destroy.

 

Postscript: what about the conspiracy theories?

No discussion of 9/11 twenty-five years later is complete without acknowledging the conspiracy theories that have surrounded it almost from the beginning. They range from claims that elements of the US government knew the attacks were coming and deliberately allowed them to happen, through to allegations that the Twin Towers and World Trade Center 7 were brought down by controlled demolition, that a missile rather than an aircraft struck the Pentagon, and that unusual financial trading before the attacks demonstrated that somebody knew what was about to happen.

None of the major investigations produced credible evidence that the attacks were an inside job or that the towers were deliberately demolished. There were, however, very real intelligence failures before 9/11, and there were enormous consequences afterwards. The attacks led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the USA PATRIOT Act, greatly expanded surveillance and security powers, and a transformation in the way governments and banks tracked money in the fight against terrorism.

Perhaps that helps explain why the conspiracy theories have proved so persistent. There is an extraordinary imbalance between cause and consequence: nineteen hijackers armed with relatively simple weapons triggered events that reshaped American foreign policy, changed global security, transformed air travel, expanded government surveillance and influenced the financial system for decades. For some, it is easier to believe that consequences of such magnitude must have required a conspiracy of similar magnitude.

But there is an important distinction between saying that governments subsequently used 9/11 to justify policies they wanted to pursue and saying that those governments therefore planned or deliberately allowed the attacks. The first is a legitimate subject for historical and political debate. The second requires evidence, and twenty-five years later credible evidence supporting such an extraordinary claim has not emerged.

Maybe that is another lesson of 9/11: sometimes history does not need a conspiracy to change the world. Sometimes a relatively small number of people can set in motion consequences vastly greater than anything they could ever have controlled.