Next month is the 23rd anniversary of the attacks of September 11th. I, like most people living today, remember where I was that day – in high school, far away from the destruction. I don’t remember much of the day itself – the two memories that stand out are our principal coming onto the PA and telling us that we were not likely a target and a girl in my math class removing and reattaching the spikes from our math teacher’s cleats (he was also the track coach) as the television reporters recycled the limited information they had again and again and again over the footage of the smoldering towers.
For the people who were there, in New York City but also in Pennsylvania and Virginia, their lives would never be the same again. For the rest of us, what 9/11 meant then and means now has changed. Because it had to.
When it happened, for a limited time after, there was a sense of unity – an extension of warmth to those who were directly impacted by the day (Congress granted roughly $7 billion to the families of those who had been murdered at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon – this amounts to roughly $2M per person). American flags were draped everywhere. It’s hard now to describe this feeling to those who weren’t there but that, of course, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there and that it wasn’t real. 
The lives lost, no matter what monetary compensation, will never be replaced, especially to the loved ones left behind. A broader tragedy, may be, that once knowing that feeling of unity, realizing that we may never have it again – for it has long since dissipated. It was the last time I have ever felt that a super majority of adults in my country agreed on anything of any real meaningful substance.
Time moves on, because it has to. 
Almost ten years ago, I was checking out at a grocery store in the Midwest on September 11th. The cashier asked me how I was doing – it was the Midwest; for those who’ve never lived there, this is very common. I shrugged and said something to the effect of “well, not great it’s today.” The cashier didn’t seem to understand so I added “9/11”. He responded, “Oh I was 3”.
We had very different reactions to the day because we had different experiences. 
I have a very emotional reaction whenever I hear the poem “The Names” by Billy Collins – I can’t hear the entire poem without crying. The cashier will never have that. This happens to every generation – you look up and find that the experiences that make up your lived experiences aren’t shared by everyone. Time moves in one direction and its hard, if not impossible, for these experiences to be shared.
9/11 may be uniquely difficult to explain. There is a quality, a surrealness to the day that hasn’t been there for any other tragedy in the US since it happened; the cover of the Onion from that day tries to capture this feeling – “American Life Turns into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie”. 
The Onion was doing what millions of Americans were doing, albeit it with humor: trying to process the unprocessable. Something had shocked the national conscience and it would take a long time to fully understand and accept what had happened.
You saw this in the way that the media and everyday people spoke about 9/11: they would refer to it as the “event” or “what happened to the towers”. There was a purposeful obfuscation of what we all were talking about and what it meant, as if it was too awful to lay out in plain English. On the 10th anniversary, I read an article in the (now defunct) Boston newspaper, The Metro. In a section devoted to religious leaders and their thoughts on the day, most of them continued the trend of talking about the day without detailing exactly what happened. The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) released a statement from their New York Chapter that was printed in this section and I want to quote it here in full because it impacted me then and I still feel it’s reverberations now, if, for nothing else, they eschewed this tactic and laid out exactly what we mean when we say 9/11:
“Ten Years Ago, members of al-Qaeda used four passenger aircraft as weapons to kill nearly 3,000 people on Sept.11, 2001. The United States government’s response was to answer violence with violence. In the ensuing wars, hundreds of thousands more people were killed. New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) urges everyone to recognize this anniversary as an occasion to remember that there are always alternatives to violence and that there is a Spirit in every human being, which responds with gratitude to these alternatives…We testify to the world that we disown all wars and fighting with outward weapons for any cause whatsoever. There are no “just wars”. Among the weapons we renounce are the tongue and the pen, when they are used to provoke prejudice and hatred. Neither will we be silenced by fear when we are called to witness against evil masquerading as good. We seek to build a world in which a just peace is possible.”
This was not the standard reaction at the time from the American populace.
Of course, the United States government knew about Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda for years – famously, Bill Clinton said that, after the second plane hit the World Trade Center, his first thought was “Bin Laden did this.” 
The American people, though, didn’t share in this knowledge and instead, not knowing any better, filled this space with conspiracies. One of the main findings of the 9/11 Commission Report was that both Presidents, Bush and Clinton, were not well served by the CIA or FBI. The Looming Tower and Legacy of Ashes both underscore intelligence failures. Of course, whenever the federal government is found to be incompetent, conspiracy theories follow and this feeling of disproportionality, a feeling that the tragic finality of the aftermath is not proportional to its meager inputs, feeds them, as it has done at least as far back as the Kennedy assassination.
This has faded with time – others tragedies and disasters have taken their places in the American psyche and, every year, fewer people were alive who remember the day. The politics of today, too, point towards a return to the days of competitive nation states, also known as realism, and away from the War on Terror, a period that lasted roughly from 9/11 to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. 
What will this new period look like? It’s too soon to tell but there are threats on the horizon – a CNN article from 2023 examines a likely scenario for a Chinese-lead invasion of Taiwan in 2026. In “War game suggests Chinese invasion of Taiwan would fail at a huge cost to US, Chinese and Taiwanese militaries”, the article suggests that, even if China was unsuccessful, the cost would be enormous – “CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) ran this war game 24 times to answer two fundamental questions: would the invasion succeed and at what cost?
The likely answers to those two questions are no and enormous, the CSIS report said.
“The United States and Japan lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of service members. Such losses would damage the US global position for many years,” the report said. In most scenarios, the US Navy lost two aircraft carriers and 10 to 20 large surface combatants. Approximately 3,200 US troops would be killed in three weeks of combat, nearly half of what the US lost in two decades of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.” This is a scenario and not an actual event but the war game points towards just how dangerous a conflict with China could be. 
And that’s just a hypothetical event. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has shocked the world – especially those who thought the creation of the European Union and other institutions would ensure that there was never a war in Europe again. Thomas Friedman, globalist and author of The World is Flat, had a theory in the mid-1990s called The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict – which states that globalization and international trade would discourage any two countries with McDonalds from every going to war with one another because war is so destructive to business. This has, clearly, been discredited. 
The casualties in Ukraine between the two countries is estimated to be over 500,000, since the war began in 2022.
It's quite likely that uncertainty is the biggest fear – we’re on the precipice of change and what will come is unknowable. This is not new. Jon Mearsheimer, writing in the Atlantic, in 1990 (yes, 1990), states, “We may, however, wake up one day lamenting the loss of the order that the Cold War gave to the anarchy of international relations. For untamed anarchy is what Europe knew in the forty-five years of this century before the Cold War, and untamed anarchy--Hobbes's war of all against all--is a prime cause of armed conflict. Those who think that armed conflicts among the European states are now out of the question, that the two world wars burned all the war out of Europe, are projecting unwarranted optimism onto the future. The theories of peace that implicitly undergird this optimism are notably shallow constructs. They stand up to neither logical nor historical analysis. You would not want to bet the farm on their prophetic accuracy.” This article was entitled Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War. 
This Dog Vs. Dog world did not come to pass. Instead, as stated before Europe banded together and formed organizations that demanded interconnectedness. Even with Brexit and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s difficult to see the breakup of the European Union and the abandonment of the Euro. And yet, if the war in Ukraine continues and if the Great Power Theories proves to be true, it’s not inconceivable that a 3rd World War may occur before the century closes. In an article entitled, “Are We Close to World War Three?” in The Week, the writers lay out various areas around the world where tensions are rising, starting with Ukraine - “Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that failure to fend off Russia's aggression could spiral into confrontation with NATO. "And that certainly means the Third World War," he has said.” They also cite the Israeli-Iran conflict, a restless North Korea, and a China that looks at 2027 as meaningful in their aspirations to retake Taiwan. 
The 2nd World War killed roughly 3% of the global population. A similar percentage today would kill nearly 250M people, a population larger than the country of Brazil. 
To be clear, I don’t think this is a likely scenario at all – I think the likelihood of a global conflict going nuclear is too high for governments to continue escalation. I also think, at a time of record high debt and deficits and low birth rates, that entering into a world war is incredibly fatalistic unless one has the expectation of a great reward at the end. 
What that would be is hard to see – Yes, if the Chinese successful invade Taiwan they will have unification – but at what cost? All signs point towards the Taiwanese, especially the youth, growing closer to the West. Taiwan recently elected a pro-independence candidate, a move that was harshly criticized by the CCP. 
Let’s look big picture and let’s assume that the Chinese are able to take Taiwan and engage in a military occupation against the will of the Taiwanese people. How many troops would they need? This is obviously a contentious question but the general rule of thumb is something like 40 troops per every thousand people. I’ll link to the Small Wars Journal for an in-depth look of how this number is calculated. Let’s use this and apply it to the Chinese military. 
Taiwan has a population of roughly 24M. Given our ratio above, the Chinese military would need to station nearly a million troops in Taiwan to keep the peace. This is about half the size of their current army. Would they be willing to do this should a weakened China (presuming a war with the Quad) looks like an opportunity for some of their neighbors (namely a re-invigorated Japan or a nationalist India, set on retaking contested territory) to make trouble? 
Anything is possible but that is a big ask. Xi Jingping may view this as vital to the future of his country or he may determine that the juice is simply not worth the squeeze. We simply don’t know. 
What about the other countries mentioned above? No one really knows what Putin will do when the war with Ukraine ends. Some say that, if he successfully retains a large portion (or all) the country, it will embolden him to go further, to attempt an invasion of Poland. Others say this would be suicide. Again, we simply don’t know what would happen.
The Israel-Iran situation, likewise, is unknowable. Iran will likely respond to Israel’s recent killing of a Hamas leader on Iranian soil. Some are saying that this could greatly inflame the situation between the two countries with some as going as far as to call this a prelude to World War 3. 
It’s unlikely that, if there is a multi-country war that falls along the lines of USA, Israel, some form of a coalition of the willing against Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea that it will resemble anything like the fighting of the Second World War. Cyber and Drone Warfare would almost certainly be part of the fighting and, depending on the context, it’s likely that the lines between civilians and military combatants would get blurry very quickly. Likewise, battlefield medicine has vastly improved since the 1940s and this would, hopefully, reduce casualties. 
And yet…. There floats, above everything else, the real danger of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Russia has more nuclear weapons than any other country. The United Staes has over 5,000 of our own. As stated earlier, it’s entirely possible that, should a global conflict break out, that it would, like the last World War, end in nuclear conflict.
This comes at a time when, across the globe, nationalism and populism, once quelled by the promises of increased prosperity through globalization and free trade, is on the march. The parallels to Europe in the interwar period are easy to see.
It’s wrong to look back on the War on Terror as an interregnum period – too many people died, both soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children. It feels disrespectful. Sadly, civilians die in war – more civilians died in the Second World War then did soldiers. It’s a hard truth of life but it is in fact a truth.
It feels wrong to look back on this period with any fondness but, for a relatively brief period, the fear of global terrorism provoked some form of order and cooperation – possibly the only positive thing to come out of the War in Iraq (other than the death of Saddam Hussein) was the slowing of the Iran and Libya nuclear programs. During this period, Russia focused on rogue Chechnyan Islamists and not the Ukrainians to the south. The United States was involved in 6 party talks to limit North Korea’s nuclear program - Kim Jong Un doesn’t nullify its armistice with South Korea until 2013. 
This period is now over. The Great Power theory has again raised its head. We don’t know where it could end but, if it leads us to a 3rd World War, the casualties will almost certainly be greater than the period known as the War on Terror.
I’ll leave us with a quote from the poem I mentioned earlier – 
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Elegant Ramblings. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, please consider liking and subscribing to the channel on iTunes or YouTube. You’ll be able to find show notes there. Hope you enjoyed. Bye for now.