How 9/11 attacks turned America into a debased, half-crazed, fading power

America launched a bad-faith global crusade to instill democracy in the Muslim world and ended up with its own democracy in tatters.

I’ll always remember Sept. 11 as something that happened in the evening. At the time I was living in a town in northern India, and I watched the towers fall on a TV someone had dragged into the street. Because I was so far away, I’ll never know the terror people in New York and Washington felt on that day, the fear that more attacks were coming, that the epic disaster movies so popular during the bored ’90s had come viciously to life.

But I’m pretty certain that amid all the apocalypticism of that time, most people felt confident in America’s