The ‘Clash’ that never was: How Sept. 11 attacks still shape global relations

The nation was shell-shocked from the Sept. 11 attacks by Islamist terrorists – attacks that produced the worst loss of life the United States had suffered on its soil in a single day since the Civil War battle of Antietam.To many Americans, the “clash of civilizations” historian Samuel Huntington had predicted nearly a decade earlier – that in the post-Cold War era, wars would be fought not between nations but between religions and cultures – suddenly threatened to come true.Yet even as the ruins of the twin towers still smoldered in lower Manhattan, President George W. Bush left the White House on the sun-splashed morning of Sept. 17 for the Islamic Center of Washington two miles up Massachusetts Avenue. Why We Wrote This After the 2001 attacks, pundits predicted a “clash of civilizations,” a geopolitical theory popular in the 1990s. The reality has been much more complicated. There, he declared that America was not at war with Islam and that the U.S. did not confuse the nihilistic extremists – who claimed to advance their religion through terrorism – with Islam.“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” Mr. Bush said. “Islam is peace.” The U.S. president then quoted a passage from the Quran, stating that, “in the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil.” President George W. Bush delivers a statement as he stands with Muslim religious leaders during a visit to the Islamic Center of Washington on Sept. 17, 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Now, a quarter century after that stunning attack, the jihadism that inspired the terrorists that day has been largely sidelined. And the future Huntington predicted of wars pitting religions and cultures against one another has for the most part not come true.The reasons range from the limited appeal of the jihadists’ worldview and its incongruity with the challenges of life in a modern world, analysts say, to rising secularity and the return to big-power conflict that Huntington believed was something of the past.Some historians and foreign policy analysts say that if there is a cautionary coda to add to the overarching demise of the “clash of civilizations,” it is this: A quarter century after launching a global war on terror that precipitated “endless wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. seems as enthralled as ever with the use of force to solve complex international challenges.President Donald Trump’s war with Iran and his repeated threats to wipe out a “civilization” echo Huntington’s thesis and what some say is its inherent Islamophobia.Still, for many, the broad waning of the “clash of civilizations” cannot be decoupled from the actions taken by leaders both in the West and in Arab and Muslim countries to thwart the extremists’ appeal and prevent the threatened clash.How President Bush’s speech resonatedAnd for many scholars, those efforts can be traced back to President Bush’s Islamic Center speech.“It’s often forgotten now, but when President Bush went to the Islamic Center it was less than a week after the attacks,” notes Jon Alterman, senior vice president in global security and geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.Saying that alone was “remarkable,” he adds. “The president’s clear instinct was to not make this into a war on Islam, and that message resonated widely but particularly in Muslim and Arab countries.”Mr. Alterman joined the State Department just a month after the attacks and eventually its policy-planning team. He recalls officials’ general bewilderment over how to respond to the attacks and the challenge posed by Al Qaeda – as well as the awkward and ineffective proposals the confusion engendered.“My favorite was ‘mosque in a box.’ The idea was that we, the United States, would ship containers and drop boxes with everything the local populations needed to pray,” he recalls. “We had to gently explain,” he adds, “that aside from maybe a rug, Muslims don’t really need anything to be able to pray.”More effective than much of the U.S. effort, Mr. Alterman says, have been the efforts by governments, from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Jordan and Indonesia, to open the door if only a crack to reforms of their societies, and to address the aspirations of their people.Saudi Arabia launched a cautious campaign of expanding individual rights, including for women, while Egypt moved to accept Islamist political participation – before eventually banning the Muslim Brotherhood. Indonesia accelerated political reforms initiated in 1998 that replaced a centralized military dictatorship with a decentralized democracy.“The message of jihadism was essentially dark and murderous, and people wanted to escape dark and murderous, they wanted some measure of prosperity and better futures,” he says. “Al Qaeda was never going to address those aspirations, but governments could, and they started to.”For some, President Bush stands out as a symbol of the post-9/11 quarter century for another reason: In many ways, he embodied the paradox of the West’s response to the challenge posed by Al Qaeda and jihadism. There were initiatives of compassion and solidarity with the Islamic world, but there was also the global war on terror, with its strains of Islamophobia.“I credit George W. for his strong rhetorical stand that this was not a conflict between Islam and Christianity, and for his attempts to prevent the 9/11 aftermath from becoming a national crusade,” says Michael Doyle, an international relations scholar at Columbia University in New York. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a news conference at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, Dec. 29, 2025. Today, on the contrary, he says, President Trump is encouraging a growing Christian nationalist “crusade” of Islamophobic actions. His travel bans have largely targeted Muslim countries, while Vice President JD Vance recently raised the specter of Muslims in the U.S. seeking to impose sharia law.“But at the same time, Bush was responsible for escalating the conflict, with the wars in Afghanistan and then, unapologetically, in Iraq,” he adds. “These Middle East wars had the effect of stirring up and prolonging the civilizational conflict his rhetoric had aimed to preclude.”Indeed, one outgrowth of the Iraq War was the meteoric, if relatively short-lived, rise of the Islamic State, an Al Qaeda spinoff that sought establishment of an Islamic caliphate on territory it conquered in Iraq and Syria.When Huntington published “The Clash of Civilizations?” theory in 1993, it was seen both as an explanation of the emerging post-Cold War era and as a rebuttal to Francis Fukuyama’s earlier “The End of History?” theory, which argued that after the Cold War, Western liberal democracy had triumphed and ideological conflict was over.Gift to jihadisBut some scholars of Islamist extremism say the “clash” theory should be placed in the context of the moment to understand how it fomented extremism’s march and the eventual “global war” to counter it.Huntington’s “clash” coincided with America’s emergence as the sole superpower, the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, and the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.“Before that moment, Islamists and Islamist fighters were in the same trenches as the U.S.,” for example, in Afghanistan, notes Fawaz Gerges, a professor and expert in jihadism at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Al Qaeda leader “Osama bin Laden’s worldview was intensely anti-communist.”But U.S. military action in the Gulf quickly shifted jihadism’s perceptions of who was the prime enemy. Al Qaeda’s first attempt to attack the World Trade Center – a truck bombing in 1993 – failed, but it foreshadowed events to come. Mohammad Asif Khan/AP/File Taliban soldiers stand guard in Panjshir province northeast of Afghanistan, Sept. 8, 2021. Across party lines in the U.S., a new poll shows agreement on at least one issue: The country’s 20-year war in Afghanistan was not worth fighting. That attack bolstered Huntington’s “clash” theory, which in turn enhanced Al Qaeda’s appeal while energizing the neoconservative thinkers gaining traction in Washington, Dr. Gerges says.“The ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis captured the imagination of many conservative American experts and neoconservative ideologues who saw it as ‘the West versus the rest,’” he says. “But at the same time, it was a godsend gift to jihadists, as it provided an ideological framework for their actions.”Among American adherents to the “clash” theory were many of the heavy hitters surrounding President Bush as he debated his response to the 9/11 attacks, Dr. Gerges says.“It’s correct to say that Bush was not a believer of the ‘clash of civilizations.’ We saw evidence of that in his rhetoric. But actions speak louder than words,” he adds, “and it was his actions, promoted by an entourage that wanted a global war on terror, that ended up sustaining the jihadists much longer than they and their widely unpopular ideology should have survived.”As unpopular as the U.S. wars in the Middle East were, Dr. Gerges says, they did not convince “even a sizable minority” in Arab and Muslim countries to adopt the jihadis’ worldview.“Al Qaeda proposed death and destruction, when what the vast majority of people wanted was a better life and bread for their kids,” he says.Today, the “clash of civilizations” is widely discredited, though some see vestiges of its premises in some of today’s conflicts, such as the U.S. war against Iran, and in rising Islamophobia in the West. A boy walks next to the rubble of buildings in Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh after the withdrawal of Israeli forces under a U.S.-mediated plan, in southern Lebanon, July 26, 2026. Another is Russia’s war in Ukraine, which Russian President Vladimir Putin justified by invoking elements of religious orthodoxy and Russian imperial tradition, says Dr. Doyle. “But for the most part, we’re back to conflict among powers,” he says, citing a “new Cold War” pitting an authoritarian camp of China, Russia, North Korea, and a few others against “a fractured West.”Dr. Gerges notes that even some of the onetime fervent advocates of the wars the “clash” theory helped spawn have renounced their post-9/11 orientation.He points to former neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan, who now calls the wars he once supported a “mistake” and says U.S. foreign policy, then as now, is often infused with Islamophobia.On the other hand, Dr. Gerges says he worries that what the U.S. has retained from an otherwise disregarded theory is the specter of perpetual conflict.“Never had I imagined in my wildest dreams that we would find ourselves in a similar situation to the one after 9/11,” he says, citing the Iran war – launched by a president who had sworn off Middle East forever wars.“There seems to be an addiction to the frame of mind that you can resolve whatever problem you have by throwing military power at it,” Dr. Gerges says. “That’s the ideological luggage of the post-9/11 period that we have been unable to unpack.”