America Marks 20 Years Since 9/11 Attacks as Biden Searches for Closure

Suri, whose books explore the office of the presidency and U.S. foreign policy, said historians see some logic in how the president is framing this moment.

“But we will also see, as we always do, that one era does not end when a new era begins,” he said. “I think we are in a different moment after the 2020 election, and we are in a different moment with the rise of China. But many of the issues from 20 years ago, they still don’t have neat chapter endings in the way that we make them look like they do in our books.”

Deputy national security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall says what matters, as the world rounds two decades since 9/11, is that there hasn’t been another major terrorist attack.

Different Challenge
“Twenty years on, our challenge is different,” she said, speaking this week to the Atlantic Council, a global affairs research group in Washington. “We have learned since 9/11 how to protect Americans from terrorism. It isn’t fail-safe, and terrible things still happen. But through a combination of actions abroad and at home, we have thus far been able to disrupt and prevent another 9/11-style attack.”

But Vanderbilt University historian Thomas Schwartz predicts fallout beyond Saturday’s era-ending commemorations.

“I’m probably more critical on this because I don’t think that this is something you can actually do,” he said. “I think the enemy in a sense has a vote, and they can decide that even if we want to call it off after 20 years, they may not. And in that sense, I think the words of President Biden — and the deeds — of a fixed time for withdrawal from Afghanistan were a mistake and were an error in judgment that I think could affect the United States over the coming years.”

The president is likely to speak publicly on Saturday, but “words are not going to make a difference at this point,” said Norman Ornstein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative public policy research group in Washington.

“Obviously, he has to give a carefully crafted speech on Saturday, I think in part saying that we have managed through several administrations to avoid another 9/11,” Ornstein said. “We managed to capture and kill the man who was behind it, Osama bin Laden, that it’s not over yet, and that we made a lot of mistakes along the way. And we’re going to try to avoid making mistakes of that sort in the future.”

Lebanon in 1983
But he cautions that Americans should look to history to see how this will play out — not to 2001, but to 1983, when President Ronald Reagan decided to withdraw American forces from Lebanon months after a bombing killed 241 U.S. service members. This, Ornstein said, is the fundamental difference between the America of today and the America of past decades.

“We did not have calls for Ronald Reagan to resign, or moves to impeach him,” he said, contrasting the situation in 1983 with Republican lawmakers who have harshly criticized the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan.

“We didn’t have this breakdown along partisan lines, and it’s a measure, in the not quite 40 years since then, of how much our politics have changed, that everything goes through a kind of tribal lens,” he said. “And that is a disturbing element here that actually is at least as unsettling in terms of where the country goes in the future as some of these other threats that we face.”

Americans have continued to broadly back the president’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in recent public opinion polls, but they have also criticized Biden over how his administration handled the evacuation. That is partly responsible for new polls indicating a 43% approval rating, the lowest of his presidency.

Anita Powell is VOA’s White House correspondent.This article is published courtesy of the Voice of America (VOA).