The 9/11 attacks — which killed almost 3,000 Americans, toppled New York City’s Twin Towers, wrecked the Pentagon, and took down a plane near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — marked the most devastating intelligence failure in U.S. history and sent the United States into a paroxysm of self-induced catastrophes from which it has never emerged. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s spectacular coordinated assault supercharged what had been a slow-motion imperial decline, trapping the U.S. in a death spiral of ruinous intertwined economic debacles, foreign policy failures, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism, and debilitating wars and military interventions.Bin Laden’s plan was to trap the U.S. in expensive, foreign quagmire wars that would trigger a domestic economic collapse. It was patterned on the strategy that the local mujahideen, he and other foreign fighters, and the U.S. and its allies had used to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Not only does bin Laden’s strategy continue apace long after his 2011 death, but it also spawned an even more effective means of destroying America from within. Bin Laden’s attacks turned the U.S. government into an engine for the destruction of America, inducing it to implement policies that have devastated the country and immiserated its people. That includes unrestrained spending while cutting taxes on the rich, closer ties with despotic regimes, the sneak-and-peek warrants and roving wiretaps of the Patriot Act and other domestic surveillance programs, and the ruinous failed forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.This swirl of toxic policies and governmental overreach opened the door to something beyond bin Laden’s wildest dreams, the rise of an even more effective terrorist who has crippled the U.S. in countless ways and sought to strangle the best of the country: President Donald Trump. (...)

For years, Iran was buried under a narrative so total and so hostile that no amount of explaining could move public opinion. Every act of self-defense was recast as aggression, every refusal to kneel as proof of bad faith. The case was closed before it was ever heard.

But you do not need to relitigate decades of history to understand why Iran held the line. You only need to look at Canada and watch what Washington asked of it. Then the valor of Iran's resistance stops being a mystery and becomes the only rational response.

They asked Canada, a close ally, G7 partner and neighbor, to weaken protections for the French language as the price of a trade deal. This was not about a border dispute or a security threat. It was about the language Canadians speak. And when Canada offered concessions, the demands did not ease. They expanded: now touch your culture, now limit who else you can trade with.

@MarkJCarney called it what it was: a power play, a question of sovereignty.

For those who keep asking why Iran will not surrender its rights, this is the answer, laid out in plain sight by Washington’s own conduct toward a friend.

First, give up enrichment. Then give up the entire nuclear program. Then give up nuclear energy altogether. Then surrender your missiles. Cut their range. Cut their number. Open the sites. Then dismantle the army. Then sever your ties with these allies, and those. Then, then, then.

There is no point at which they say, enough. Each concession is not a destination. It is a receipt, proof that pressure works, and an invitation to make the next demand. Give up the first right and you have not bought safety. You have taught them that the price of the next one is zero.

Ask Canada, which was asked to trade away part of its own linguistic identity by a supposed friend and ally.

A nation that surrenders one right does not secure the others. It moves to the front of the line to lose them.

Five years ago, the 20-year American war in Afghanistan came to an inglorious end. In April 2021, the United States had begun its final withdrawal, with the goal of pulling out the 2,500 U.S. troops that remained in the country by September. Within weeks of the first U.S. departures, the Taliban had swept up scores of positions as Afghan government forces melted away. By early August, the group had taken control of most provincial capitals. Finally, on August 15, 2021, the U.S.-backed government in Kabul collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of terrified Afghans besieged the city’s airport. Roughly 120,000 were evacuated in planeloads by the United States, its allies, and even groups of private citizens. In a heartbreaking final blow, 13 American service members died in a suicide bombing at the airport four days before the last U.S. soldier departed on August 30. Two decades of heroic effort had ended in shame.

Recriminations followed—some justified, some not. The same group that had harbored al-Qaeda while it planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks had triumphantly returned to power, and fears of a resurgent terrorist threat mounted. After all, the main reason that successive American presidents had decided to keep U.S. forces in the country for so long was the belief that without them, Afghanistan would once again become a safe haven for terrorists even if the Taliban did not manage to take full control.

Nothing of the sort occurred. Over the past five years, not a single act of terrorism against the United States was carried out by a group based in Afghanistan. Washington spent roughly $1 trillion on the war. More than 120,000 Afghan civilians were killed or injured. More than 775,000 American service members were deployed to Afghanistan, more than 20,700 were injured, and more than 2,400 died—all to defend against a threat that turned out to have been exaggerated. (...)