Today’s chaos is starting to feel like the tectonic change of 9/11 | Opinion
When we’re looking back on September 2025 years from now, we could see this moment as the most pivotal since September 2001. As during that Sept. 11 morning 24 years ago, matters of war, freedom and the economy are being reshaped faster than we can keep track. The uncertainty has risen so far that I am starting to feel the way I did a week after those attacks that shattered the Pentagon, just down Columbia Pike from my townhouse.
Then, as now, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is at the center in matters of war. Then, the United States invoked the NATO charter to call upon our allies in a crusade to free Afghanistan from the yoke of the terrorist regime whose allies had attacked us. Now, Russia is probing NATO allies Romania and Poland on the borders of Ukraine with drone incursions that appear anything but accidental.
The next incursion could be the one that triggers open conflict between the Western alliance that has been supplying Ukraine with weapons as it tries to fend off an unprovoked invasion by Russia. Already, British and Dutch warplanes have joined their Polish and Romanian counterparts in patrolling NATO skies just seconds away from airspace being dominated by Russian missiles and drones.
Escalating tensions will put President Donald Trump in the position of having to choose to abandon NATO altogether or put American lives on the line to defend our allies that stretch along Russian and Ukrainian borders from Finland and Estonia in the North to Romania and Turkey in the South. Even a year ago, there’d have been no uncertainty at all about what our responsibilities were.
Then, as now, the future of American freedoms was up in the air. In reaction to 9/11 came new intrusive digital monitoring overseas and domestically, no-fly lists and a new Department of Homeland Security. Precautions around travel changed radically. A forever prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba opened for terrorism suspects. Civil rights concerns took a back seat to safety.
Today, similar safety concerns have opened detention camps across the country as the civil rights of Hispanic Americans have taken a back seat to the immigration crackdown with the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court.
An American president would use the 9/11 attack and the War on Terrorism that it spawned to justify the military execution of civilian American suspects abroad, just as an American president now uses terrorism labels to justify the execution of drug runners on the high seas.
Then, a post-9/11 urge for national unity silenced dissent and pushed politicians of both parties to endorse wars they later came to regret. Now, the politically-motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk has sparked an unprecedented rhetorical and legal war on free expression by the Trump administration.
Attorney General Pam Bondi promised a federal crackdown on “hate speech,” before backing away under fire from conservatives and liberals alike. Even as she did, the president backed her original position, threatening a reporter to his face and filing a meritless $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times. Meanwhile, his deputy chief of staff went on TV to call Democrats “a domestic extremist organization” — just up the rhetorical slippery slope from calling them outright terrorists. Even normally liberty-minded politicians such as Rand Paul have endorsed the hate speech crackdown, a position they too will come to regret.
Not content with the uncertainty in matters of war and freedom, Trump has unveiled a proposal to reshape the way every public company in the United States is regulated, a move that could fundamentally change Wall Street and retirement savings in the same way that 9/11 had a tectonic impact on stock markets and the economy alike.
The proposal to end a 50-year-old requirement that public companies report their earnings every three months could have positive impacts in combating short-term thinking at large corporations, just the way post-9/11 changes to security and risk management made the U.S. economy more resilient when it faced COVID-19 two decades later.
Still, the layering of uncertainty upon uncertainty in matters of war, freedom and finance is leaving me with flashbacks to the hours after 9/11 when I could still see smoke rising from the Pentagon outside my office window.
Then the chaos was forced upon us. Now the uncertainty and chaos is largely of our own making.
David Mastio is a national opinion columnist for McClatchy and The Kansas City Star.
This story was originally published September 18, 2025 at 12:39 PM with the headline "Today’s chaos is starting to feel like the tectonic change of 9/11 | Opinion."
