Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, 2001, America should resist the temptation to treat that morning merely as history. The war that arrived in New York and Washington did not end with the destruction of al-Qaeda’s Afghan sanctuary, the death of Osama bin Laden or the elimination of successive terrorist commanders. Sept. 11 was the most devastating manifestation of a much longer ideological confrontation between modern civilization and radical Islamist movements that reject its fundamental principles.
A quarter-century later, thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars have been sacrificed in this struggle, yet the war remains unfinished. To understand why, one must look beyond 2001 and return to one of the great political catastrophes of the modern Middle East: Iran in 1979.
The Iranian Revolution was a decisive moment in the political transformation of radical Islam.
Ruhollah Khomeini did not overthrow Mohammad Reza Pahlavi alone. The revolutionary coalition contained radical Islamists, Marxist and Marxist-Leninist organizations, left-wing intellectuals, nationalists and other political forces that temporarily found common cause in destroying the monarchy. Across the Cold War landscape, anti-Western revolutionary movements were encouraged by a broader international environment in which the Soviet Union and its allies competed aggressively against American influence.
Khomeini as ayatollah proved extraordinarily capable of exploiting this convergence. A radical Shi’ite cleric became the political beneficiary of forces that frequently had little in common except their hostility toward the Shah, the United States and the Western-oriented order Iran represented.
The tragedy is more striking when viewed against what Iran lost. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had been a strategic ally of the United States and the West, and he understood that the destruction of the Iranian state would have consequences far beyond his own throne. Confronted by revolutionary chaos, he ultimately left Iran rather than preserve his rule through unlimited mass bloodshed.
Much of the Western intellectual and media establishment nevertheless interpreted the revolution through romantic narratives of liberation while the Shah was reduced to a caricature, and Khomeini was frequently misunderstood as the representative of popular emancipation. The political mythology surrounding Mohammad Mossadegh and 1953’s fake saga further shaped this interpretation, often obscuring the complexity of Iran’s constitutional history. What followed should have destroyed those illusions: executions, purges, clerical dictatorship, the seizure of the American embassy and the transformation of Iran into an ideological state openly hostile to the United States and Israel.
What began in 1979 did not remain inside Iran. During Khomeini’s decade in power and the subsequent decades under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic systematically developed an infrastructure for exporting revolutionary militancy beyond its borders.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its Quds Force and Iranian intelligence institutions became instruments for training, financing, arming and supporting terrorist militant organizations throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah became the most sophisticated product of this architecture, while Tehran subsequently developed deep relationships with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Iraqi militias and the Houthis. Iran thereby transformed terrorism and proxy warfare from episodic revolutionary violence into an enduring instrument of state policy.
This is the historical connection that makes 1979 indispensable to understanding 2001.
The Islamic Republic did not create al-Qaeda, and the theological divide between revolutionary Shi’ism and Sunni jihadism is real. But ideological differences have never prevented extremists from cooperating when strategic interests converge.
The 9/11 Commission documented contacts involving Iran, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda and found that Iran facilitated the transit of al-Qaeda members through its territory before Sept. 11, including future hijackers, while finding no evidence that Tehran knew of the specific 9/11 plot. The larger lesson remains important: Radical movements that appear doctrinally incompatible can cooperate against common enemies, and the Islamic Republic repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to place revolutionary strategy and Islamic terrorism above theological consistency.
Sept. 11 was therefore a second historical rupture. If 1979 demonstrated that radical Islamism could capture a state, 2001 demonstrated that transnational Islamist terrorism could strike at the symbolic heart of Western civilization.
New York was more than an American city; it represented commerce, modernity, pluralism and the globalized 21st century. The attack on the World Trade Center was not simply mass murder. It was an ideological declaration that the freedoms and institutions of modern civilization themselves could become targets of a movement determined to impose an absolutist vision of politics, religion and society.
The West spent much of the 20th century learning that certain ideological threats cannot be wished away through semantic moderation.
President George W. Bush correctly recognized that the United States was confronting something larger than a conventional criminal conspiracy. His designation of Iran as part of an “axis of evil” acknowledged the relationship between terrorism and regimes capable of sponsoring, facilitating or exploiting extremist violence.
Yet Washington subsequently committed enormous resources to Afghanistan and Iraq without resolving the deeper strategic problem. Twenty years of American involvement in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban’s return to Kabul. Iraq held elections after Saddam Hussein, but also faced corruption, sectarian conflict, powerful militias and extensive Iranian influence.
America won wars, removed dictators and killed terrorists, yet repeatedly discovered that military superiority alone could not determine the political character of what came afterward.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic survived. That is one of the central contradictions of the entire post-9/11 era. Washington spent immense quantities of blood and treasure fighting terrorism across distant battlefields while the regime that had spent decades institutionalizing support for militant organizations remained in power in Tehran. Al-Qaeda was devastated but survived. ISIS emerged from the ruins of Iraq and Syria, and created another form of jihadist barbarism. Hezbollah expanded into a formidable military organization. Iranian-backed militias entrenched themselves across the region.
The names changed and the commanders disappeared, but the ideological war continued.
America nevertheless demonstrated what determined counterterrorism can accomplish. Osama bin Laden was eventually found and killed. During U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, was eliminated. Qassem Soleimani, the notorious commander of the IRGC Quds Force and one of the principal architects of Iran’s regional terrorist network, was killed in January 2020.
In February, the confrontation entered another historic phase with the killing of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Islamic terrorists, during the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran. After decades in which Tehran expanded its regional infrastructure while American administrations debated containment, deterrence, sanctions and diplomacy, the center of the system itself was finally subjected to direct military pressure.
These developments deserve to be understood within the longer history that began in 1979, rather than as isolated military operations. The significance of the current American and Israeli campaign lies not merely in the elimination of individual commanders. It lies in confronting the state structure that spent decades turning revolutionary ideology into geopolitical power.
The Trump administration and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have chosen a more direct confrontation with that structure than the policies pursued during much of the preceding quarter-century. Whether that approach ultimately produces durable security will depend on what political order follows, but its strategic significance is already clear: The source of Iran’s regional system, rather than merely its outer branches, has become a central battlefield.
The names changed and the commanders disappeared, but the ideological war continued.
This is why regime change in Iran occupies such an important place in the strategic argument. The objective should not be the destruction of Iran; Iran is an ancient nation whose people have themselves paid an enormous price under clerical dictatorship. Nor should another disastrous experiment in foreign occupation or nation-building be contemplated.
The distinction between Iran and the Islamic Republic is fundamental. The question is whether a revolutionary regime whose institutions have supported militant organizations for decades can coexist indefinitely with a stable Middle East while retaining the same ideological and security architecture. The conclusion is that the problem cannot be permanently solved while that system reproduces itself.
The West spent much of the 20th century learning that certain ideological threats cannot be wished away through semantic moderation. Fascism had to be defeated. Soviet communism had to be contained until its political system collapsed. Apartheid had to end as a governing order. Radical Islamist terrorism is historically and ideologically different from each of these phenomena, and simplistic analogies should be avoided.
Yet democratic civilization faces the same fundamental responsibility: It must recognize movements that reject peaceful coexistence for what they are. There can be no durable accommodation with an ideology that transforms religious absolutism into political violence and regards terror as a legitimate instrument of power.
America therefore stands before an unfinished historical task. The sacrifices of American soldiers, intelligence officers, law-enforcement personnel and their allies cannot be measured simply by the number of terrorist leaders eliminated. The deeper measure is whether the political infrastructure that allowed radical terrorism to expand can finally be broken. The military blows delivered to Iran’s revolutionary establishment and its regional networks during the past year may represent a turning point, but a turning point is not yet an ending.
Sept. 11 changed America because it demonstrated that distance could no longer protect the West from ideological violence born elsewhere. The lesson of 1979 is equally important: When radical ideology captures the institutions of a state, its consequences can survive for generations and travel far beyond that state’s borders.
A quarter-century later, the United States should finally connect those two lessons. The war on terrorism will not truly be over merely when another terrorist commander disappears. It will approach its end when the political system that turned revolutionary Islamist militancy into an enduring instrument of state power can no longer reproduce itself—and when Iran can return from being the center of a revolutionary project to being a nation at peace with its own people and the world.
