Twenty-Five Years After September 11, the Order It Created Has Largely Dissolved

The United States marks 25 years since the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people. The Financial Times wrote that the shock which briefly created a shared sense of purpose has left a complicated legacy. The Hindu described what now stands at the site, the Reflecting Absence memorial built as two pools on the footprints of the towers.

Moscow marked the anniversary differently. RIA Novosti reported that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described how the United States used the world's reaction to the attacks, the Russian government's standing argument that Washington converted an initial moment of near-universal sympathy, including from Russia, into a licence for interventions that followed.

The financial and institutional architecture built after 2001 is measurable even where the political consensus is not. Sanctions enforcement, correspondent banking surveillance, know-your-customer requirements and the extraterritorial reach of the dollar clearing system all expanded from counter-terrorism authorities. Those tools are now used mainly against states rather than against non-state groups, and their use is the single largest driver of the search for payment channels outside the dollar.

The anniversary arrives with American forces engaged against Iran, the Red Sea partly controlled by an armed movement, and leaders of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and the countries that have joined since) assembling in New Delhi. The order that the attacks accelerated, in which one power set the terms of global security, is not the order in place today.