Chapter 42

On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists tied to the extremist network al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, hijacked four commercial airliners. Two planes struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, causing both towers to collapse; a third struck the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C.; and a fourth, United Flight 93, crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers stormed the cockpit.

Nearly 3,000 people died that day, the deadliest attack on American soil in the nation's history. Television images of the burning and collapsing towers were seared into the national memory, and Americans across the political spectrum rallied behind President George W. Bush in the attacks' aftermath.

Bush declared a global "War on Terror," vowing to pursue not only al-Qaeda but any nation that harbored terrorists. The attacks reshaped American foreign policy, domestic security, and civic life for the next two decades.

Weeks after the attacks, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which vastly expanded the government's surveillance and law-enforcement powers to detect and prevent terrorism. The law eased restrictions on wiretapping, allowed roving surveillance across multiple devices, and expanded the government's ability to search records and detain terrorism suspects.

In 2002 the administration created the Department of Homeland Security, consolidating dozens of federal agencies — including the new Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which took over airport security screening — into a single cabinet department focused on counterterrorism and disaster response.

Civil libertarians on both the left and right warned that the Patriot Act's broad surveillance powers threatened constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and free expression, sparking a debate over the balance between security and liberty that continued for years, especially after later revelations about the scope of government data collection.

In March 2003, the Bush administration launched an invasion of Iraq, arguing that dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat allied with terrorism. A U.S.-led coalition toppled Hussein's government within weeks, but the promised stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were never found, badly damaging the war's justification and America's international credibility.

The initial military victory gave way to years of brutal insurgency and sectarian violence between Iraq's Sunni and Shia populations, as the U.S. struggled to stabilize the country and build a new government. American troop levels rose sharply during the 2007 "surge," which helped reduce violence, and combat troops formally withdrew by the end of 2011.

The war's high cost — in American and Iraqi lives, and in hundreds of billions of dollars — fueled lasting public skepticism of open-ended foreign interventions and remained a defining issue in American politics for years afterward, including the later rise of the terrorist group ISIS in the vacuum Iraq's instability helped create.

Weeks after September 11, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom against Afghanistan, whose ruling Taliban regime had sheltered Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. American and allied forces quickly toppled the Taliban government, but bin Laden escaped into the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

What began as a targeted counterterrorism mission evolved into America's longest war, as U.S. forces worked for two decades to support a fragile Afghan government against a persistent Taliban insurgency. In May 2011, U.S. Navy SEALs finally located and killed Osama bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a major symbolic victory in the broader War on Terror.

Despite that success, the Afghan war dragged on with no clear resolution. In August 2021, after a U.S. withdrawal agreement, the Taliban swiftly retook control of the country as the Afghan government collapsed, ending America's twenty-year military presence in a chaotic and widely criticized final withdrawal.

A decade of loose lending standards produced a massive housing bubble, as banks issued risky subprime mortgages and packaged them into complex securities sold worldwide. When housing prices collapsed beginning in 2007, the bubble burst, triggering the worst American financial crisis since the Great Depression.

In September 2008, the venerable investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, freezing credit markets worldwide and threatening the entire financial system. Congress, under President Bush, passed the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to stabilize major banks, an intervention deeply unpopular with many voters across the political spectrum.

The Great Recession that followed threw millions of Americans out of work, erased trillions in household wealth, and left home foreclosures and long-term unemployment as defining features of the following years — a crisis that dominated the 2008 presidential campaign and the first years of the next administration.

In November 2008, Illinois senator Barack Obama was elected the nation's first African American president, defeating Republican John McCain amid the deepening financial crisis and running on a message of "hope and change." Obama's administration pushed a stimulus package to combat the recession and pursued auto-industry bailouts that helped stabilize General Motors and Chrysler.

Obama's signature domestic achievement was the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010), popularly called "Obamacare," which expanded health insurance coverage to millions of previously uninsured Americans through subsidized marketplaces, an individual mandate, and expanded Medicaid, while barring insurers from denying coverage for preexisting conditions.

Obama also ended the Iraq combat mission, ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and was reelected in 2012 over Republican Mitt Romney. His presidency unfolded alongside a deeply polarized Congress, and the Affordable Care Act remained a fiercely contested political battleground throughout and after his two terms.

The early twenty-first century brought sweeping demographic change to the United States. Immigration, chiefly from Latin America and Asia, along with differing birth rates, steadily reshaped the nation's racial and ethnic makeup, with demographers projecting that no single racial group would hold a numerical majority by mid-century.

Social attitudes shifted rapidly on issues once considered settled. Support for same-sex marriage rose dramatically over just two decades, and in 2015 the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, a landmark expansion of civil rights.

At the same time, immigration remained a bitterly contested political issue, as debates raged over border security, undocumented immigration, and the status of long-settled immigrant communities — tensions that intensified rather than resolved as the country's population grew more diverse.

The smartphone revolution, launched by devices like the 2007 iPhone, and the rise of social media platforms transformed how Americans communicated, consumed news, and engaged in politics, accelerating both connection and division. Cable news and online media increasingly sorted Americans into separate, often mutually hostile information ecosystems, deepening partisan polarization.

The 2016 and 2020 elections exposed and intensified these divides, as debates over trade, immigration, race, and the role of government grew more heated than at any point in decades. In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States, killing more than a million Americans, upending the economy, schools, and daily life, and becoming yet another flashpoint in the nation's polarized politics.

As the United States moved deeper into the twenty-first century, it remained a nation of extraordinary wealth, technological innovation, and diversity, still wrestling with the same enduring questions about equality, opportunity, and national identity that had shaped its history from the very beginning.