The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks significantly reshaped global politics, leading Western democracies to abandon many liberal principles and contributing to the resurgence of older conflicts over empire, decolonization, immigration, and culture, which in turn fueled the rise of far-right movements.
Al-Qaeda's campaign of terror aimed to provoke Western democracies into dismantling the civil liberties of their own citizens, thereby exposing their claims to freedom as hypocritical. As the war on terror progressed, Al-Qaeda leaders portrayed anti-terror laws and the increasingly militarized conduct of the U.S. and its allies not as signs of resolve but as displays of weakness and evidence of the shallowness of Western liberalism. While Osama bin Laden may have been disappointed by Al-Qaeda's limited success in mobilizing Muslims globally to overthrow their dictatorships, the U.S. and its European allies, by sustaining authoritarian regimes, acted in ways he had predicted.
Al-Qaeda, a movement characterized by a nihilistic embrace of the suicide bomber, showed little interest in conquest or governing. A primary objective was to provoke Western states into an "auto-immune response to terrorism," where the measures taken to defend the political body would corrode it from within. In this respect, bin Laden was seen as perversely successful in drawing the U.S. and its allies into costly wars. These efforts also weakened liberal norms through the widespread use of emergency powers, surveillance, indefinite detention, torture, and rendition.
The aftermath of 9/11 brought increased suspicion of Muslims, hostility toward immigration, and the elevation of civilizational rhetoric and border militarization from the political margins to the center of Western public discourse. The attacks transformed global politics by fundamentally altering democratic societies' relationship with security and civil liberties.