Anyone who was an adult 25 years ago can remember where they were when they heard news that Muslim terrorists had flown two passenger planes into the World Trade Center.

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It was one of those cataclysmic events that marks one’s mind indelibly and creates a permanent refraction, from before to after, like B.C. and A.D., or before COVID and after COVID. There was the world before 9/11 and the world after it.

I was driving to work in Toronto that morning, listening to a news show hosted by a Vietnam War draft dodger who had fled America when his country needed him and had, in the decades since, achieved a degree of media stardom in Canada. If I recall correctly, he speculated, reasonably enough in those earliest seconds of the all-consuming news cycle, that a small plane carrying tourists to see the skyscrapers close up had met with disaster. If only that had been the case.

Shortly after I reached the office, the second plane hit. Reporters and editors who had been watching on TV as the first tower belched smoke into the blue sky, gasped in shock and horror when the second plane flashed across the screen and exploded in a ball of flame before a live worldwide audience.

Global revulsion at the attack was instantaneous, and there was an emotional understanding among people everywhere, particularly in the West, that this was an act of war against our civilization. Yes, there was Article 5 of the NATO agreement, which states that an attack on one member will be treated as an attack on all members. But there was more than that. There was a feeling of genuine solidarity and civilized horror. Foreign leaders and pundits declared, “We are all Americans.”

Some dissenting voices took the side of our enemies, and there were one or two utterly cynical responses, such as that of a British civil servant who advised colleagues to release any bad news while the world was distracted by the enormity perpetrated by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Mostly, however, and overwhelmingly, there was a sense of reeling disbelief combined with genuine sympathy for America, and a nearly universal understanding that a great evil was abroad in the world. Like so many others, I lost a friend murdered that day; she was on the plane that the hijackers smashed into the Pentagon.

Men and women stopped what they were doing, collected their children early from school, and rearranged their lives long term. There was a rallying to the flag. Men and women quit their jobs to do whatever they could to help. Young men abandoned their careers to join the armed forces, stand with their country, and go to war with the newly declared and terrible enemy.

President George W. Bush stirred and emboldened the nation when he stood on the apocalyptic rubble of southern Manhattan and told workers doing the grim work of retrieving bodies, “I can hear you. …The rest of the world hears you … and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

It was a rallying cry for just retribution and seemed also to contain a new clear-sightedness. In the aftermath of the attack, watching the national and international reaction, I wrote that the passion released on 9/11 might bring epochal change and initiate a new age of revived American patriotism,........

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