by Rahul Mahajan

About the author: Rahul Mahajan is a graduate student in physics at the University of Texas at Austin and an antiwar activist, serving on the National Boards of Peace Action and the Education for Peace in Iraq Center.

The world changed on September 11, 2001. That’s not just media hype. The way some historians refer to 1914–1991 as the “short twentieth century,” many are now calling September 11, 2001, the real beginning of the twenty-first century. It’s too early to know whether that assessment will be borne out, but it cannot simply be dismissed.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, forever ended the idea that the United States could somehow float above the rest of the earth, of it and not of it at the...