Twenty-one years on from the destruction of the Twin Towers, it's becoming possible to tell which parts of the post-9/11 security state were passing expediencies or flashes of paranoia, and which have become institutionalized parts of American life.
Last year's withdrawal from Afghanistan suggests large-scale regime change wars with lots of American boots on the ground are over for now. The Biden administration, for all its foreign policy faults, has drastically wound down overseas drone strikes. Perhaps those too will become a relic of a darker time.
