Twenty-five years after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the consequences are still unfolding. The immediate response produced the Patriot Act, vast expansions of surveillance, and open-ended military authorisations. Those decisions, made rapidly by representatives and executives, set in motion a series of prolonged conflicts — Afghanistan, Iraq, and the wider “War on Terror” — that proved far easier to start than to end. Power vacuums, regional destabilisation, and the strengthening of adversaries such as Iran were among the results. Ordinary citizens largely watched from the outside.
The pattern has not disappeared. The current conflict with Iran carries clear echoes of that post-9/11 logic: repeated military pressure, contested objectives, difficulty reaching a stable political settlement, and the risk of another open-ended entanglement. Once again, decisions of enormous consequence are concentrated in the hands of a small number of representatives and officials. Once again, the public is asked to accept the costs after the fact.
This is not simply a failure of individual leaders. It is a structural feature of representative democracy when it comes to questions of war and security.
Representatives operate inside a system that rewards the acquisition and retention of power. To gain office they must make promises that resonate with voters. Peace, restraint, and an end to “forever wars” are popular promises. Yet once in power, the incentives, institutional pressures, and security establishments that surround leaders often push in the opposite direction. The result is a recurring gap between what is offered to the electorate and what is delivered.
Donald Trump’s political rise drew significant support from his expressed disdain for endless wars and nation-building. That stance helped distinguish him from previous administrations. Yet under his leadership the United States has again found itself in sustained military confrontation with Iran. The gap between campaign posture and governing reality is not unique to one politician or one party. It is a predictable outcome of a system in which the public’s formal power is largely limited to choosing representatives every few years, while the actual decisions about war, surveillance, and long-term security strategy remain remote.
Representative democracy creates a simple transaction: citizens hand over power; representatives promise to use it wisely on their behalf. In domestic policy the failures of this model are often gradual. In matters of war they can be catastrophic and enduring. Once military commitments are made, institutional momentum, sunk costs, alliance pressures, and the politics of looking “strong” make reversal extremely difficult. Citizens who wish to change course discover that their main instrument — the next election — is slow, blunt, and easily overridden by new promises.
There is another way to organise democratic power.
Direct democracy does not claim that citizens should micromanage every military decision. It does claim that questions of this magnitude — whether to enter, expand, or continue wars; how far surveillance powers should reach; what constitutes legitimate security policy — should not remain the near-exclusive domain of representatives who face strong incentives to promise one thing and deliver another. Citizens could be given structured, informed opportunities to deliberate and decide on the fundamental direction of security policy, rather than being limited to periodic selection of the people who will decide for them.
The lesson of 9/11 and its long aftermath is not only about intelligence failures or geopolitical miscalculation. It is about a system that concentrates the power to make history-altering decisions in relatively few hands, while leaving the public with little capacity to correct course when those decisions prove disastrous or endless. Forever wars are easier to sustain when the people who pay the price have only intermittent and indirect control over the policy that produces them.
Liberty in this domain means more than the right to vote for a representative who claims to oppose war. It means the practical ability of citizens to shape the decisions that commit their society to war or peace. Until that capacity is strengthened, the cycle of expansive promises and entrenched military commitments is likely to continue.
The alternative is not naivety about security threats. It is the reconstruction of democratic power so that those who bear the consequences have a genuine voice in the choices that create them.
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