Sep 10, 2026
Timothy Snyder
The point of terrorism is not to cause suffering, but to provoke the target into doing something that hurts it even more. In the quarter-century since the 9/11 attacks, the US has done just that, leaving the world and itself worse off.
KHARKIV—On September 11, 2001, when I taught my third class as a professor of East European history at Yale, I knew what the subject had to be: provocation. The Russian imperial secret services, and then the Soviet secret services, had perfected the art of convincing adversaries to do what they wanted them to do while making them think it was for their own reasons. When something terrible happens, as it had that day, suffering, though no doubt desired by those who caused it, is not the point. The point is to get you into a frame of mind that leads you to do something that hurts yourself even more.
