This morning, families gathered at the 9/11 Memorial plaza in Lower Manhattan to read aloud the names of the 2,983 men, women and children killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks and the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing. They have done this every September 11 for 25 years. Two columns of blue light will rise over Lower Manhattan at dusk, visible for 60 miles. The flags fly at half-staff. The ceremony is precise and unchanged: the names, the light, the silence.

Trump proclaimed September 11, 2026 as Patriot Day. He wrote of the 'warriors of our Armed Forces who have defended the sacred cause of freedom in the quarter century since.' Those warriors include 18 Americans who have died in the Iran war since February 28. The proclamation does not name them. The ceremony at Ground Zero does not name them. Their names are elsewhere, in the records of the operations that took them — operations with names like Epic Fury and Southern Spear and the rotating designations of six months of nightly bombing in a war Trump also calls a denuclearization operation and says was nearly over in April.

Twenty-five years ago, 19 men from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the UAE boarded four aircraft and killed 2,977 people. The United States went to war — first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, then through a generation of counter-terrorism operations across the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. The war on terror became the longest military campaign in American history. It was still running when the second Trump presidency began. It is still running now, rebranded and reoriented, under a different name, against a different adversary, in the same region.

The quarter century that began on September 11, 2001 has not produced what was promised. The Afghanistan the United States left is governed by the Taliban it spent 20 years fighting. The Iraq that was rebuilt at a cost of $2 trillion descended into sectarian conflict and produced ISIS. The Iran that was supposed to be brought to the table by the 2015 nuclear deal was left by Trump in 2018, went to war with the same Trump in 2026, and now has a new Supreme Leader who US intelligence assesses as more inclined to seek nuclear weapons than the old one. The sacred cause of freedom has been defended for 25 years. The cause is not substantially closer.

At Ground Zero the names are being read. In Jordan, air defence batteries are still tracking the aftermath of Tuesday's missile launches. In the Strait of Hormuz, five tankers were destroyed three days ago. In Nepal, 933 hydropower workers remain unaccounted for in glacial debris. In Haiti, gangs control 90 per cent of Port-au-Prince. In West Africa, Ebola is in Uganda. In Venezuela, 65 billion barrels of oil are under majority US control. The world that September 11, 2001 produced is still running. It produces things every day.

Two thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three names will be read aloud this morning. The reading takes most of the day. Each name is a specific person who did not know, on September 10, 2001, what the following morning would produce. The people who died in the Iran war did not know, on February 27, 2026, what the following morning would produce either. All of them are in the same sentence: the sentence that begins with September 11, 2001 and has not ended.

Twenty-five years. The names are still being read. The war is still running.