A Coup and a Terrorist Attack. Lessons from September 11's Cataclysmic Events

In the United States, September 11 marks the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in 2001. But September 11 is also the anniversary of an event that happened 28 years earlier: the military coup in Chile that unseated the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and ushered in 17 years of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

In America of 2025, both cataclysmic events hold meaning. The infrastructure of surveillance and repression that came out of the 2001 attack, which revolved around the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and had Muslims as its targets, is now being expanded, while Donald Trump’s’ “forever war” on America is bringing the post-9/11 “war on terror” home.

The deployment in Los Angeles in June 2025 of a Marine infantry division that served in the “war on terror” in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan symbolizes that trajectory.

Trump's War on America

In my essay, “9/11 as Shock Event: The Path to Illiberal Politics,” I noted the continuities with the strategies of repression and subversion that the U.S. used during the Cold War to prop up juntas — Chile, most famously. I would not be surprised if the DHS color-coded "threat advisory system," which was updated daily for release by the media, makes a comeback.

9/11 as Shock Event: The Path to Illiberal Politics

DHS head Tom Ridge explains the new terror threat advisory system, March 2002. Joshua Roberts/AFP/via Getty Images

The presence of active-duty military and National Guard in the streets of American cities, and the possible use of the military in future Trump administration operations against American civilians, carried out on American territory, bring to mind lessons from the Pinochet years about the ruin of morale, discipline and mission when armed forces previously loyal to the Constitution become tools of a strongman’s power consolidation ambitions and participate in domestic repression.

I wrote about this extensively in Strongmen , but here are a few essays that examine this tragic history of collaboration that destroyed the integrity of the Chilean military, and look at Trump’s attempts to politicize and domesticate the military against this backdrop. I hope you find them enlightening.

When Rule of Law Becomes Rule of the Lawless

What MAGA Did Not Want the U.S. Naval Academy to Hear

When the Right Turns the Military into an Authoritarian Tool