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Never Forget.
I believe those two words could be enough for today's introduction, but sadly, 25 years after the tragedy, the phrase has lost its intrinsic meaning to many. Some of us were very young the day the world changed forever. I, personally, cannot claim to have lived through 9/11, but I grew up hearing what that day was like. I was alive, yes, but I was too young to recall. That has allowed me, however, to understand that I am an offspring of a different generation, one that never got to experience the meaning of the free world.
Understanding that, however, has never given me a sense of resentment towards authority, as it seems to have happened to many Americans… and trust me, they can't grasp what it's like to go through customs as a foreigner in a U.S. airport. All of that is irrelevant. While it did shape generations to come, what matters most is not the fact that you now have to take your shoes off at TSA or that you can’t bring a bottle of water from outside. Those are the stupid little things we tend to focus on most. What matters is what actually happened on September 11 and 12, 2001, not the way it changed the world.
Saying that might not be popular. Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act and the other 9/11 derivatives are of course relevant, but the reason to claim we shall Never Forget is solely what happened on that day and the day after. And New Yorkers seem to have forgotten all the pain, the suffering, the collective trauma, and the shock that came with hearing, “A second plane has hit the South Tower.” That realization itself was unthinkable on September 10, 2001, and the terror it caused is unparalleled in history. The world people knew was gone forever.
Today's newsletter is dedicated to the victims and their families. It is they who we need to remember. And I extend the word “we” to the whole world, not only U.S. citizens. Anyone who loves the good in this world should remember. Forgetting is relegating all that pain to a lower level, and that shouldn’t be tolerated. Under no circumstances. While New Yorkers have forgotten, we remember.
We will Never Forget.
In this issue, you will find:
New York Forgot
Year 2030, The Year of The Americas
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New York Forgot
It has been 25 years since the world changed forever. Some people, especially those that didn't know the world before, have forgotten what they vouched never to.
What We Remember. At 8:46 on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 disappeared into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. For seventeen minutes, America could still hope that something incomprehensible had happened by accident. Then, at 9:03, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower on live television. People were trapped above the impact zones. Some jumped rather than burn alive. Thousands descended smoke-filled staircases while firefighters carrying heavy equipment climbed in the opposite direction.
At 9:59, the South Tower collapsed. Twenty-nine minutes later, the North Tower followed.
By the end of that morning, New York’s skyline had been mutilated, and 2,977 people had been murdered, including 343 FDNY firefighters.
Why It Matters. But September 11 is only half of the story, the other half began on September 12. New York woke up wounded, furious and extraordinarily united. American flags appeared everywhere; people lined up to donate blood; construction workers, police officers, firefighters and volunteers went toward Ground Zero; strangers fed strangers; firehouses became shrines, and the POTUS stood there amongst New Yorkers with a message of hope, unity and the promise of justice. Patriotism stopped being an abstraction.
America had been attacked because of what it represented, and Americans responded by embracing precisely what the attackers despised.
There was grief, but also defiance. It was the America later captured so unapologetically by Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue: wounded, angry and absolutely certain whose side it was on.
"Never Forget" became a promise and an allegiance. Preventing a future tragedy required remembrance.
Yes, But. Twenty-five years later, New York still remembers September 11. The names are read, the bells ring, the families return to Ground Zero, and the Tribute in Light illuminates Manhattan each year. But remembering an event and remembering what it meant are different things. Somewhere during the quarter-century separating those two New Yorks, “Never Forget” became “New York forgot.” Part of the explanation is generational. Roughly 100 million Americans alive today were born after 9/11. They never watched the second plane hit and the realization that came with it. Nor did they see the missing-person posters covering New York or spent that afternoon wondering whether another American city would be next.
Then came twenty years of war. Afghanistan dragged on and Iraq became intertwined with 9/11 in the public imagination despite Saddam Hussein not having planned the attacks.
Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and the controversies of the War on Terror gradually changed the conversation. For part of American culture, the central question shifted from what had been done to America toward what America had done afterward.
That's how the the latest Netflix 9/11 documentary reflects it. Somewhere along the way, the moral clarity of September 11 became unfashionable, and nowhere is that transformation more visible than in New York itself.
The Turning Point. The city that rallied around firefighters, police officers, the American flag, and an instinctive defense of its country is now governed by Zohran Mamdani, an Islamist socialist. His political worldview represents a profound departure from much of the economic, political, philosophical, and foreign-policy consensus that defined post-9/11 America. Mamdani has commemorated its victims and first responders and established September 11 as an annual Citywide Day of Remembrance and Service, but then came a scene so symbolic that it almost writes the argument itself.
After signing his September 11 executive orders, Mamdani gave a ceremonial pen to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, who previously represented Ahmed al-Darbi at Guantánamo Bay. Al-Darbi pleaded guilty to war-crime charges related to an al-Qaeda plot against commercial shipping.
Twenty-five years after al-Qaeda murdered thousands in New York, the mayor commemorating those attacks handed a symbolic pen from his 9/11 orders to a man publicly known for representing an al-Qaeda prisoner. There may be no better illustration of the distance between 2001 and 2026.
A city once extraordinarily conscious of what its symbols meant appears increasingly incapable of understanding why that particular symbol might be grotesque to people who buried relatives after September 11.
Often Forgotten. Meanwhile, the people who embodied the old New York are still paying the price. More than 15,000 FDNY members were exposed to the toxic environment surrounding Ground Zero during rescue and recovery operations. More than 10,000 have since been certified with a 9/11-related physical health condition. They went back. After watching two towers collapse and knowing Lower Manhattan had become a graveyard, thousands of Americans went back.
They searched first for survivors, then bodies, then fragments of bodies. They cleared the pile day after day.
Some eventually died because they did, and that was September 12. Perhaps that is what New York most urgently needs to remember.
“Never Forget” was never supposed to mean merely reading 2,977 names once a year. It meant remembering why they were murdered, what was attacked that morning and what kind of civilization produced ordinary people willing to run up burning staircases while everyone else ran down.
In Conclusion. America has every right to debate the wars that followed, condemn mistakes committed in its name and reconsider its foreign policy. But introspection cannot become amnesia. The firefighters climbing those stairs did not know what New York would look like in 2026. The passengers who fought back aboard Flight 93 did not know what America’s politics would become. The workers who arrived at Ground Zero were not making an ideological argument. They understood that something evil had happened to their country and that their response mattered.
Was it all for nothing? No. I really hope it wasn't. But keeping that answer true requires more than an annual ceremony.
Twenty-five years later, America once again repeats the promise it made among the ruins: Never Forget.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable question on this anniversary is no longer whether America remembers September 11, it is whether New York remembers September 12.
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If the economic projections for 2030 tell us anything, it is that predictions of the Western Hemisphere’s decline may have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the next decade could belong to the Americas.
In Perspective. The numbers are striking. Of a projected USD 150.3 trillion global economy, North America alone would account for approximately USD 44.3 trillion. Add South America’s USD 6 trillion, and the Western Hemisphere crosses the USD 50 trillion threshold—roughly one-third of global output. At the center of it all remains the United States, projected here at USD 37.7 trillion, comfortably ahead of China at USD 26 trillion.
That matters because the economic geography of the 2030s will be defined by something more complicated than GDP rankings.
China remains enormous; India is rising rapidly, and Europe, despite years of relative decline, still represents an economic bloc of roughly USD 37 trillion.
But the Americas possess a combination that few other regions can reproduce.
How It Works. Capital and technology in the United States; manufacturing capacity in Mexico; energy and minerals across Canada and Latin America; agricultural power stretching from the American Midwest to Brazil and Argentina; and, perhaps most importantly, extraordinary geographical insulation from the principal theaters of geopolitical confrontation make it particularly resilient. The world is becoming more dangerous, and geography is becoming valuable again.
The wars and disruptions of the 2020s have already exposed the vulnerabilities of supply chains built around the assumption that globalization would remain politically neutral. It will not.
Washington’s confrontation with Beijing, instability in the Middle East, Russia’s confrontation with Europe and the growing competition over critical minerals have transformed proximity from a logistical convenience into a strategic asset.
The Revenge Of The GCA. Mexico is projected at USD 2.5 trillion and already occupies an increasingly important position in American supply chains. Brazil, at USD 3.2 trillion, would remain the region’s largest South American economy and one of the world’s major agricultural and mineral powers. Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Peru are smaller individually, but collectively sit on extraordinary reserves of lithium, copper, energy, food and other resources that the industries of the future will require.
The opportunity, therefore, is not for Latin America to replace China or compete independently with the United States, but to become indispensable to the economic architecture being constructed around it.
Why It Matters. For decades, Latin America’s great economic frustration has been its inability to convert natural abundance into sustained geopolitical influence. The region repeatedly exported commodities while importing the sophisticated products manufactured from them. The emerging geopolitical environment offers another chance to change that equation through nearshoring, energy integration, mineral processing, manufacturing and deeper continental supply chains.
There is, however, nothing inevitable about an “American century.” Latin America still suffers from weak institutions, poor infrastructure, insecurity, low productivity and political instability.
A mine that cannot obtain permits, a factory surrounded by criminal violence or a port connected to inadequate roads does not become strategically useful merely because it sits near the United States.
Geography creates the opportunity; policy determines whether countries exploit it, and that may be the real story behind this graph.
In Conclusion. The United States will remain the hemisphere’s gravitational center. But Washington increasingly needs secure supply chains, reliable energy, critical minerals and industrial partners closer to home. Latin America needs investment, technology, markets and security. For perhaps the first time in decades, their economic necessities are beginning to converge.
2030 will still be a world of American-Chinese competition, European power and Indian ascent.
But if you look at the map carefully, the Western Hemisphere possesses almost everything required to prosper in that world.
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