A quarter century after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks killed 2,977 people on American soil, the United States is quietly scaling back and redirecting parts of the system it developed in response — unlearning key lessons from the assault and the costly response that followed.

The counterterrorism apparatus has been thinned. Alliances like NATO that proved their worth in Afghanistan have been weakened at a moment when the U.S. faces the toughest security picture since World War II. Ill-defined Middle East entanglements persist.

And the intelligence architecture designed to stop the next attack is — by the assessment of people who helped build it — once again struggling to connect the dots in an evolving threat picture.

None of that was inevitable.

The 9/11 attacks drove the largest reorganization of the federal government since the 1947 National Security Act, a two-decade global war on terror, and a vast expansion of American surveillance powers — a response built at enormous cost and defended for years as the price of never being caught unprepared again.

Now the U.S. is paring back or repurposing important parts of that architecture, with far less argument than went into building it.

Here are four hard-earned takeaways from Sept. 11, 2001, that the country seems to have forgotten.

Don’t count out counterterrorism

The infrastructure created to prevent similar attacks on U.S. soil has been hollowed out in recent years as the U.S. has faced increased threats from countries like Russia, China and Iran. While the terrorism threat has diminished, it has not disappeared, analysts said.

“There has been complacency over the past few years, as we’ve seen tremendous downsizing, as well as the loss of institutional knowledge and experience,” said Daniel Byman, director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“I worry, especially when terrorism has become so politicized, that we’re just going to repeat the same mistakes as before. You can’t treat terrorism as a threat that we focus on episodically and inconsistently,” Byman said.

The same episodic attention has bled into how Washington treats its allies, who offered much more than solidarity after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

America’s alliances are not optional

In the days and months after Sept. 11, the U.S. learned firsthand the value of its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, who invoked the alliance’s Article 5 collective defense clause for the only time in its history. In Afghanistan, NATO countries provided not just intelligence, basing access and military support, but also political legitimacy for Washington’s efforts against terrorist threats.

The Trump administration would do well to heed that example, said Bradley Bowman, a former Army officer and national security adviser to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees.

“At this moment when we need allies and partners more than ever, when we need friends more than ever, this administration seems to be taking them for granted, and worse than that, actually promoting discord with them,” said Bowman, now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Critics say President Donald Trump has discounted NATO allies’ contributions after 9/11 and has continually failed to advise allies of Washington’s plans or make efforts to bring them along, only to later lash out that they do nothing for the U.S., such as in the ongoing Iran war.

“Our allies came to our assistance and saw it in their interest to come to our assistance,” said Jeffrey Feltman, a former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon and a top Middle East official at the State Department. “I’m not sure today that our allies see it in their interest to come help us if we ask.”

The U.S. relied on similar work to build a coalition that confronted and dismantled the Islamic State group, drawing in dozens of partners even after the Iraq War proved more polarizing among U.S. allies.

But the Trump administration’s impulsive shoot-first approach to the Iran war has called into question whether Washington could do something similar again.

Middle East misadventures cost the U.S.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, presidents in both parties have overestimated Washington’s ability to deliver quick and lasting results in the Middle East, with American interventions causing a raft of spillover effects the U.S. continues to grapple with today.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, launched in the aftermath of 9/11, left the American public wary of prolonged military missions and ill-defined Middle East engagements. That skepticism remains today, with 55% of Americans saying that going to war with Iran was a mistake, according to a recent survey by the University of Massachusetts.

“The objectives set at the outset of a conflict are fateful — one better be careful about setting objectives that may turn out to exceed our capabilities,” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Blind spots in U.S. intelligence must be found

The intelligence failures that missed the murderous jetliner plot on Sept. 11, 2001, prompted a massive overhaul of America’s security apparatus aimed at ensuring that local and federal authorities pooled resources and shared information in a bid to prevent future attacks.

And while the U.S. has disrupted a number of attacks since, experts and former officials worry that the government is slow once again to prepare for a new generation of challenges.

“The U.S. homeland, in my view, is more vulnerable than it has ever been in recent times from state and nonstate adversaries,” said Seth Jones, head of the defense and security department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He pointed to the threat of drone attacks, terrorism and sabotage operations and warned that U.S. bases and critical infrastructure are highly exposed, counterdrone defenses are weak, and the intelligence architecture stood up after 9/11, such as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is antiquated and has ambiguous responsibilities.

“We are not well positioned to defend the homeland,” Jones said.

U.S. intelligence-sharing, he added, is “actually quite stovepiped” — particularly on attacks by Russia and other adversaries that are intentionally hard to trace and stop short of triggering formal military or diplomatic responses. “I think we’ve largely gone back,” Jones said.

And while the U.S. did make significant strides in sharing and collecting intelligence, Trump has not only politicized U.S. intelligence but has also often disregarded it in favor of his own instincts, said Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration.

“We have a problem now of not only the politicization of intelligence, but consumers who frankly don’t consume it,” Daalder said. “That’s a problem that can’t be solved by process.”

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