Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale, examines the Global War on Terror as a radical break in international politics. Part of his DeVane Lecture series course Power and Politics in Today's World, taught at Yale in fall 2019, this session traces how the September 11 attacks reshaped the post-Cold War order that had emerged after the fall of communism. Shapiro considers what made the war on terror distinct from prior conflicts, what alternative paths policymakers might have taken, and how the era's choices produced today's climate of fear and resentment rather than the optimism of the early 1990s. The lecture runs 71 minutes and is drawn from material that also informs Shapiro's book After the Fall, situating a specific historical event within a broader argument about the trajectory of global power since the Cold War's end.