The Terror
Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin
The likelihood that al-Qaeda will lose its Afghan base raises the question of whether practical sovereignty within contiguous territory is necessary for the terror-group's success, or whether advances in communications and encryption – coupled with increasingly good tradecraft – will over time obviate the need for a territorial base. This is a crucial question for the US and others who are fighting the network, because even complete success in Afghanistan will not destroy this terrorist threat. Nor will the terrorists be appeased by any conceivable change in US policies toward the Muslim world. Moreover, preemptive or preventive strikes against terrorist operations will not always be feasible. In this kind of world, a strategy dependent upon identification and elimination of specific threats will have to be combined with one focused on remedying vulnerabilities to ill-defined, all-azimuth threats of potentially catastrophic scope.
American Grand Strategy in the Age of Terror
G. John Ikenberry
The surprise attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon have been called this generation's Pearl Harbor, exposing America's vulnerabilities to the outside world and triggering a fundamental reorientation of foreign policy. To some, 11 September marks the end of the post-Cold War era: after a decade of drift, the United States has finally rediscovered its grand strategic purpose. But this evocative image of historical transition in American foreign policy and world order is misleading. The events of 11 September and the Bush administration's declaration of war on terrorism will have an enduring impact on world politics, primarily in reinforcing the existing Western-centred international order and providing new sinews of cohesion among the great powers, including Russia and China. If Washington plays its cards well, it is possible that engagement and accommodation – rather than balance-of-power and security rivalry – will continue to define great-power relations well into the future.
Pragmatic Counter-terrorism
Jonathan Stevenson
Within ten days of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush proclaimed: 'our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated'. Despite the sweeping cast of the 'Bush doctrine', however, the qualification 'with global reach' gave him the leeway to circumscribe the operative definition of terrorism. Practical considerations require a policy that does so. The counter-terrorism effort against al-Qaeda alone will require diverse and sustained military, law-enforcement and intelligence resources that will stretch the capacities of the United States and its allies. The US and its allies enjoy greater leverage over some terrorist groups, and less over others. The upshot is that different policies will fit different terrorist groups and sponsors.
Putin's Gamble
Oksana Antonenko
For the first time since the Second World War, Russia, the United States and Europe are working together to address what all of them view as vital security interests. Russia is important not only for the war against Taliban and al-Qaeda, but also for longer-term goals such as targeting terrorist money flows, identifying and eliminating al-Qaeda cells throughout the world, addressing the proliferation of weapons-of-mass destruction (WMD) materials and technologies and finding effective responses to bio-terrorist threats. Russian President Vladimir Putin took a major gamble after 11 September, setting aside outstanding disagreements and offering full Russian support to the US-led coalition against terror. It is now up to the NATO allies to respond with similar imagination to accommodate Russia's legitimate strategic concerns and bring Moscow into the global economy. If this chance is missed, the next ten years are likely to resemble the 1990s as a decade of lost opportunities in Russian–Western relations.
The Third World War?
Lawrence Freedman
Osama bin Laden does not speak for Islam. However, it is his objective to do so, so this is a war about the future of Islam, and therefore about the governance of all states with Muslim populations, and all conflicts in which Muslim groups are directly involved. These conflicts occupy much of the current international agenda, taking in the Middle East, the Gulf, the Balkans, Central and East Asia, and parts of Africa. While the individual conflicts still have their critical distinctive features, a global struggle of sorts is emerging that cannot but shake up local and global political structures, often in quite surprising and unintended ways. Whether or not international politics will be so transformed at the end of this process that it can be described as the 'third world war' remains to be seen. A key test will be how the United States emerges from this as an international actor.
NATO After 11 September
Philip H. Gordon
On the evening of 12 September 2001, the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation invoked that treaty's mutual defence guarantee for the first time in the alliance's 52 years. When that treaty's Article 5 was drafted – pledging that an attack on one ally would be treated as an attack on all – not a single signatory could have imagined that its first invocation would involve Europeans coming to the aid of the United States rather than the other way around. Yet that is precisely what happened, and NATO will never be the same again. The notion that mutual defence could be a two-way street, and that NATO might use its military power to deal with international terrorism – in Central Asia no less – are just some of the ways that the attacks have begun to transform the world's largest and longest-standing defence alliance.
What is NATO For?
Anthony Forster and William Wallace
Before 11 September, the cumulative impact of NATO enlargement and Balkan interventions had given NATO a stronger European focus, even as the security priorities of its leading member were shifting away from Europe. NATO is becoming more of a European security organisation, less of an alliance. Its utility as a Europe-wide security structure should not be underrated: consolidation of a peaceful order across European is in itself a major achievement, permitting the US and its allies to focus their attention on other regions, with 'coalitions of the willing' benefiting from the standardised procedures, training and infrastructure that NATO has developed among the armed forces of its member states and partners. All of this should be useful for the war against terrorism. But the United States should not expect too much from NATO itself, as a formal alliance, outside Europe, despite the emergence of the new terrorist threat to Western security.
America's Balkan Disengagement
Marta Dassù and Nicholas Whyte
In the world after 11 September, international attention to the Balkans will decline. Western priorities are shifting, and drawing resources with them. The region's historic window of opportunity, which opened at the end of the 1990s, may be swinging shut. Changes to the transatlantic relationship will have multiple knock-on effects on policies and attitudes toward the region. These are likely to include the accelerated disengagement of the United States from the direct management of the post-war Balkans. As developments in Macedonia in 2001 demonstrate, military, economic and political responsibilities will be overwhelmingly assumed by the EU, its leading members and, in particular, by those West European countries – such as Italy and Germany – that are most exposed to Balkan instabilities.
