Addicted to Security: Globalized Terrorism and the Inevitability of American Unilateralism

Abstract

MAJOR EVENTS SUCH AS THE END OF THE COLD WAR, the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the US war in Afghanistan (2001) and the Iraq war led by the US and the UK (2003) provide excellent opportunities to re-evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of competing theories of international relations, the accuracy of different predictions about the future derived from these theories and the utility of alternative policy recommendations derived from these predictions. The errors that plagued optimistic expectations about the emergence of global stability after the Cold War, for example, were based in part on questionable assumptions about the emerging power and influence of democratic values, international institutions and global liberal regimes. These regimes were expected to impose sufficient discipline on state actors to prevent repeated defections from collective action and ultimately to control international violence.(1) It was apparent to many others, however, that the decline of bipolar strategic rivalry was not sufficient to provide multilateral institutions with the coercive power they needed to compel states and other actors to co-operate consistently.(2) Both optimists and pessimists agreed that the system had undergone fundamental change, but their predictions were often mutually exclusive.Perhaps the clearest illustration of premature closure of inquiry is Charles Kupchan's prediction that unipolar moment not last... The rise of other powers and waning and unilateralist internationalism will combine to make unipolar moment a fleeting one. The rise of Europe and, Kupchan argues, America's diminishing appetite for global engagement will compel the US to fortify the homeland and rein in overseas commitments in an attempt to cordon itself off from such threats.(3) Far from turning inward, however, ongoing deployments to Bosnia, Kosovo and Liberia, major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and related financial and military commitments to post-war reconstruction in these countries confirm that Washington is not only increasing its overseas commitments but is willing to engage in the most sweeping and expansive intervention, democratization and reconstruction projects since 1945. Moreover, the splits in Europe resulting from divisions over the Iraq war, in which 14 of 19 NATO members ultimately supported the American position, do not bode well for Kupchan's predictions about the emergence of a sufficiently unified and powerful Europe to replace US hegemony.If erroneous predictions about the demise of unipolarity and the emergence of multilateralism as a staple of American foreign and security policy are wrong, then by extension the theories put forward to account for these predictions are equally suspect.The purpose of this article is to provide a more realistic account of US responses to emerging threats of terrorism and proliferation in the aftermath of 11 September, and a more accurate set of predictions about the future of American foreign and security policies in the decades to come. Sections 1 through 4 will develop the article's primary thesis: namely, that the domestic and international forces at play today are creating a security environment in which American officials will become increasingly committed to (and politically dependent on) a set of priorities in which security trumps everything. Critics of US foreign policy should therefore move beyond the simplistic (and excessively optimistic) assumption that these American security imperatives are only temporal in nature, simply a product of a conservative-hawkish White House and Cabinet led by a Republican president who just managed a victory in the 2000 election. That assumption is dangerously superficial; terrorism and proliferation have become facts of life for American citizens and by extension for any current or future US government. The US will continue to be threatened by and to experience the devastating physical and psychological consequences of globalized terrorism. …