It is better to be feared than loved.
Machiavelli, The Prince
The united states, destiny’s longtime darling, is on a collision course with history. Insulated from the old world by two centuries of near mythic independence but stunned today by a sudden consciousness of vulnerability, America is failing to read the message of mandatory interdependence that defines the new twenty-first-century world.
Terrorists otherwise bereft of power have bored into the American imagination, seeding its recesses and crannies with anxieties for which the technicolor terror alert codes are unsettling indicators. Yet in its approach to confronting terrorism, whether prosecuting wars abroad or pursuing security at home, America has conjured the very fear that is terrorism’s principal weapon. Its leaders pursue a reckless militancy aimed at establishing an American empire of fear more awesome than any the terrorists can conceive. Promising to disarm every adversary, to deploy “the mother of all bombs” and remove the taboo against the tactical use of nuclear weapons, to shock and awe enemies and friends alike into global submission, the beacon of democracy the world once most admired has abruptly become the maker of war the world most fears.1
Some may think this is all to the good. The issue for America and the world alike is not only whether America can deploy new strategies of preventive war and still stay true to its defining democratic values, and hence remain on affectionate terms with its global neighbors; it is whether these strategies can actually succeed in securing it against terrorism. No nation can be expected to sacrifice its safety on the altar of its nobler aspirations. Machiavelli taught the Prince it was better to be feared than loved. America may have drawn from 9/11 the same lesson. But is fear America’s best ally? Are Afghanistan and Iraq to become benchmarks for a successful global strategy of security through intimidation?
Not in an era of interdependence. Not when going it alone invites failure. Not when terrorism has exposed the frailty of sovereignty and the obsolescence of once proud declarations of independence. If 9/11 teaches a lesson about fear’s potency, it also tells a story of the insufficiencies of military power. If the techno-blitzkrieg in Iraq teaches a lesson about military power’s enduring relevance, it also tells a story of its limits as an instrument of democratization. Yet in responding to terrorism’s disregard for national frontiers, the United States has reached for increasingly obsolete military strategies associated with a traditional sovereignty it no longer fully possesses. Seeking a safer world, it has systematically undermined collective security. Reacting to global lawlessness, the nation has vacillated between appealing to law and undermining it, between employing international institutions and defying them. It has invoked a right to unilateral action, preventive war, and regime change that undermines the international framework of cooperation and law of which it was once the chief architect—when this framework, alone, can overcome terrorist anarchy. President Bush’s war on terrorism may or may not be just, may or may not conform to American values, but more important, in the form it has been pursued, its military successes notwithstanding, it cannot and will not defeat terrorism.
From the plague of HIV to global warming, from global media monopolies to international crime syndicates, every emerging feature of the interdependent world calls for America to look outward; instead, it blinks and turns inward, gazing overseas only to fix its baleful eye on “enemy” targets defined by an elusive war on terrorism and quixotically selected “rogue states” meant to stand in for terrorists too difficult to locate and destroy. Although it is the “model” democratic society, America often acts with plutocratic disdain for the demands of global equality, condemning a shadowy “axis of evil” while ignoring an all too visible axis of inequality. It has elected to pursue a national security strategy of preventive war under conditions that cry out for a national security strategy I call “preventive democracy.” Although it is the emblematic multicultural nation, it shows little patience for cultural diversity or religious heterogeneity, especially where they appear to threaten American ideals or to lie outside the compass of the American imagination. It believes that, even as it continues to support dictatorship in nations it regards as friends, it can impose democracy on vanquished enemies at the barrel of a gun. It thinks privatized markets and aggressive consumerism freed of democratic constraints are what it means to forge democracy; it believes others can establish democracy overnight by importing American institutions it took centuries to nurture and grow in the United States. America’s current foreign policies for war and for peace, for overthrowing tyranny and for establishing democracy, rest on a defective understanding of the consequences of interdependence and the character of democracy. Thus does fear’s empire produce an empire of fear inimical to both liberty and security.
American militancy is reflected in and perhaps exacerbated by President Bush’s missionary zeal in prosecuting the war on terror—a kind of High Noon cowboy righteousness that even friends of the White House have associated with the president’s tendencies to be “impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill-informed.”2 But the American response to terrorism is more than just a question of presidential temper. Americans generally choose representative commanders in chief who reflect their own anxieties and aspirations at a given moment in history. Both national parties and leading opinion elites have supported the idea that fear can only be defeated by fearsomeness. While the world trembles, Americans release their own cold fear in shivers of applause for a militant Americanism punctuated by “USA! USA!”
The world beyond America always used to be more than a world away. With it crowding America’s doorstep today, Americans gather nervously in the parlor hoping they can secure their safety by locking the doors and thrusting their intimidating smart weapons out of well-secured gunports. Fearful of the otherness of the world, and oddly oblivious to the fact that they embody that otherness in their own diversity, they look to coerce hostile parts of the planet into submission with a strong-willed militancy. Friends and allies follow along reluctantly because America’s power is not to be denied, even where the realities of interdependence mean it is unlikely to triumph.
America’s world has then become a place far more perilous and perplexing than Americans have ever known before—a puzzling new world of doubt and danger, a world nominally pledged to the democracy Americans believe they embody, but a world no longer always willing to believe America’s claim to embody it. Feeling less than trusted and too little loved by that world, Americans may intervene more but trust it little and love it less in return. The useful myths (they once functioned as verities) by which the last century’s costly hot and cold wars were bravely fought and decisively won—American autonomy, American virtue, American democracy, and American innocence—are reasserted with patriotic ardor at home, even as they are deemed hollow and hypocritical abroad. America’s world is no longer America’s world. It is at risk of becoming at once a willing colony and the capital of fear’s spreading empire.
AMERICAN HEGEMONY IS not in question. After all, “the military, economic and political power of the United States makes the rest of the world look Lilliputian.”3 It is, Michael Ignatieff reminds us, “the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean, guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.”4 Walter Russell Mead raises the ante still further: “The United States,” he writes, admiringly, “is not only the sole global power, its values inform a global consensus, and it dominates to an unprecedented degree the formation of the first truly global civilization our planet has known.”5
Spending more on its military budget ($350 billion and climbing, not including the costs of the war with Iraq) than the next fifteen or so defense high spenders put together (all of America’s allies together spend less than $220 million), and deploying high-tech armaments no nation can match, America can crush those nations it regards as enemies almost at will. Picking off a random terrorist with a missile fired from an unmanned Predator aircraft in a no-name desert here, bringing down an unfriendly regime by military intimidation there, prepared to go to war on a “preventive” basis well before an actual act of aggression is committed against America most anywhere, the United States is a formidable adversary. Having helped bring down the Soviet Union by exhausting it in an arms race, and then having used its own weapons to defeat conventional ones in Afghanistan and Iraq in wars so lopsided they scarcely deserve the name, it knows it is without military peers in the manufacture, deployment, and use of armaments, including those awesome weapons of mass destruction it has decided its potential enemies cannot be permitted to develop. No wonder President Bush thinks that if Americans have to, they can prevail even if they are “the only ones left”—a willing coalition of one.
Yet its power makes the United States weak even as it makes it strong, leaving it unloved by those it “saves” (South Korea has shown little more affection for the United States recently than its enemy to the north), resented by its allies (the 2002 German election was won by a candidate who came from behind in the polls by categorically refusing to support America’s polices in Iraq), and despised even more than it is feared by those it effects to conquer (a belligerent North Korea; an ambivalent, sometimes sullen Iraq that did not—as it was supposed to—altogether welcome the U.S. invasion). In its unprecedented power lies an unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to preserve what it already has, and so is almost by definition always overextended. “To secure my turf,” noted the powerful landholder, “all I need is the land adjacent to my own.” It must count as friends all who pretend not to be its enemies, so that its allies are more often the enemies of its enemies rather than its real friends. To be opposed to the United States is to belong to, if not the axis of evil, at least to the bad guys; to support the United States is to be a good guy, even if the supportive regime is authoritarian or even tyrannical, as in the case of close American friends and allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Zimbawe. It is hardly a wonder then that the United States obsesses over minor league rogue states like Libya, Somalia, Cuba, and Iraq, whose threat to American interests, even when magnified by interdependence, is nominal. It has the resources to field military forces around the globe and to fight several wars at once, but it cannot protect its own headquarters at the Pentagon or the cathedral of capitalism in Manhattan because interdependence permits the weak to use the forces of the strong jujitsu style to overcome them. Fear is terrorism’s only weapon, but fear is a far more potent weapon against those who live in hope and prosperity than those who live in despair with nothing to lose.
Moreover, because the nearly invisible, highly mobile agents that oversee terrorism are not nation-states and can melt away and reappear in multiple venues, they are little affected by America’s vaunted military might. The United States can strike down whole nations, but terrorist cells and their ever-morphing leaders are left standing. They know that fear is their ally: in the words of Anwar Aziz, who was an early suicide bomber in Gaza in 1993, “battles for Islam are won not through the gun but by striking fear into the enemy’s heart.”6 And even were they to fear death, what have terrorists to fear from armies that cannot find them? Donald Rumsfeld, as enthusiastic a proponent of preventive war as America has produced, worries about the elusiveness of terrorist cells. “The people who do this don’t lose, don’t have high-value targets,” he acknowledges. “They have networks and fanaticism.”7 Why then, one might ask, are we to believe that counterstate preventive war strategy can ever really work against terrorism, even when it “works” to punish or modify unfriendly regimes?
Even as America tries to secure itself against terrorism (one form of the new global anarchy) through sovereign dominion, the international market economy (another form of the new global anarchy) eats away at the very idea of sovereignty. Although it has made its world over in its own image, the United States is hard-pressed to control its own economy because interdependence permits capital, jobs, and investment to move where they will—American sovereignty notwithstanding. America can spread a pop cultural civilization of movies, music, software, fast food, and information technology across the world until the world is reborn as McWorld, but it cannot control the blowback that is Jihad: for interdependence gives to Jihad means to confront McWorld (global terrorism!) no less impressive than the means McWorld possesses to confront Jihad (global markets!). Indeed, they are, in one sense, the very same means in that both are founded on a global anarchy that both promote.8
There are multiple pressure points where American hegemony and global interdependence can be found colliding. These include the disturbing inequalities of the north/south divide, the anarchic marketization of the global economy, and the pervasive homogenization of cultures that has followed the spread of McWorld. But no point of collision has been more dramatic or more perilous than the one disclosed by evolving American strategic doctrine.
Terrorism’s successes pose in brutal terms to America and the world straightforward questions: Can the United States really remedy the pathologies of a global interdependence it helped create, and which has eroded the sovereignty on which it depends, by deploying the traditional strategies of the sovereign state—above all, overweening military power in the supposedly innovative form of preventive war? Can the old regimes born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contend with the globalized malevolence they have inadvertently helped to create—without first creating benevolent forms of interdependence that replace global disorder with lawful order? Can international governance come about through the anarchic processes of markets and war? Can fear defeat fear? Can a politics of nation-states (America vs. Iraq, South Korea vs. North Korea, Palestine vs. Israel) contend with a world comprised more and more by a wide variety of nonstate actors (al-Qaeda, Shell, Greenpeace, OPEC, Bertelsmann, Hezbollah)?
His country under attack from what was, in effect, a terrorist nongovernmental organization (al-Qaeda), President Bush sought vengeance on “states that harbored terrorism.” This impelled him into a strategy that targeted Afghanistan and then Iraq (and perhaps in time North Korea and Syria and Iran), even as terrorists moved freely from Afghanistan to Yemen and Sudan; from the unruly and ungovernable mountain provinces of Afghanistan to the unruly and ungovernable provinces of Pakistan; from the Middle East to Africa and Southeast Asia, to Indonesia and the Philippines. In fact, ironically enough, as America and Europe exported their forces to confront terrorism in the Third World, Third World terrorists have continued to roost in England and Germany and in New England and New Jersey and Florida as well. Such states too must be counted (though obviously he did not) among those harboring terrorists on whom President Bush promised to wreak a terrible vengeance. (To date, New Jersey and Florida are not on the hit list—although some would argue that the encroachment of homeland security and the Patriot Act on civil liberties within the United States has effectively put them there.)
Yet while terrorism appears an impressive display of brute power, it is in fact a strategy of fear rather than force, of weakness rather than strength. Donald Rumsfeld likes to quote Al Capone’s lines about how “you will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone,” but in doing so he is playing the terrorist’s game on the terrorists’ turf. Indeed, because fear is terrorism’s only weapon, the terrorist’s primary job (as with an infectious agent) is merely to initiate the contagion. The contaminated body’s immune system does the rest as the body struggles to neutralize the infection by making war on its own infected systems. Hence, the American government was compelled to close down its commercial aviation system for a number of days and hem it in with crippling security provisions more or less permanently in response to the 9/11 hijackings.9 The aviation industry has been in shock ever since. The hijackers closed down the stock market not only by destroying facilities in the World Trade Center but by inspiring fear—a kind of speculative immune reaction to the attacks, doing its own damage more effectively than al-Qaeda could have. The stock market has yet to recover. Before the war in Iraq began, the government closed off pedestrian access in front of the White House and, with unintended irony, walled in the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
Terrorism’s strategic jujitsu cannot win other than by leveraging others into losing, overcoming them by dint of their own forceful momentum. The diabolical intelligence behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks was evident in the crude but demonically imaginative use of passenger planes as lethal firebombs by men armed otherwise only with box cutters. It is even more visible a year or two later in the way Americans anxiously watch their own government’s color-coded signals announcing today’s levels of risk to determine how safe they are supposed to feel—and feeling deeply unsafe precisely because their level of fear is now color-coded for them. One might ask whether any terrorist can have spread fear more effectively than the American government inadvertently has done as it dutifully passes on random threats against unspecified targets and warns that further attacks are a virtual certainty. When the terror alert was once again raised to “high” in spring 2003 following terrorist attacks in Riyadh and Casablanca (despite the “victory” against terrorism supposedly represented by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein), a “knowledgeable U.S. official” warned that the so-called intelligence chatter and intercepted messages contained “reasonably spooky stuff,” Halloween in May.10
Terrorism can induce a country to scare itself into a kind of paralysis. It disempowers the powerful by provoking an anxiety that disables capacity. It turns active citizens into fretful spectators. There is nothing more conducive to fear than inaction. Take, for example, the anthrax scare in the United States a few weeks after 9/11. Anthrax itself, although it cost five precious lives, did minimal systemic damage. Indeed, it was probably the work of a disgruntled American laboratory employee rather than a foreign terrorist. But because it involved the universal postal service system, the threat generated a nationwide fear that devastated the country’s collective sense of security.
Names can contribute to the sense of fear. There is even something slippery and distracting in the term weapons of mass destruction (WMD), since the phrase passes easily from the certain and widely recognized mass devastation associated with nuclear weapons to the far less predictable outcomes associated with biological and chemical weapons. The 1995 sarin attack launched by the Japanese terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo in the Tokyo subway was technically a chemical weapons attack and hence to be classified as a “weapons of mass destruction” incident. Though thousands were affected, only twelve people perished, and commentators have since noted that this attack demonstrated the extraordinary difficulties of using chemical weapons even in closed spaces like subway systems. The anthrax incidents in the United States affecting U.S. post offices, broadcast studios, and government offices were biological attacks—instances of “weapons of mass destruction” at work. But while they certainly spread fear far and wide (in part because of how they were depicted by the government and the pandering media), actual casualties were minimal. Is it really useful to regard such incidents as instances of the deployment of weapons of mass destruction (recently modified to read “weapons of mass terror” by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz)? Surely “conventional” weapons—including napalm, cluster bombs, and land mines—have taken far more civilian lives in earlier conflicts (though the United States is not even a signatory to the International Land Mine Ban Treaty).11
Could it be that the intention of the new term weapons of mass destruction is less to create a coherent new military classification than to reinforce a strained logic of preventive war so that it can be applied to sovereign states rather than terrorist organizations—states that do not yet have the nuclear weapons that might justify preventive interdiction? (That is, if the possible presence of such weapons, as in North Korea,12 did not make such interdiction too costly.)13 Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, has noted that Syria, Egypt, Turkey, and Algeria are all potential developers of nuclear weapons in that part of the world, while Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are capable of doing so in Asia.14
In fact, the term weapons of mass destruction was used as early as 1937 to refer to Germany’s new bombing techniques in the Spanish Civil War, and became closely associated with “atomic bombs and similar weapons of mass destruction” immediately after World War II.15 Throughout the Cold War, it was used to refer to nuclear (plutonium) and thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs. The use of chemical agents like mustard gas, on the other hand, has been a threat since World War I, and is of course the subject of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Convention—about which, despite its constant references to WMD, the United States been remarkably ambivalent, unhappy with inspection provisions that might encroach on American sovereignty. Only after 9/11 has the term weapons of mass destruction been used to elide the differences between the original nuclear and thermonuclear weapons of mass destruction and biological and chemical agents which have historically never exacted the casualties associated with conventional bombing (cluster bombs or napalm, for example) or even land mines. Indeed, prior to 9/11, “as of July 1999, the largest number of casualties in a single terrorist incident were the 329 passengers killed in the explosion of an Air India jumbo jet off the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985,”16 while so-called weapons of mass destruction used in terrorist attacks (as against in war) have resulted in even more limited losses. This may be why the American Dialect Society selected weapons of mass destruction as its 2002 “word of the year,” ratifying its status as a widely used but “long-winded phrase whose meaning reflects a nation’s worry about war with Iraq.”17
Saddam Hussein may have been trying to acquire nuclear weapons (as are many other nations, including such Middle Eastern adversaries of America as Syria and Iran), but he almost certainly had, and in the past unquestionably used, biological and chemical weapons. This was the brunt of Colin Powell’s evidence presented to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003.18 Yet the term WMD implies that to have and use biochemical weapons is tantamount to having and using nuclear weapons. Possessing laboratory anthrax strains (provided at least in part by the United States in the 1980s when Saddam was America’s “friend” in the war against Iran)19 is no different under the loose logic of WMD than possessing thermonuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles.20A slippery slope, indeed, leading to dangerously wayward conclusions.
When the U.S. government incorporates biological and chemical agents into the category of WMD—perhaps in order to justify the war with Iraq or insure itself against those who might one day blame it for not giving Americans fair warning against the risks of a homeland incident—it actually magnifies the danger and enhances the fear. Terror succeeds in what it promises rather than in what it actually achieves, and so turns the effort to defend against it into its chief tool. Code the danger levels! Arrest every two-bit felon and call him a terrorist! Publicize vague threats! Label the war against it “unending”! Bring down Saddam as a WMD-addict, even if no weapons can be found! The terrorist can sit in a mountain cave or a Karachi slum and watch his enemies self-destruct around the initial fear he has seeded with a single and singular act of terror or with a few well-chosen follow-up threats that need not be made good on but which can be spread worldwide on a five-dollar tape made available to the cooperative global media. A bomb in Bali or Casablanca? The tourists stay home. An explosion in Kenya? Israelis suddenly feel as at risk abroad as they are in Tel Aviv. Some American school somewhere possibly vulnerable to an attack? Parents keep kids home or send them to school in a state of permanent anxiety. Anthrax in a television studio? American news anchors spread their own fear to a nation of fearful viewers (scare the opinion makers and they will scare everyone else for you). And so it goes: American troops rehearsing for war in Iraq on television wearing scary space age antigas and antibacteriological gear they would never actually be required to wear and being immunized against smallpox and other toxic agents to which they were never exposed in an exercise which, though calculated to increase their combat readiness in an era of weapons of mass destruction, could only exacerbate rather than assuage their fears; government escalating the “terror level” from yellow to orange a few weeks prior to the assault on Iraq, then back to yellow with the war over, then up and back again, giving Americans no specific information but provoking quasi-hysterical behavior, including people wrapping their suburban homes in plastic sheeting, a run on duct tape (to seal off windows) and bottled water, and mothers purchasing gas masks for their two year olds. How such measures do anything other than catalyze the very fears terrorists wish to inspire is unclear. What is clear is that men who are otherwise powerless can manipulate the governments and mass media of their powerful enemies so that their adversaries do the greater part of their work for them.
In the same fashion, a single maritime attack on a tanker can raise the prospect of environmentally cataclysmic oil spills from hundreds of other ships that will never actually come under attack. The U.S. Coast Guard is now tracking several hundred “flag of convenience” cargo vessels that just might be linked to terrorism—a good thing for security, but a process that can only strike fear into the tens of millions of Americans living in America’s great port cities. Fear is terrorism’s tool and catalyst, the multiplier and amplifier of actual terrorist events that on the global scale are few and far between and, while devastating to those directly affected, are of less statistical consequence than say a year’s traffic fatalities or the mundane tragedies of people falling off ladders at home.
President Bush declared war on terrorism and everything he has done since September 11, 2001, seems tethered to that fateful day’s events. As Peter Boyer has written, in response “Rumsfeld wanted an unconventional war . . . and it would come as close as a Western nation can come to answering terrorism in kind.”21 Yet it is not terrorism but fear that is the enemy, and in the end, fear will not defeat fear. Fear’s empire leaves no room for democracy, while democracy refuses to make room for fear. In free societies, Franklin Roosevelt reminded us, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Free women and men engaged in governing themselves are far less vulnerable to fear than are spectators, passively watching their anxious governments try to intimidate others. Preventive war will not in the end prevent terrorism; only preventive democracy can do that.