Attention must be paid
America's message: `You're either with us or you're not'
The United States had one foreign policy before the terrorists struck. Now it has another. Literally overnight, building a global coalition against terrorism shot to the forefront of American decision making. "September 11 changed everything," says a senior State Department official. "This is issue No. 1 for now and a long time to come."
Washington, in effect, was laying down new foreign-policy ground rules on the fly. On a long flight home from Peru in the hours after the attacks, Colin Powell and his aides began hashing out a diplomatic response. The next day at the White House, the secretary of state presented George W. Bush the idea of forging a global alliance against terror, and the president embraced it. The formulation that emerged is every bit as ambitious as his father's Gulf War coalition against Iraq. The United States intends not only to target terrorist groups but also to punish states found to be assisting the militants. The Pentagon advocated toppling regimes that give terrorists sanctuary and succor.
What had been Bush's chief security goal--missile defense, a concept that would have done nothing to curb last week's carnage--now takes a back seat. Many in Congress will prefer emergency funding for counterterrorism, domestic security, and intelligence.
Lining up friends. The shift in strategy got off to a fast start. The United Nations Security Council unanimously condemned the attacks as a threat to peace. NATO declared its support for America's position. In addition, the pursuit of terrorists and their backers could lead to surprising geopolitical alignments.
Osama bin Laden, the terrorist leader considered the prime suspect in the U.S. attacks, has plenty of potent enemies, including Russia, India, and China. Russia believes his al Qaeda organization is sending mujahideen into battle beside Chechen separatists against Russian troops. Pakistani militants trained by bin Laden are trying to retake Indian-held Kashmir. And China suspects bin Laden is training and supplying Muslim separatists in its Xinjiang province. The political isolation of bin Laden's host and patron, the fundamentalist Taliban of Afghanistan, makes a once unthinkable alliance against terrorism especially plausible. Except for Pakistan, the Taliban are virtually friendless in their region.
U.S. officials and analysts alike describe last week's attacks as a defining moment in America's foreign relationships, particularly in the Middle East. As Bush and Powell worked the phones, their message--as described by a senior State Department official--was, "You're either with us or you're not, and we'll design our policy toward you accordingly." The administration asked for quick doses of intelligence on terror groups. "Winks and nods" toward terrorists, says one U.S. official, "aren't going to be tolerated anymore."
If the United States is to "lead the world to victory" in a war on terror, as Bush vowed, it will need many supporters. "We cannot solve this problem alone, however powerful we are," cautions James Steinberg, a former deputy national security adviser now at the Brookings Institution. Jordan, for example, exposed a bin Laden-linked plot to blow up American-owned hotels in Amman in 1999, and Arab intelligence services have managed to penetrate bin Laden's network in ways the United States has not.
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