By Fareed Zakaria Newsweek, October 23, 2000, U.S. Edition

The New Twilight Struggle
America is now Goliath, facing many Davids--enemies who use stealth, speed and suicide to draw blood. What we can do.

By Fareed Zakaria Newsweek, October 23, 2000, U.S. Edition

Over the last decade America has had a surprisingly easy time as the global superpower. The backlash has been almost comic. A few hundred Frenchmen brandishing chunks of smelly cheese outside a McDonald's; Yuppie protesters in Seattle chanting old civil-rights songs; Malaysia's strongman, Mahathir Mohamad, lecturing Washington on human rights. But last week the pictures got a lot uglier--ships bombed, planes hijacked, embassies closed or evacuated. Terrorism might represent the new price of hegemony--one that is likely to grow over time.

Call it the David problem. The military calls it asymmetrical warfare. American military power is unprecedented in history. We spend more on defense than the next five great powers put together. An ongoing technological revolution will lengthen that lead over the next few decades. So what's a frustrated enemy to do? Strike Goliath with a slingshot. Use stealth, speed and sometimes suicide to draw blood--and media attention.

Terrorist attacks generally don't make it to the top of the national-security agenda. Strategists tend to view them as a second-tier problem, better handled by cops than Kissingers. More Americans are killed every year by lightning, they point out, than by terrorists. But several new trends are making these dismissals obsolete and dangerous.

Globalization helps terrorists. Cold-war arsenals are for sale, as are the scientists who built them. Twenty years ago it would have been difficult and expensive to put together explosives that would blow a 40-by-40-foot hole in a modern destroyer. Today, you can get this stuff by mail order. The $500 Global Positioning System that Hertz puts into its new rental cars can be used by terrorists to pinpoint targets. The computer networks used by the American military--or utility companies or the stock exchange--can all be penetrated by teenage hackers. Somebody, for example, gained access to the precise refueling and docking schedules of the USS Cole. And terrorists now have their own formidable networks that have created permanent links between drug cartels, terrorist groups and rogue states.

Grim as the events in Yemen were--horrific for the families of the dead--the larger tragedy hasn't unfolded yet. Were a terrorist organization to do what it did in Yemen but use weapons of mass destruction--chemical, biological or even nuclear--it could result in the greatest loss of American life since the Vietnam War.

The wonder is that it hasn't happened already. Consider these facts, drawn from former national-security adviser AnthonyLake's new book, "Six Nightmares": since 1992 more fissile material (the critical ingredient in making a nuclear bomb) has been stolen from the former Soviet Union than the United States was able to produce in the first three years of the Manhattan Project. Saddam Hussein's government has admitted to producing 2,245 gallons of anthrax, 5,125 gallons of botulinum toxin and four metric tons of chemical weapons during the 1990s. Each of these chemicals could kill billions of people. The botulinum alone could destroy the earth's entire population several times over. Yet since 1998, when U.N. inspectors left Iraq, all these substances--along with many other weapons--remain unaccounted for and in Saddam Hussein's possession.

Smuggling this material into the United States would be easy. Free trade and globalization require the speedy movement of people and goods in and out of the country. We like imports and exports. Border checks tend to be random and rare. Among the Coast Guard there is a joke: the easiest way to smuggle chemical weapons into America would be to put them in a container of illegal drugs.

The American government has spent 10 years planning how to fight two regional wars simultaneously (in the Middle East and the Korean peninsula). We've maintained NATO's capacity to deter a Russian invasion of Europe. We've spent $60 billion researching a missile shield. But the immediate and direct threat to national security is quite different from these exercises in grand strategy. In 1998 the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people. In 1996 the bombing of a U.S. housing complex in Saudi Arabia killed 19 American servicemen. This year it has been the USS Cole. And yet America remains woefully unprepared to deal with this recurring problem. We have not bolstered our intelligence and covert operations. We lack good coordination between law-enforcement and national-security officials. We shrink at the thought of the American government's monitoring people, goods and information more tightly.

But we have to consider moving in all these directions. The new dangers we face require it. We may well be the Goliath of the world. But don't forget it's David, not the giant, who wins in that story.

America's New World Disorder
Of course terrorism has existed forever, but 9/11 symbolized a new reality: the democratization of violence on a large scale

By Fareed Zakaria Newsweek, September 15, 2003, U.S. Edition

Since September 11th, the world has speeded up. The once glacial pace of international affairs--symbolized by the never-ending U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations--has been replaced by constant turmoil.

Consider recent events: the U.N. headquarters and then the main Shiite mosque in Iraq are bombed; Hamas and Israel declare all-out war; the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, resigns; Washington reverses course on Iraq and goes to the United Nations. And that's just in the past three weeks. Terror attacks, diplomatic crises and armed conflict are becoming normal in international relations. Welcome to the new international disorder. When historians look back they will point to certain dominant realities--most obviously terrorism and radical Islam--that have created this post-9/11 world.

The cold war was given form by two forces: one political, one technological. Politically, the defining feature was the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Technologically, it was the rise of nuclear weapons. Together the two defined the age we lived in for half a century. The former explained the long political and ideological struggle between the West and Soviet communism; the latter explained why it never turned violent. Thus no world war, but a cold war.

The day-to-day events of that struggle were a logical result of these broader factors. Because using nuclear weapons was unthinkable, competition took the form of shifts in the correlation of nuclear forces. The arms race became a way to measure who was winning. And since the central battlefield was quiet, both sides helped allies in their local struggles--in other words, proxy wars. Any conflict, no matter how remote (Angola, Nicaragua), was tied back to the central contest between America and the Soviet Union.

What are the realities shaping international life today? On the technological front, September 11th marked our entry into a world of mass terror. Of course terrorism has existed forever, but 9/11 symbolized a new reality: the democratization of violence on a large scale. "Even a few decades ago, if you wanted to kill 3,000 people, you would need to have control of a state," explains Harvard's Stephen Walt. "Today a small group of people can do it. That's a huge difference with huge implications." This means violence is much more likely than it was during the cold war, when deterrence ensured that adversaries could refuse to surrender and yet stay at peace. How do you deter someone whose address you do not know?

September 11th also highlighted a political reality: the struggle between the West and radical Islam. Over the past few decades it has become clear that this one significant movement stands in violent opposition to the modern world. It has waged a civil war within Islam, against the mainstream adherents of the faith. But it has also taken the battle to the masters of modernity, the West, and in particular the United States.

In a previous age, such a movement would have been an irritant. But with new technologies of destruction, it can wage a world war. The religious orientation of the Islamists also breaks down deterrence. How do you deter someone who is willing, indeed eager, to die?

The Bush administration has drawn conclusions about this new world. You have to go on the offensive. Prevention is the only path to security. The concept of preventive action makes a good deal of sense. In today's world you cannot wait until armies are massed across your border, because there will be no armies and the enemy will not wait to be seen. When he strikes it is too late to strike back. (By misapplying the doctrine to Iraq, the administration has muddied a useful strategic concept.)

But the new realities also suggest other paths to security. For one thing, global cooperation is now much easier. Most countries are united in wanting to hunt down terrorists. None has any interest in empowering Al Qaeda. That is why even Libya and Syria have given some help to the United States in its struggle against Osama bin Laden. For hardheaded reasons of self-interest, most countries would join together in a global antiterrorism coalition--if the United States would try to forge one.

You cannot deter Islamic fundamentalists, but you can weaken them. Guerrillas move through the population the way fish swim in the sea, explained Mao Zedong. The surest way to defeat the radicals is to turn the local population against them. Central to the war on terror, then, is a political strategy that appeals to the Muslim mainstream.

Those in the front lines understand this. Gen. David Petraeus, who runs most of northern Iraq, hangs a sign in his headquarters. WE ARE IN A RACE TO WIN OVER THE PEOPLE, IT READS. WHAT HAVE YOU AND YOUR ELEMENT DONE TODAY TO CONTRIBUTE TO VICTORY? It is a question that he might ask of his superiors in Washington.

ASSIGNMENT due Friday Sept 22, 2006:

For each article, write ½ page summary of the main points, and ½ page reaction. Two pages total.