Opportunity Lost: Zones of War and the War on Terror

Abstract

The events of 9/11 provided the United States, and indeed the international community as a whole, with a unique opportunity to begin to shape a new world order to enhance global security in addition to the American 'homeland'. What had been framed as a moral problem within a discourse of humanitarian intervention to deal with a growing list of 'failed states', was now a strategic issue in which the security of the core was linked with that of the periphery via the demonstrated ability of al-Qaeda to establish a foothold in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Unfortunately, that opportunity has not been taken by the Bush Administration. Whether it still exists remains an open question, but there is little doubt that the window is closing fast. This paper is divided into three parts. First, I elaborate the distinction between core and periphery that was a central metaphor for the post-cold war period among many commentators. Second, I trace the shift in US foreign policy from Bush's 'new realism' to 'nation-building' after 9/11. Finally, I suggest that the key failing of this change in American grand strategy not, as is sometimes claimed, the substitution of multilateralism and containment by allegedly novel forms of unilateralism and military pre-emption, but rather the United States' simultaneous support for nation-building and a neoliberal foreign economic policy designed explicity to weaken the state in the periphery