No, America Has Not (Thank God)

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The contrast with radical Islamic terrorism could hardly be more pronounced. Al-Qaeda controls not a single state. Leaders of every nation in the Muslim world loathe al-Qaeda's tenets, for the very good reason that they threaten those leaders' power. Though there is certainly a network of al-Qaeda sympathizers in the West, radical Islam has been unable to proselytize outside a very limited core of religious fanatics. Compared with the military power of Soviet communism, Islamic terrorists are a raggle-taggle army on the run. To revise our national priorities fundamentally in response to the terrorists pays them more respect than they deserve.

In fact, a foreign policy shaped by the war on terrorism would serve America poorly. The world is full of problems that need American resourcefulness: the rise of China, the fall of Japan, Europe's crisis of self-confidence, economic turmoil in Latin America. Policies designed to combat terrorism have nothing to offer such cases, yet any one of them may have more of an impact on our future than Sept. 11. If the U.S. takes terrorism as a simple guide to complex situations, it will often fall into error. It is, for example, natural for Americans to sympathize with Israelis--fellow sufferers from terrorism. But it is false to imagine that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with its roots in competing claims to the same real estate, can be solved solely by asking who is a terrorist and who is a victim.

In the end, I suspect, the war on terrorism will look nothing like World War II or the cold war but rather like the 50-year fight to end the Atlantic slave trade in the first half of the 19th century. That was a priority for many nations, but it never defined the national interest of any one of them. The occasional use of military power against slavers--usually by Britain's Royal Navy, which held a position like that now enjoyed by U.S. forces--was important to the cause. But so were moral persuasion, multilateral diplomacy, economic development and bribes. All will prove useful in defeating terrorism.

Ending the slave trade was a noble undertaking. So is the war on terrorism. But we cannot allow it to define who we are or to shape all the ways in which we act in the world. If we do so--to use the old refrain--the terrorists really will have won.