AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY AFTER 9/11:

AN ASSESSMENT

Stephen D. Biddle

April 2005

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FOREWORD

 Grand strategic choices are among the most important decisions senior 

leaders must make. Getting grand strategy right is fundamental to success in 

the Global War on Terrorism. This monograph assesses the grand strategic 

choices presented to the United States since 2001, by evaluating their ability 

to serve our basic national security interests in a post-September 11, 2001 

(9/11), world, and by identifying implications for American policy in the 

coming years. 

 The author, Dr. Stephen Biddle, argues that some of the most important 

of these choices have yet to be made. Policymakers must arrive at a clear 

definition of the enemy and the aim in the War on Terrorism; to date, 

American policy has combined ambitious public statements with ambiguity 

on critical particulars. The ongoing insurgency in Iraq is increasing the 

costs of grand strategic ambiguity to the point where fundamental choices 

can no longer be deferred. 

 The author goes on to present and evaluate two broad alternatives for 

resolving these ambiguities and creating a coherent and logically sufficient 

grand strategy: rollback and containment. Rollback would retain the 

ambitious goals implicit in today’s declaratory policy and accept the cost 

and near-term risk inherent in pursuing them. Containment would settle 

for more modest goals in exchange for lower costs and lower near-term 

risks. Neither alternative dominates the other on analytical grounds―both 

involve serious costs as well as benefits. Most important, the choice between 

them turns on a series of basic value judgments on the acceptability of risk, 

the relationship between near-term and long-term risk, and the ultimate 

degree of security the Nation should seek. 

 These value judgments are political, not analytical, questions: none can 

be resolved by analysis alone. Rather than usurping the responsibility of 

policymakers, the monograph seeks instead to show that a painful choice 

between competing values is increasingly necessary―to illuminate the 

respective strengths and weaknesses of the key alternatives for the benefit 

of those who must choose. 

 The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to offer this monograph as a 

contribution to the national security debate on this important subject.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

STEPHEN D. BIDDLE is Associate Professor of National Security Studies at 

the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute (SSI). Before joining 

SSI in June 2001, he was a member of the political science faculty at the 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has held research positions 

at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in Alexandria, Virginia; the 

Harvard University Center for Science and International Affairs (CSIA); 

and the Kennedy School of Government’s Office of National Security 

Programs; and holds an appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor of 

International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Dr. Biddle has 

presented testimony before congressional committees on Operation IRAQI 

FREEDOM, conventional net assessment, and arms control; served as U.S. 

Representative to the NATO Defense Research Group study on Stable 

Defense; served as a member of the Defense Department Senior Advisory 

Group on Homeland Defense; and is co-director of the Columbia University 

Summer Workshop on the Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy 

(SWAMOS). He is the author of Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat 

in Modern Battle, (Princeton University Press, 2004). His other publications 

include articles in Foreign Affairs, International Security, Survival, The Journal 

of Politics, Security Studies, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Journal of 

Strategic Studies, Contemporary Security Policy, Defense Analysis, and Military 

Operations Research; shorter pieces on military topics in The Wall Street 

Journal, Orbis, Joint Force Quarterly, and Defense News; various chapters 

in edited volumes; and 26 IDA, SSI, and NATO reports. His research has 

won Barchi, Rist, and Impact Prizes from the Military Operations Research 

Society. Dr. Biddle holds AB (1981), MPP (1985), and Ph.D. (Public Policy, 

1992) degrees, all from Harvard University.
v

SUMMARY

 “Grand strategy” integrates military, political, and economic means to 

pursue states’ ultimate objectives in the international system. American 

grand strategy had been in a state of flux prior to 2001, as containment 

of the Soviet Union gave way to a wider range of apparently lesser 

challenges. The 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade towers, 

however, transformed the grand strategy debate and led to a sweeping 

reevaluation of American security policy. It may still be too early to expect 

this reevaluation to have produced a complete or final response to 9/11―

policies as complex as national grand strategy do not change overnight. 

But after 3 years of sustained debate and adaptation, it is reasonable to ask 

what this process has produced so far, and how well the results to date 

serve American interests. 

 The author argues that, heretofore, the grand strategic response to 9/11 

has combined ambitious public statements with vague particulars as to 

the scope of the threat and the end state to be sought. This combination 

of ambition and ambiguity creates important but unresolved tensions in 

American strategy. If the costs are low enough, these tensions are tolerable: 

the United States can avoid making hard choices and instead pursue illdefined goals with limited penalties. But the higher the cost, the harder 

this becomes. And the costs are rising rapidly with the ongoing insurgency 

in Iraq. Eventually something will have to give―the ambiguity in today’s 

grand strategy is fast becoming intolerable. 

 There are two broad alternatives for resolving these ambiguities and 

creating a coherent strategy: rollback and containment. Rollback would 

retain the ambitious goals implicit in today’s declaratory policy and 

accept the cost and near-term risk inherent in pursuing them. These costs 

include a redoubled commitment to nation building in Iraq and elsewhere, 

accelerated onset of great power competition, heightened incentives for 

proliferation, and hence an increased risk of weapons of mass destruction 

(WMD) use by terrorists in the near term. But in exchange, it offers the 

mid-term possibility of rolling the terrorist threat, and hence the ultimate 

danger of WMD use, back to a level below the severity of September 10, 

2001. By contrast, containment would settle for more modest goals in 

exchange for lower costs and lower near-term risks. In particular, it would 

permit America to withdraw from nation building in the Mideast, it would 

slow the onset of great power competition, and it would moderate the 

risk of near-term WMD terrorism. But this retrenchment would leave 

the underlying causes of Islamist terror unassailed, and would therefore 

accept a persistent risk of major terrorist attack for the indefinite future. 
vi

And it could never eliminate entirely the risk of those terrorists acquiring 

WMD; though it might reduce the probability per unit time, by extending 

the duration of the conflict indefinitely it could ultimately increase, not 

decrease, the odds of WMD use on American soil in the longer term. 

 Neither alternative dominates the other on analytical grounds. Both 

involve serious costs as well as benefits. And to resolve these costs and 

benefits requires at least two critical value judgments. Is accepting near-term 

risk for a long-term payoff preferable to the opposite? Rollback tolerates 

higher risk in the near term for a possibly lower cumulative risk in the 

longer term; containment reduces near-term risks but may increase them 

in the longer term. And is high payoff at high risk preferable to a sure thing 

for a smaller payoff? Rollback swings for the fences (it pursues something 

closer to absolute security) at the risk of striking out (catastrophe if we 

fail); containment ensures contact with the ball (lower risk of catastrophic 

failure), but promises only singles in return (it cannot eliminate the threat 

of terror). Neither question is analytically resolvable: the answers turn on 

value judgments, not analytical findings. 

 But though neither is analytically superior, either is defensible―either 

one could, in principle, provide a coherent grand strategy and a sound 

response to the attacks of 9/11. Today, however, we have neither. And the 

result is an incoherent―or at best, incomplete―strategy in which the costs 

of failing to make critical choices are mounting rapidly. The time has come 

to choose.
1

AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY AFTER 9/11:

AN ASSESSMENT

 “Grand strategy” integrates military, political, and economic means to 

pursue states’ ultimate objectives in the international system.1

 American 

grand strategy had been in a state of flux prior to 2001, as containment 

of the Soviet Union gave way to a wider range of apparently lesser 

challenges. The September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks on the Pentagon and the 

World Trade towers, however, transformed the grand strategy debate and 

led to a sweeping reevaluation of American security policy. It may still be 

too early to expect this reevaluation to have produced a complete or final 

response to 9/11―policies as complex as national grand strategy do not 

change overnight. But after 3 years of sustained debate and adaptation, it 

is reasonable to ask what this process has produced so far, and how well 

the results to date serve American interests. 

 One could address this question in many ways. The literature on grand 

strategy after 9/11 is large and diverse, spanning many positions, critiques, 

responses, and approaches.2 The particular approach I adopt below is less 

to respond to these published critiques in detail than it is to consider grand 

strategy from the top down as a response to a series of basic questions: 

What are our interests? What threatens those interests? What end state do 

we seek against that threat, and how quickly must we attain it? And how 

do we interrelate military and nonmilitary means to achieve that end state? 

I then characterize the Government’s answers to those questions to the 

degree that declaratory policy permits―and I assess those answers (and 

thus the policy they represent) in terms of how well or badly they address 

the questions that collectively frame any grand strategy. 

 I argue below that heretofore the Government’s answers to these 

questions have combined ambitious public statements with vague 

particulars as to the scope of the threat and the end state to be sought. This 

combination of ambition and ambiguity creates important but unresolved 

tensions in American strategy. If the costs are low enough, these tensions 

are tolerable: the United States can avoid making hard choices and instead 

pursue ill-defined goals with limited penalties. But the higher the cost, the 

harder this becomes. And the costs are rising rapidly with the ongoing 

insurgency in Iraq. Eventually something will have to give―the ambiguity 

in today’s grand strategy is fast becoming intolerable. 

 There are two broad alternatives for resolving these ambiguities and 

creating a coherent strategy: rollback and containment. Rollback would 

retain the ambitious goals implicit in today’s declaratory policy and 

accept the cost and near-term risk inherent in pursuing them. These costs 

include a redoubled commitment to nation-building in Iraq and elsewhere, 
2

accelerated onset of great power competition, heightened incentives for 

proliferation, and hence an increased risk of weapons of mass destruction 

(WMD) use by terrorists in the near term. But in exchange, it offers the 

mid-term possibility of rolling the terrorist threat, and hence the ultimate 

danger of WMD use, back to a level below the severity of September 10, 

2001. By contrast, containment would settle for more modest goals in 

exchange for lower costs and lower near-term risks. In particular, it would 

permit America to withdraw from nation-building in the Mideast, it 

would slow the onset of great power competition, and it would moderate 

the risk of near-term WMD terrorism. But this retrenchment would leave 

the underlying causes of Islamist terror unassailed, and would therefore 

accept a persistent risk of major terrorist attack for the indefinite future. 

And it could never eliminate entirely the risk of those terrorists acquiring 

WMD; though it might reduce the probability per unit time, by extending 

the duration of the conflict indefinitely it could ultimately increase, not 

decrease, the odds of WMD use on American soil in the longer term. 

 Neither alternative dominates the other on analytical grounds. Both 

involve serious costs as well as benefits. And to resolve these costs and 

benefits requires at least two critical value judgments. Is accepting near-term 

risk for a long-term payoff preferable to the opposite? Rollback tolerates 

higher risk in the near term for a possibly lower cumulative risk in the 

longer term; containment reduces near-term risks but may increase them 

in the longer term. And is high payoff at high risk preferable to a sure thing 

for a smaller payoff? Rollback swings for the fences (it pursues something 

closer to absolute security) at the risk of striking out (catastrophe if we 

fail); containment ensures contact with the ball (lower risk of catastrophic 

failure), but promises only singles in return (it cannot eliminate the threat 

of terror). Neither question is analytically resolvable: the answers turn on 

value judgments, not analytical findings. 

 But though neither is analytically superior, either is defensible―either 

one could, in principle, provide a coherent grand strategy and a sound 

response to the attacks of 9/11. Today, however, we have neither. And the 

result is an incoherent―or at best, incomplete―strategy in which the costs 

of failing to make critical choices are mounting rapidly. 

 My purpose here is not, however, to advocate one over the other. The 

value judgments on which the choice turns are inherently political rather 

than analytical; analysts cannot establish how much security is enough, 

or whether it is best to accept higher near-term risks to lower them in the 

longer term. This is necessarily a responsibility of our elected officials. 

In fact, it is arguably their highest responsibility. Rather than usurping 

this responsibility, I seek instead to show that a painful choice between 

competing values is increasingly necessary, and to illuminate the respective 
3

strengths and weaknesses of the key alternatives for the benefit of those 

who must choose. 

 I do this in six steps. First I outline American interests in the post-9/11 

world. Second, I sketch the range of possible threats to those interests, 

with a particular focus on terrorism and great power competition. Third, 

I address the end state sought with respect to these threats. Fourth, I turn 

to the means for pursuing that end state; in particular, I assess the tensions 

created by ambiguities in threat and end-state definitions for the selection 

of effective means in the War on Terror. I then present rollback and 

containment as alternative approaches to resolving these tensions. Finally, 

I discuss the conclusions and implications for American security policy. 

AMERICAN INTERESTS IN THE POST-9/11 WORLD 

 Although the public discussion of American interests changed 

dramatically with 9/11, the interests themselves have changed little, if at 

all. In particular, security of the homeland and the safety of the American 

population were always vital national interests even before the 2001 attacks. 

As the 1995 Annual Report of the Secretary of Defense put it: 

Since the founding of the Republic, the U.S. Government has always sought 

to secure for its people a set of basic objectives: 

• The protection of their lives and personal safety, both at home 

and abroad. 

• The maintenance of the nation’s sovereignty, political freedoms, 

and independence with its values, institutions, and territory intact. 

• Their material well-being and prosperity.3

Similar phrasings can be found in most pre-9/11 American strategic 

documents; security of the homeland and the population hardly emerged 

as interests in 2001. 

 Conversely, the economic interests embodied in the 1995 list have 

become more muted in the security debate since 2001, as have regional 

stability and the security of key allies, both of which had played prominent 

roles in the pre-9/11 debate. Yet they remain important. Even today, an 

oil embargo, closure of major sea lanes, refugee crises in the Caribbean, 

or domination of key resources by hostile powers would all pose serious 

consequences for America in ways that would all but demand the use 

of American power in response, and none can safely be ruled out as 

possibilities. Just as some interests that drew less attention before 2001 

have now become more salient, so others have become less so―but salience 
4

and importance are not the same thing, and strategists cannot afford to 

overlook more traditional interests or focus too narrowly on some to the 

exclusion of others. The freedom and safety of the American people have 

always been the country’s primary national interests―but they have never 

been the only ones, nor are they today. 

THREATS TO AMERICAN INTERESTS 

 As with American interests, few truly new threats to those interests 

have appeared in the last decade, and few have disappeared. Their relative 

severity has changed (certainly their perceived severity), but the list itself 

has not. 

 Figure 1 illustrates this point with a comparison of threat lists distilled 

from five recent strategic documents: the 1996 and 2002 National Security 

Strategies of the United States, the 1997 and 2001 Quadrennial Defense Reviews, 

and the 2005 National Defense Strategy.

4

 These documents span the preand post-9/11 eras, yet present remarkably similar threat enumerations. 

The 2001 and 2002 articulations merge some previous categories (“rogue 

states” and “peer competitors” in 1996 and 1997, for example, become 

“regional powers” in 2001, “rogue states and regional crises” in 2002, and 

“traditional threats” in 2005), but essentially the same challenges appear in 

some form in almost all the lists. Priorities, obviously, have changed and, 

in particular, “non-traditional” threats now receive much more prominent 

treatment than they did before 2001. But 2001 neither created new threats 

nor eliminated old ones. 

1996 National Security Strategy, 

1997 Quadrennial Defense Review: 2002 National Security Strategy:

• Rogue states • Terrorism

• Ethnic conflict, state failure • Rogue States

• Proliferation • Regional crises

• Peer emergence 

• Terrorism 

• Transnational crime 

2001 Quadrennial Defense Review: 2005 National Defense Strategy:

• Proliferation • Irregular

• Regional powers (esp. Asia) • Catastrophic

• State failure • Disruptive

• Terrorism • Traditional

• Transnational crime 

Figure 1. Threats.
5

 These priorities, moreover, have always been closer to assumptions than 

to analytic findings―both before and after 9/11. A common critique of pre9/11 strategy (especially by analysts who specialized in terrorism studies 

before 2001) is that it paid insufficient attention to threats such as terrorism. 

This critique is less a claim that relative priorities were studied extensively 

but with unsound findings, and more an argument that terrorism simply 

was ignored in favor of attention to other things. But a similar critique could 

now be leveled against post-9/11 strategic thought: with some exceptions, 

the bulk of the post-9/11 literature has simply assumed that terrorism is 

now the nation’s first priority. 

Delimiting the Terrorist Threat.

 As assumptions go, this one is pretty safe. But like many assumptions, 

it leaves important details unexamined. It is one thing, for example, to hold 

that countering terrorism is the first priority, with management of great 

power competition, say, no higher than second. But is it a close second, 

a distant second, or a truly remote second? The difference matters. If 

nonterrorist threats pale to insignificance relative to terrorism, then they 

merit little or no effort in a world of constrained resources―to divert effort 

toward unimportant threats is to incur needless opportunity costs. But if 

great power competition is a close second, then it makes sense to accept 

real cost in the near term as a hedge against its emergence as a priority 

some time in the future. 

 Below I outline some of the ways in which the requirements of 

countering terror and great power competition can conflict with one 

another. But before that can be developed, another striking feature of the 

threat lists in Figure 1 warrants note: they are remarkably unspecific. 

 The lists consist of categories (some quite vague), not names―and 

certainly not relative priorities or severities for the names one might 

associate with the categories. This is fairly typical of peacetime strategy, 

especially in low-threat conditions where war is considered a distant 

possibility and planning centers on preparing for the unknown.5 And 

several of the documents summarized in Figure 1 are of just this nature: 

in 1996 and 1997, war seemed remote and threats were necessarily cast in 

generic terms. 

 In September 2001, however, the President announced that the nation 

was at war―and public statements since then have repeatedly echoed that 

formulation.6 Yet the nation’s key strategic documents have continued to 

treat threats in the same generic, unspecific, peacetime-like sense that they 

had done prior to 2001. 
6

 This lack of threat specificity makes true strategic thought difficult. 

Wartime strategy is normally concerned with identifying enemy 

weaknesses or centers of gravity and crafting a design to strike at them. 

Weaknesses and strengths are specific to the parties, however―no two 

actors are identical. Sun Tzu’s oft-cited injunction to know one’s enemy 

is all about the need to fit one’s strategy to the particulars of one’s enemy 

and his specific vulnerabilities.7 This is impossible when official strategic 

documents do not identify the enemy but instead frame policy in terms of 

broad categories of challenge-types without naming actual challengers.8

How can one craft a strategy to exploit an enemy’s weaknesses without 

knowing who the enemy is?9

 For some of the threat categories in Figure 1, this imprecision is 

nettlesome but tolerable―the enemy actors are reasonably clear, if implicit. 

“Rogue states” for example, presumably include the standard list of 

aggressive regional powers (e.g. Baathist Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya, 

and so on). But for others, this lack of specificity is more problematic. This 

is especially true for terrorism and great power competition. 

 Terrorism, after all, is a tactic, not an enemy. Taken literally, a “war 

on terrorism” is closer to a “war on strategic bombing” or a “war on 

amphibious assault” than it is to orthodox war aims or wartime grand 

strategies; one normally makes war on an enemy, not a method. Nor can 

one simply assume that anyone who uses terrorist tactics is to be the target 

of American war making. “Terrorism” is a diverse tactic, used by many 

groups in many ways to serve many different political agendas. Many 

of these groups and agendas pose no immediate threat to Americans. In 

fact, prior to 2001, it was rare for Americans to be killed by international 

terrorists. The most lethal terrorist groups of 1960-97, for example, were 

Aum Shinrikyo, the Tamil Tigers, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the 

Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and Islamic Jihad―none of which 

deliberately targeted Americans.10 A war that encompassed literally any 

group using terrorist tactics would be impossibly broad, engulfing a wide 

range of groups posing no meaningful threat to America. 

 Terrorism per se thus cannot be the enemy. But it is far from clear 

exactly who the enemy is. The administration has made some effort to 

delimit the problem by adding the phrase “of global reach.” This is little 

help, however. In a globalized world, any terrorist with an airline ticket or 

an internet service provider has “global reach.” 

 Official statements do little to narrow the focus. Many suppose that the 

real enemy is al Qaeda, and that “terrorism” is little more than a rhetorical 

synonym for Osama bin Laden’s organization. Yet the administration has 

explicitly, and repeatedly, made clear that this is not their view. Though 
7

the details revealed to date are ambiguous, it is clear that the declaratory 

policy of the U.S. Government defines the enemy more broadly than just al 

Qaeda. 

 The September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, for 

example, explicitly declines to narrow the definition of the enemy: “The 

enemy is not a single political regime, or person, or religion, or ideology. 

The enemy is terrorism.”11 As the Secretary of Defense put it in a formal 

address to the North Atlantic Council: “al Qaeda is not the only terrorist 

network that threatens us.”12 Similarly, former National Security Advisor 

Condoleeza Rice stated, in remarks to the Conservative Political Action 

Conference, “[T]here is no such thing as a good terrorist and a bad terrorist. 

You cannot condemn al Qaeda and hug Hamas.”13 The President himself, 

in his Address to the Joint Session of Congress in the immediate aftermath 

of the 9/11 attacks, said “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it 

does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global 

reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”14

 Declaratory policy thus establishes a lower bound on the definition of 

the enemy: it is more than just al Qaeda. The upper bound, however, is much 

less clear: how many other terrorist groups are included? The United States 

has already deployed troops and conducted military operations against 

some other groups, including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) 

in Afghanistan and Ansar al Islam in Iraq.15 We have deployed advisors 

against, but not yet directly engaged, other groups such as Abu Sayaf in 

the Philippines or the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Columbia (FARC).16

Still others we have denounced but without, to date, deploying advisors or 

initiating hostilities, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, or the IRA; the National 

Security Advisor has explicitly put Hamas in the same threat category as 

al Qaeda, though without, to date, accompanying this with direct military 

action.17 And there are many that we have officially designated as terrorists 

but which seem more distant still from American use of force, such as the 

Israeli militant group, Kahane Chai, the Greek November 17 Organization, 

the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, or the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso.

18 While 

some groups are clearly targets and others seem unlikely to be, many fall 

in a broad grey zone in between, where they are neither clearly within nor 

clearly outside the definition of our enemy in the War on Terror.19

 The unbounded, expansive quality of the threat definition in declaratory 

policy does have certain advantages. The linkages and interconnections 

among shadowy terrorist groups are unclear. Casting the net broadly 

makes it less likely that our war effort will inadvertently exclude important 

allies of al Qaeda whose connection to bin Laden was ambiguous or 

unknown to us. The broader the definition of the enemy, the lower is the 
8

risk of excluding a real threat in an inherently murky domain. A broad 

definition could in principle create common cause with American allies 

facing terror threats of their own (though the exigencies of counterterror 

warfare can also drive wedges between potential state allies: see below). 

And, of course, a broad definition of the enemy is rhetorically helpful: a war 

ostensibly against terrorism at large affords a moral clarity and normative 

power that helps marshal public support for the war effort. Conversely, 

a more discriminating threat definition means accepting or deliberately 

overlooking some terror activity; this could be difficult to justify to the 

public who ultimately must authorize any American war effort. Sound 

grand strategy must provide for public support; an articulation of the 

threat that undermines this is problematic. 

 An unbounded threat definition can also pose serious problems, 

however. Perhaps most important, it risks making unnecessary enemies, 

and unnecessarily expanding the hostile coalition. It does this by creating 

common cause among disparate terrorists and driving together groups 

with very different interests and agendas. Historically, terrorists have had 

great difficulty working together. As illegal organizations, terrorist groups 

are necessarily suspicious of outsiders, and their primary aims are normally 

local and immediate in nature: the IRA wants a Catholic government for 

Northern Ireland; the ETA (the Basque Fatherland and Liberty group) 

wants a separate Basque state on the Iberian peninsula; and Hamas and 

Hezbollah want the establishment of a Palestinian state and the destruction 

of Israel.20 Heretofore, Hamas, the IRA, or the ETA have rarely targeted 

Americans, and have rarely coordinated their actions.21 An American 

declaration of war on “terror,” however, could provide just the common 

cause these (and other) groups have historically lacked. The ETA might 

normally see no reason to risk interaction with al Qaeda, which creates 

a danger of compromise and risks attracting the enmity of al Qaeda’s 

enemies in return for limited benefits in changing Spanish government 

policy. But if America announces to all such groups that the only difference 

we see among them is the order in which we mean to destroy them, then 

we give them a powerful reason to cooperate. Especially for groups with 

greater natural overlap in aims and culture―such as Hamas and al Qaeda, 

for example―repeated American insistence that all are in the cross hairs 

must surely provide an important counterweight to the disincentives they 

would otherwise face for joint action against us. Among the most important 

responsibilities of the grand strategist is to create allies for oneself and 

deny them to one’s opponent. Perhaps the greatest failing of German 

grand strategy in two world wars, for example, was the repeated failure to 

do this, with the result that they twice created hostile coalitions too great 
9

for German power to overcome.22 In a world where the interconnections 

among terrorist groups are ambiguous, a central aim of American strategy 

ought thus to be to drive wedges between these groups wherever possible―

to reduce, not increase, their marginal proclivity for cooperation and joint 

action against us. A broad but unspecific definition of the enemy that 

refuses to exclude any meaningful terror group could easily do just the 

opposite, unifying a polyglot terrorist alliance, and risking self-fulfilling 

prophecy by driving together groups who would otherwise have sat on the 

sidelines rather than making war on distant America.23

Clarifying the Threat of Great Power Competition.

 The threat of great power competition shares some of these difficulties. 

Setting aside the question of which powers may become threats, American 

policy is ambiguous on the nature of the problem itself. 

Military and Nonmilitary Competition. Great power competition, for 

example, can span both military and nonmilitary domains. Military 

competition attracts the most attention, but seems the most remote as a 

threat: few see much danger that a competitor could match U.S. military 

power head-on any time soon.24 Others focus on military challenges but 

emphasize “asymmetric” threats in which competitors (even great powers) 

seek to offset U.S. advantages in conventional mechanized warfare with 

WMD, terrorist attacks, or selected strikes against weak points such as 

ports.25 Yet military competition is only a part of the problem.26

 Diplomacy, for example, offers great powers an important opportunity 

to counter American preponderance. Opposition to U.S. policies in the 

United Nations (UN) can deny America the power of legitimacy in the eyes 

of foreign publics and other world actors. A “legitimacy deficit” is often 

cited as a major challenge to U.S. policy success in Iraq; like it or not, the 

views of transnational institutions such as the UN play a significant role 

in global perceptions of legitimacy, and diplomatic action by other great 

powers can shape such institutions’ policies in ways that can deny the 

United States an important political asset.27 Even without an institution, 

great powers can always deny the United States their bilateral cooperation 

or assistance, making it harder to shift burdens, share costs, or even conduct 

military operations (for example by denying overflight rights to American 

aircraft, transit to American troops, or basing to American forces). 

 Economic means can impose punitive costs on America for short-term 

coercive ends, and weaken America’s long-term competitive position over 

time. Economic issues play an important role in U.S. national security 

interests. Commerce, however, is a two-way street. The same openness and 
10

economic interdependence that America promotes as major foreign policy 

goals also expose the United States to manipulation. Trade partners can 

reduce access to foreign markets. Exchange rates and capital flows can be 

manipulated for coercive ends, or to limit American freedom of maneuver 

internationally. Many, for example, fear that the European Union may 

become an exclusionary trading bloc in a way that would limit American 

access.28 A world of competing regional trade systems would reduce U.S. 

growth and prosperity relative to an open world economy, and this prospect 

could be used strategically to manipulate American policy choices or to 

balance American power. Foreign direct investment and foreign ownership 

of American debt total trillions of dollars: Japan and China alone now hold 

over $870 billion in U.S. Treasury Bonds, and almost 40 percent of the 

American national debt is now held by foreign bond holders.29 Were other 

great powers to use strategically their position as central underwriters of 

U.S. Government debt, the result could be important coercive leverage on 

the United States. The U.S. dollar historically has been the world reserve 

currency, a status that has afforded the United States major economic 

advantages; a strategic shift to the Euro could reduce America’s ability to 

transfer the costs of economic adjustment onto others, and constrain the 

American economy in the long term.30

 Of course, economic coercion imposes costs on both the target and the 

coercer; none of these balancing options are painless for their users. Yet 

the costs are rarely equal, and differences in incurred costs offer important 

leverage for states, both in threatening and in using economic coercion 

against other states.31 In fact, such strategies are extremely common in the 

international system: since 1960, for example, not a single day has passed in 

which the United States has not enforced economic sanctions against some 

other state; between 1980 and 1997, American sanction targets included 

Iraq, Libya, Cuba, Haiti, Yugoslavia, El Salvador, Iran, Panama, Poland, 

and Suriname, among others; sanction threats were used coercively 

against states as powerful as China and Japan.32 In the past year, a coalition 

of European powers used economic coercion to pressure the United 

States into abandoning protections for American steel producers that the 

administration clearly felt were critical politically.33 The West used trade 

restrictions imposed over a generation to constrain Soviet economic growth 

and undermine the long-term economic foundations of Soviet power.34

More broadly, the entire mercantilist school of international political 

economy centers on the strategic use of trade to advance state power and 

undermine rivals; there is a long tradition of strategic manipulation of trade 

relationships in international politics.35 The effectiveness of mercantilist 

trade manipulation is controversial―but it is widely used, and it can 
11

impose serious costs on target states. These costs may not equal Islamist 

terrorism’s, but they are real, they are commonly invoked, and they should 

not be ignored in the grand strategy debate.36

Internal and External Balancing. A second distinction that tends to blur 

in official statements of grand strategy is between internal and external 

balancing as vehicles for great power competition. Internal balancing occurs 

when a state strengthens itself via greater mobilization of resources within 

its own borders, for example, by spending more on defense, improving 

the quality of the materiel purchased through that spending, or fielding a 

larger military. But states can also balance externally, by forming coalitions 

with allies to pool resources against a common enemy.37

 The policy debate tends to focus on internal balancing, and especially the 

prospects for China’s emergence as a peer, “near-peer,” or niche competitor 

of the United States.38 Yet this overlooks the problem of external balancing. 

Not only are the two challenges very different, but the external challenge 

may well be the more threatening to the United States―and especially in 

the near- to mid-term. 

 Internal balancing is, at most, a long-term prospect: no conceivable 

challenger is going to emerge as a peer competitor to the United States any 

time soon. Even for China, few projections see it approaching American 

economic or military power for decades at the soonest, and many see either 

slower growth or diminishing returns as the Chinese economy matures.39

Japan and Germany were once seen as prospective challengers to American 

preeminence; their recent economic and demographic stagnation have 

stilled most such projections. Other candidates for peer status, such as 

India or Brazil, are considerably more distant prospects than China. By 

contrast, external balancing could produce a meaningful challenge much 

more quickly. Even today, a grand coalition of the European Union, Russia, 

and China would command a combined economy larger than America’s, 

and a population more than six times the size of ours. Although its total 

defense expenditure would still be inferior to America’s, China’s combined 

current spending would still be within about 20 percent of ours.40 As China 

develops and as Russia recovers, the potential strength of such a coalition 

could grow over time. But the scale of internal growth needed is much 

smaller―and achievable much more quickly―if such powers are balancing 

externally via coalition rather than internally via domestic mobilization 

alone. 

 Strategic warning is also more available for internal than for external 

balancing threats. Any great power’s transition to peer status produces 

a variety of easily detected long-lead indicators, ranging from economic 

growth to military spending to weapon acquisition to assertive international 
12

behavior. Any of these can be observed well in advance, and would surely 

be noted by American intelligence and the larger foreign policy community. 

Coalition formation, by contrast, can occur quickly and with much less 

warning. The speed of the downward spiral in U.S.-German relations in the 

months prior to the Iraq War in 2003, for example, stunned many observers. 

A historically close U.S. ally became an active opponent of central U.S. 

strategic policy in less than a year; together with similar opposition from 

much of Western Europe, this led to widespread predictions of the “end 

of the West” and anguished reassessments of the future of the Atlantic 

Alliance.41 There is reason to expect this relationship to improve in coming 

years, but the history of pre-Iraq diplomacy in 2003 illustrates the speed 

with which great power realignment can occur, and the degree to which 

such shifts can surprise intelligence services and policymakers. 

 Internal balancing is both expensive and risky for challengers. Not 

only would China need to invest massively in military power for it to 

achieve peer status, the very act of doing so risks bringing on a preventive 

war. Historically, power transitions brought on by the rapid growth of a 

challenger have often spurred threatened hegemons to strike before the 

challenger becomes too strong. In fact, many theorists see this as one of 

the most common causes of great power warfare.42 Even given a benign 

America, arms-racing creates instabilities that raise tensions and could 

trigger war.43 By contrast, external balancing is lower cost and may not 

require balancers to initiate an open arms race with the United States. 

 Finally, internal balancing is chiefly a military challenge. By its own 

efforts, a single challenger can pose a military threat to another; it can even 

threaten some forms of limited economic coercion by holding bilateral 

trade relationships hostage. Either would challenge America where we 

are strongest: our military power is preeminent, and the diversity of 

our trading partners makes us less vulnerable to bilateral coercion than 

smaller or more specialized economies would be. External balancing 

by coalition formation, on the other hand, makes nonmilitary balancing 

much more effective, and could challenge American interests in places of 

greater American vulnerability. Diplomatic pressure, for example, is much 

more powerful if exerted by a united front. Trade restraint or financial 

manipulation is much more painful if a coalition of economies act in 

concert to reduce the target’s access to alternative markets or sources of 

supply.44 The sheer size of the American economy and polity makes us 

less vulnerable to diplomatic or economic pressure than are smaller or 

poorer states, but we are not invulnerable―and our exposure to economic 

or diplomatic coercion may well exceed our military vulnerability for a 

long time to come. For such challenges, external balancing constitutes a 
13

different―and in many ways more demanding―threat than the internal 

balancing that attracts most attention in today’s debate. 

END-STATE AMBITIONS 

 What are our aims with respect to these threats? One could imagine a 

spectrum of possibilities from least to most ambitious. 

Terrorism End States. 

 For terrorism, the least ambitious aim might be just to maintain the 

2005 status quo for attacks against Americans―that is, to avoid letting the 

problem get any worse than it is already, and with little focus on nonAmerican victims. In particular, a minimalist aim might merely seek to 

avoid WMD attacks on the continental United States or a succession of 9/11 

scale events while tolerating any lesser forms of terrorism. At the opposite 

extreme, one could posit a maximalist aim of eliminating all terrorism, of 

any kind, anywhere, against anyone. Between these polar opposites, one 

could then array a variety of intermediate possibilities, such as a global 

return to the low-casualty symbolic terrorism of the 1970s, or any of a 

variety of other points between the bookend extremes of global abolition 

and the 2005 U.S. status quo. 

 Where, within this spectrum, is current American grand strategy? No 

explicit or specific position has been laid down in declaratory policy. Yet 

official statements, where offered to date, have implied extremely ambitious 

goals. 

 The 2003 National Strategy on Combating Terrorism, for example, states: 

“Our goal will be reached when Americans and other civilized people 

around the world can lead their lives free of fear from terrorist attacks.”45

Elsewhere it defines “victory against terrorism” as the attainment of “a 

world in which our children can live free from fear.”46 As Deputy Secretary 

of Defense Paul Wolfowitz put it: “For too many years, the international 

community treated terrorism as an ugly fact of international life, [as] 

something we had to live with . . . We were far from a policy of zero tolerance

for terrorism. September 11th changed all of that.”47 Undersecretary of 

Defense Douglas Feith has argued that terrorism should be eradicated by 

rendering it illegitimate as an undertaking, following the model of “piracy, 

slave trading, and genocide.”48 At face value, such statements imply a war 

aim very close to worldwide eradication of any form of terror―which 

would approach the maximum conceivable end of the spectrum of possible 

ambitions for the War on Terror. 
14

 Yet such statements leave much unsaid. What does “zero tolerance” 

or a life “free of fear” mean in operational terms? Literal eradication of 

a tactic as ancient and widespread as terrorism is surely unlikely. Even 

for the analogies sometimes used to claim that abolition is possible, true 

eradication has been elusive: piracy and slave trading persist in some parts 

of the world, and genocide is practiced all too widely, as Cambodians, 

Rwandans, and Sudanese can attest.49 But if some degree of tolerance 

is inevitable, how much terrorism will the U.S. Government accept? At 

what level can we declare ourselves no longer a “nation at war,” at what 

level can we stand down from $400 billion annual defense budgets, and 

(perhaps most important) how great a reduction in terrorist violence must 

we design our strategy to achieve? 

 These particulars are critical to the formulation of sound strategy (see 

below), but official strategic documents made public to date offer little 

guidance. They are clear in rejecting a minimalist conception; they imply 

great ambition; but they do not delimit that ambition in any way that 

would permit one to know when victory had been achieved, or to exclude 

any given goal as beyond the nation’s war aims. 

 The National Strategy on Combating Terrorism comes closest, holding that 

the desired end state is to reduce terror from a severe, global threat to an 

“unorganized, localized, nonsponsored, rare” phenomenon, restricted to 

particular states and returned exclusively to the “criminal domain.”50 But 

even this guidance remains critically ambiguous. How rare is rare? Even in 

2001, death by terrorism could be considered extremely “rare” as a source 

of morbidity or mortality in the population as a whole: more Americans 

died of peptic ulcers than were killed by terrorists in history’s worst year 

for terrorism against Americans.51 This is still too many deaths, but by how 

many? And what would constitute a terrorism restricted to the “criminal 

domain?” Many, after all, argued that terrorism should be treated as a 

crime rather than an act of war even for the 9/11 attacks; by what standard 

should terror be judged as within or beyond the category of crime? What 

probability of a truck bombing is low enough? Even at the peak of the 

Iraqi insurgency, the odds that any given individual would be killed by 

a truck bomb were vastly lower than the odds that they would not―in 

terror’s worst moments, the objective probability of such events is low by 

many standards. Again, this is not low enough, but what is? In particular, 

is the September 10, 2001, status quo acceptable? Declaratory policy can be 

read to imply that it is not. Pre-9/11 terrorism, after all, was clearly statesponsored, international, and organized, and had been so for decades.52 If 

our aim is as the National Strategy presents it, then the pre-9/11 status quo 

is clearly no longer acceptable, and our policy is to roll this threat back to 
15

a level much lower than obtained well before we declared war on terror in 

2001. But just how far is unclear. 

Great Power Competition End States.

 For great power competition, one could imagine a similar spectrum of 

possible end states. Here, however, the ultimate end state is presumably the 

loss of American unipolar preeminence―the key issue is when and how 

this comes about. Historically, all great powers―even superpowers―have 

eventually declined. No unipolar system has ever been permanent, not the 

Roman Empire, not the Spanish Hapsburgs, not the British Empire. This 

eventual decline may not happen quickly, but sooner or later, one must 

assume that the United States, too, will lose its current predominance. The 

key issue for grand strategy is how quickly this inevitable end is to occur, 

and whether it will be replaced with a bipolar, multipolar, or unipolar 

successor. 

 In these terms, the least ambitious goal for American grand strategy 

today would merely be to ensure that no hostile military superpower 

emerges any time soon. The sheer scale of America’s current advantage 

makes this highly unlikely in any event; to prevent the unlikely and affect 

indifference to the rest would be a plausible and undemanding ambition. 

 At the opposite extreme would be to delay as long as possible even the 

long-term development of any power or potential coalition of powers that 

could challenge any important U.S. interest. Such an ambition has several 

dimensions. Not only must the growth of challengers’ power and influence 

be slowed, but one’s own strength must be maintained (or increased) as long 

as possible. Even without others’ growth, one’s own decline can eventually 

bring about a multipolar end state, as a weakened hegemon declines into 

the range of other great powers. As economic strength is a function of 

domestic as well as international factors, so extending preeminence thus 

involves both domestic and foreign policy considerations, ranging from the 

domestic tax rate to international trade practices. In addition, a wider range 

of interests is potentially involved. Just as great power competition can be 

conducted in the military and the nonmilitary domains, so the preservation 

of unipolar status can involve both military and nonmilitary dimensions: if 

a hostile coalition can exert economic or diplomatic pressures that constrain 

American freedom of action even without threatening American military 

defeat, this would imply an erosion of influence relative to the unipolar 

extreme. 

 U.S. declaratory policy is nearly silent on the desired end state for great 

power competition. Both the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review and the 2002 
16

National Security Strategy imply a concern with the preservation of U.S. 

primacy by averting challenges. But this concern is even less explicitly or 

systematically developed than for the terrorist threat, and there is no explicit 

discussion of long-term goals with respect to great power competition. 

MEANS: COPING WITH AMBIGUOUS ENDS 

 These ambiguities reflect a failure to make critical choices on the basics 

of national grand strategy. This failure would be tolerable if the same means 

served regardless, or if one could pursue multiple ends simultaneously at 

modest cost. But in fact, different ends imply different means, and their 

costs are rising rapidly. We are reaching the point where we can no longer 

afford this degree of ambiguity on our basic strategic purposes. 

Implications of Ambiguity on the Relative Importance of Terrorism 

and Great Power Competition.

 The means one would choose to maximize counterterror effectiveness, 

for example, tend to aggravate great power competition. This is particularly 

problematic for the threat of preemptive war to change the regimes of 

state supporters of terrorism. This threat plays a prominent role in the 

administration’s approach to the War on Terror; the more energetic the 

campaign against terror, the more salient such threats are likely to be, 

and the more such wars are likely to be fought.53 Yet warfare against state 

sponsors of terror can accelerate great power balancing in at least two ways: 

by affecting others’ perceptions of our intent, and by elevating American 

defense expenditure in ways that retard American economic growth. 

 To date, American preponderance has stimulated little real balancing 

from other great powers. Most analysts attribute this to benign perceptions 

of American intent: since others have seen us as a status quo power with 

strongly multilateralist impulses, our strength has been no threat to them, 

and need not be balanced.54 Yet maximum effort against terrorism requires 

American uses of force that have already had major negative effects on 

others’ perceptions of our intent, and more is likely if America continues 

to act as energetically as it has. If the chief determinant of balancing is 

perception of others’ intent, then continued erosion of world perception 

of American intentions can be an important stimulus to great power 

competition, and energetic American use of force against terror has 

proven to be an important catalyst for negative perceptions of American 

intentions. 

 The war in Iraq, for example, had a major effect on world opinion of 

America. Polling data in every major power turned sharply against American 
17

policy with the invasion decision, and has rebounded only slightly since. 

In France, 63 percent of respondents viewed America favorably before 

the invasion of Iraq, but only 31 percent did afterwards. In Germany, a 61 

percent favorable rate dropped to 25; in Britain, 75 fell to 48; in Russia, 61 

fell to 28.55 Elite perceptions are harder to track systematically, but leaders 

whose policies fail to reflect views held as widely (and deeply) as these risk 

replacement: in Spain, for example, the incumbent Aznar government fell 

due in no small part to its unpopular support for American policy in Iraq.56

America’s first counterterror war in Afghanistan proved less damaging 

for popular opinion overseas, but it is unlikely that further invasions 

would enjoy Afghanistan’s level of worldwide support―the clarity of 

Afghanistan’s connection to 9/11, and the war’s proximity to the terror 

attacks themselves are unlikely to be equaled elsewhere.57

 Preemptive warfare also imposes major economic costs. Through 

November 2003, the war in Iraq had been costing an average of around $4 

billion a month; congressional staff now estimate that recent increases in 

combat intensity have increased that figure by 50 percent or more, yielding 

a cost of over $70 billion for the year for Iraq alone.58 The war in Afghanistan 

is projected to add another $8.5 billion for 2004.59 The Congressional 

Budget Office now estimates that the cost of military operations in Iraq 

and Afghanistan could total $179 to nearly $400 billion for the years 2005-

14, in addition to the $100 billion already spent, and the $26 billion they 

expect to be spent in the remainder of 2004, for a total projected cost of up 

to half-a-trillion dollars between 2002 and 2014, and this figure excludes 

reconstruction aid for either country―or the potential cost of any other 

campaigns fought elsewhere between now and 2014.60

 In principle, an economy the size of America’s could accommodate 

such costs. The roughly $80 billion the United States will spend this year 

for warfighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is less than 1 percent of the year’s 

gross domestic product (GDP).61 The entire defense budget now comprises 

less than 5 percent of GDP, or a figure comparable to the late-Cold War 

norm, and well below its Cold War peaks during Korea or Vietnam.62

Sound fiscal policy could surely provide this level of expenditure without 

crippling economic consequences―in principle. 

 Principle and practice can be very different things, however. Since 2001 

the government has systematically failed to provide revenues sufficient 

to cover its costs. The projected U.S. federal budget deficit for FY 2004 

exceeds $470 billion; for the 5 years ending in FY 2009, the cumulative 

projection exceeds $1.4 trillion.63 Neither figure includes likely spending 

for contingencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere. These wars are 

being funded by spending without corresponding taxation. Barring major 

changes in American fiscal policy, large, sustained expenditures for ongoing 
18

preemptive warfare can be expected to create corresponding increases in 

federal budget deficits. 

 Orthodox macroeconomic theory would expect sustained deficits on 

this scale eventually to retard American economic growth.64 Worse, the 

financing for these deficits now comes predominantly from foreign lenders. 

Once the world’s greatest net creditor, the United States is now its greatest 

net debtor.65 As noted above, America’s increasing dependence on foreign 

creditors to fund its deficit spending creates coercive exposure: how would 

America fund its deficit if overseas lenders stopped buying Treasury Bonds? 

Overseas financing of U.S. Government debt also adds to a serious balance 

of payments deficit. Americans import far more goods and services than 

we export, and more capital leaves the country every year than enters it.66

This represents an ongoing net shift of wealth overseas. In the short run, 

this enables Americans to enjoy a higher standard of living than our own 

production can sustain. But in the longer run, it transfers capital, and thus 

productive resources, from America to other great powers. 

 Other things being equal, these economic consequences will hasten the 

loss of American primacy. The macroeconomic effects of large, sustained 

federal deficits can be expected to reduce American growth; together with 

the debt’s effect on a chronic balance of payments deficit, this slowing of 

American growth and accelerated transfer of American resources overseas 

will accelerate the eventual decline of the American economy relative to 

competing great powers’. And America’s growing dependence on foreign 

creditors to fund these deficits creates increasing exposure to economic 

coercion. Robust American growth in the short run may mask these effects, 

and concern with immediate threats may make a focus on the long term 

harder. But near-term policies have long-term consequences, and a central 

responsibility of grand strategy is a concern with the long term rather than 

merely the immediate. In the long term, the economic requirements of 

energetic counterterrorism thus conflict with the needs of averting great 

power competition. 

 Conversely, the policies one would adopt to minimize the risk of great 

power competition tend to conflict with the requirements of energetic 

counterterrorism. A principal means of assuring others of one’s benign 

intent (and thus, of forestalling great power balancing) is multilateralism: 

voluntarily constraining oneself to act within a consensus of other states’ 

views. This voluntary acceptance of constraint signals other powers that 

their interests will be reflected in one’s own behavior, and this, in turn, 

implies that one’s intentions are not fundamentally opposed to others’ 

interests. Even an overwhelmingly powerful state―a hegemon―need not 

be balanced if its use of that power is likely to be consistent with one’s own 
19

interests; multilateralism provides assurances of this via the voluntary 

acceptance of constraint, and thus retards great power balancing.67

 To be meaningful, however, such constraint has to accept real costs―talk 

is cheap, and real assessments of intent thus turn on hard decisions where 

actual self-interest must be sacrificed if consensus is to be maintained.68

This in turn means that meaningful multilateralism requires that the United 

States periodically act in ways that accept real costs to America in order 

to accommodate other great powers’ interests. And the most important 

interests at stake in the international system are the security interests 

embodied in decisions over war and peace. If the United States declines to 

compromise with other great powers over decisions to wage war, this is a 

powerful signal that when push comes to shove, America cannot be relied 

upon to serve interests beyond its own. And if others see their interests and 

America’s as inconsistent, this creates an incentive to balance American 

power as a means of protecting those interests in the clinch.69

 Multilateral restraint in the waging of war can clearly interfere with 

effectiveness of any given counterterror campaign. The administration 

saw the invasion of Iraq as central to its design for the War on Terror; its 

preferences were clearly at odds with those of most other great powers. To 

have compromised in a way that would have signaled others that American 

intentions were not fundamentally in conflict with their own would have 

been to accept a major diversion from what the administration saw as the 

requirements of countering terrorism. More broadly, any requirement 

to incur otherwise unnecessary cost in order to signal benign intent 

necessarily reduces effectiveness in countering terror. In fact, cooperation 

that does not reduce effectiveness does not provide a meaningful signal. 

Even hostile powers can cooperate tactically when it advances their own 

goals; cooperation per se tells one nothing about a state’s intent. Hitler 

found it tactically advantageous to cooperate with Stalin over the division 

of Poland just before invading the Soviet Union―Hitler’s cooperation over 

Poland hardly proved benign intent toward the Soviets. Only cooperation 

that imposes real costs―and thus, cooperation that a hostile state would 

reject―sends meaningful signals of benign intent.70 And by definition, to 

accept costs in the conduct of the War on Terror as a means of signaling 

benign intent to other great powers is to reduce American effectiveness in 

countering terrorism. 

 Similarly, to husband American economic strength for the long-term 

competition with other great powers can impose costs on near-term 

effectiveness against terror. To live within today’s tax revenue would 

require a major reduction in expenditures for the War on Terror.71 But 

even if the administration reversed its fiscal philosophy and raised taxes 
20

to fund its current expenditures, the result would still depress American 

economic growth at the margin in the long term. Defense expenditure is 

less productive economically than other uses of capital: its multiplier effects 

are smaller, and its overseas focus tends to aggravate balance of payments 

deficits.72 A policy aimed at retaining or expanding American economic 

strength for the longest time possible would need to hold defense spending 

down to the lowest level consistent with international stability. Ambitious 

wars of counterterror preemption necessarily impose expenses that come 

at the cost of long-term economic performance. 

 The net result is tension between the requirements of countering 

terrorism and great power competition. The preemptive warfare required 

by energetic counterterrorism along the lines the administration has laid 

out both stimulates balancing behavior and degrades American economic 

performance. In the long run, this hastens the eventual loss of American 

primacy and the eventual arrival of bi- or multi-polarity. 

 By contrast, some may argue that terrorism does so much damage 

to economies, and creates such communities of interest among great 

powers, that these tensions are more apparent than real. After all, the 9/11 

attackers claim to have inflicted $1 trillion in economic damage on the 

United States;73 if so, a series of such attacks (or worse) could do greater 

damage to American economic growth than would the elevated defense 

expenditures needed to prevent them. And terrorism threatens every great 

power; this common threat could in theory drive the great powers together 

in opposition to Islamist fundamentalism, rather than driving them apart 

or spurring competition among them. 

 While there is some truth in this, both counterarguments have 

limitations. As for terrorist economic damage, it is hard to assess its 

sensitivity to counterterrorist expenditure; much depends on unknowable 

details of al Qaeda’s operations and methods, and the degree to which 

particular U.S. countermeasures have affected these. But most human 

undertakings display diminishing marginal returns to scale. And today’s 

scale of counterterrorist effort is very ambitious. It would be surprising if 

the last $100 billion of counterterror expenditure were as productive as the 

first, yet its effect on American economic growth is the same (or worse). 

And it is easy to overestimate the real economic damage of terrorism. Its 

human toll is terrible, but its ability to damage an economy as large, as 

resilient, and as adaptive as ours has real limits. The actual economic 

damage attributable to the 9/11 attacks, for example, now appears to 

have been far smaller than that claimed by al Qaeda. As the Congressional 

Research Service put it: 
21

9/11 is more appropriately viewed as a human tragedy than as an 

economic calamity. Notwithstanding their dire costs in human life, 

the direct effects of the attacks were too small and too geographically 

concentrated to make a significant dent in the nation’s economic output. 

September 11 did not trip a fragile economy into recession.74

 To do serious, long-term damage to the American economy would 

thus require far worse than the 9/11 attacks. This is not impossible―if we 

did nothing at all to counter terror, then massive, sustained attacks on a 

scale needed to depress the American economy might well ensue.75 But 

doing nothing is not the real alternative to today’s heavy expenditures 

for preemptive counterterror warfighting: there are many less expensive 

intermediate steps between nothing and an expenditure of nearly $100 

billion a year to wage concurrent wars in multiple theaters. And these 

intermediate steps would presumably have some value in constraining 

al Qaeda’s ability to exceed their 9/11 toll by a margin great enough to 

induce serious long-term economic effects. 

 As for the unifying effect of terrorism on great power foreign policies, 

though all great powers face terrorism, opinions differ widely on this 

threat’s severity. And America’s allies tend to see the threat in far less 

apocalyptic terms than has the current administration.76 There are also many 

ways to respond to any given terrorist threat, and America’s allies have 

mostly chosen far less ambitious approaches.77 Clearly the administration’s 

position that an invasion of Iraq was required to confront the terrorist 

threat is opposed strenuously by most other great powers. It is possible 

that future attacks may change other great powers’ assessment of the terror 

threat and its required responses. But there is no evidence of this yet. And it 

is at least as possible that the current, deep, division between America and 

the other great powers on counterterrorist policy could continue or even 

deepen―especially if terrorists seek to exploit this division by focusing on 

Americans and avoiding attacks on other great powers. 

Implications of Ambiguity in Counterterrorist End States. 

 Our end-state ambitions are another area where strategic ambiguity 

creates important tensions. Do we seek something close to the end of 

terrorism, or do we aim only to cap the threat at levels near today’s? The 

means needed for the first require an acceptance of risks unnecessary for 

the second―and extended pursuit of the first can undermine our ability to 

fall back to the second later. 

 This is because any realistic prospect of reducing the terror threat to 

levels much below that of 9/11 requires regime change on a regional scale 
22

in the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere as well. Regime change, however, 

is a high-risk undertaking. If it succeeds, it could produce a dramatic 

reduction in the threat of Islamist terror. But if it fails, it can make the same 

threat radically worse. By contrast, more modest goals―such as capping 

the danger of nuclear terror in the near- to mid-term―can be achieved with 

much less risky means. These means cannot end the terror threat, however. 

And because they leave the wellspring of Islamist terror unaddressed, such 

means allow this threat to fester for perhaps a generation or more. This in 

turn creates a long-term risk of WMD terror that may ultimately exceed 

the short-term risks embodied in a more ambitious approach, even with 

careful efforts in the meantime to limit terrorist access to WMD. 

 The key issue here is the relative importance of eliminating the 

underlying causes of Islamist terror. Maximalist ends require this: as long 

as terrorism’s original motivations remain, we will never be able to do 

more than suppress the threat at a still-virulent level. Espionage, police 

work, and special forces raids can suppress terrorist networks, but cannot 

eliminate them outright. If the underlying incentive for terrorist action 

remains, the same social and political processes that created al Qaeda in 

the first place will replace its losses as we inflict them. New recruits will 

replenish depleted ranks; new leaders will emerge to take the place of those 

killed or captured; and resourceful people will find new funding pathways 

to replace those blocked by Western intelligence. Just such a process now 

seems to be underway with al Qaeda.78 To do more than slow this process 

requires action to eliminate the wellsprings of terrorist recruitment. 

 And this, in turn, would almost certainly require radical political 

reform in the Mideast. Many now see the roots of Islamist terrorism as 

a liberty deficit in the Arab mideast. In this view, corrupt Arab autocrats 

value loyalty from palace guards and key elites over economic opportunity 

or political participation for the population. This elite loyalty is purchased 

by extracting public resources for private gain, and enforced by repression 

that squelches innovation or public sector efficiency. Meanwhile growing 

populations fight economic stagnation and often grinding poverty, while 

supporting a bloated bureaucracy that demands bribery for its minimal 

services. Into this mix, rising Islamic fundamentalism creates a rallying 

point for political and economic frustration, yielding rage and Islamist 

militancy attributable ultimately to local misgovernance. Though this 

anger’s real source is thus local, its only feasible outlet is foreign. Arab 

autocrats have proven willing to crush Islamist rebellions by force, but they 

quietly encourage campaigns of anti-Israeli, anti-U.S. protest as means of 

redirecting Muslim rage at safer targets abroad. These safety valves enable 

successful domestic repression by venting its resistance outward toward 
23

foreigners. Of course this is dangerous to the foreigners―and especially 

so once Osama bin Laden learned to weaponize Islamist resentment and 

harness it to a sweeping anti-Western terrorist program. Before bin Laden, 

the costs of tolerating autocratic misgovernance and the frustration-fueled, 

state-sanctioned anti-Americanism it bred were relatively modest. But after 

bin Laden, its costs are much higher. Without fundamental political reforms 

that would replace dysfunctional autocracy with legitimate governments 

able to meet the needs of their own people, the ultimate wellspring of 

Islamist terror would thus remain unmolested by even the most aggressive 

counterterrorist espionage or military campaign. If Islamist terror is to be 

ended, rather than merely managed or contained, then its political roots 

in Arab autocracy will almost certainly need removal, and this requires 

radical political change in the region.79

 How is such change to be obtained? The administration’s approach 

has been to rely on the catalytic effect of creating an exemplar democracy 

in the region itself: they argue that the presence of a true democracy in 

the heart of Arabia will compel other regimes to reform or be overthrown 

themselves. And the exemplar the administration has chosen is Iraq. By 

overthrowing Saddam and replacing him with a functioning democracy, 

they see the beginnings of a political reconstruction of the region that could 

end Islamist terror at its source.80

 The problem is thus broader than just Iraq: the main purpose of creating 

a democracy in Iraq is to shape politics elsewhere in the region. Al Qaeda’s 

strength comes chiefly from Saudis, Egyptians, Moroccans, and other nonIraqi Arabs. If Islamist terror is to be eliminated at its source, it can only 

be via political reform in states other than just Iraq. An Iraqi example may 

lead spontaneously to peaceful reform elsewhere in the region―but it may 

not. And if not, then U.S. policy intervention elsewhere may be needed, too: 

success may ultimately require coercive regime change in other states. 

 Political engineering on this scale could easily go awry. It is far from 

clear whether stable democracy can be built from the ruins of a Ba’athist 

police state in Iraq, even with all the money and soldiers we can provide. 

And if democratization fails, the result could be dangerous instability. 

Historically, the most war-prone states are not autocracies―they are 

regimes in the early stages of transition from autocracy to democracy.81 To 

multiply the opportunities for such unstable transitions across the region is 

to create a serious risk of major war. And internal conflict is an even greater 

danger: the removal of police-state autocracy also removes the repression 

that has kept internal ethnic conflict under control in much of the region. 

Chronic civil warfare amid the wreckage of overturned autocracies could 

derail democratization and substitute a region-wide version of Lebanon 
24

or Somalia: if a democratic Iraq can catalyze reform elsewhere, so a failed 

Iraq could presumably export chaos to its neighbors. A region-wide 

Lebanon might well prove beyond our capacity to police, regardless of 

effort expended. And if so, then we will have replaced a region of police 

states with a region of warlords and chronic instability. This could easily 

prove to be an easier operating environment for terrorism than the police 

states it replaces. And the misery and resentment produced by anything 

like this outcome could accelerate, not retard, recruitment for al Qaeda or 

its successors. 

 Not only would this be risky, it would also surely be expensive. Any 

meaningful chance of success would require major American assistance. 

Not only would economic aid be needed on a massive scale, but American 

peacekeepers and warfighters would probably also be required. Iraq 

obviously is requiring much higher troop levels than the administration 

had projected before the war, and Iraqi oil wealth is providing less of the 

reconstruction expenditure than had been expected.82 But Iraq is only a 

part of the real problem. If civil or cross-border warfare should accompany 

any of the other democratic transitions needed to erase the region’s liberty 

deficit, then American troops could well be needed to quell the instability 

there, too. And to provide the needed troops and aid will be difficult with 

a chronic American federal budget deficit. 

 None of this is to suggest that success is impossible. But neither is it 

guaranteed―even if we mount the effort and spend the money needed 

to have a chance. Regime change on this scale is inherently risky and 

expensive. 

 But it is also necessary if the terror threat is to be rolled back to anywhere 

near elimination. A serious effort to reach goals at the ambitious end of 

the objectives spectrum requires political change in the Mideast―and to 

provide this on the needed scale is to accept major near-term risks and 

costs. 

 By contrast, much more limited means could suffice if our aims are 

limited to capping the terrorist threat at levels closer to today’s. The key 

here is WMD acquisition, and especially the prospect of terrorists getting 

nuclear weapons. If al Qaeda got nuclear weapons, the terrorist threat 

would be radically worse than either today or September 10, 2001. A 

plausible goal for American grand strategy might be merely to prevent 

this―but without necessarily doing the things needed to eliminate al Qaeda 

altogether by removing its root causes. 

 Such a strategy might entail significant increases in funding for 

controlling fissile material and completed weapons (especially in the 

former Soviet Union); expanded use of permissive action links (PALs) 
25

or other access controls on existing weapons (especially in new nuclear 

states); strengthened nonproliferation regimes; more aggressive 

monitoring of reactors; covert action to disrupt proliferation programs; 

and much more ambitious efforts to expand counter-biological weapon 

(BW) vaccine production and public health infrastructure. It might also use 

a combination of security guarantees, strengthened formal alliances, and 

economic incentives to discourage states from pursuing WMD programs 

whose products might be transferred to nonstate terrorists.83

 The cost of such a strategy would be much lower than that of forcible 

regime change in a single state, much less across a region. Even a tripling 

of current expenditures for the Nunn-Lugar program of nuclear weapon 

control in the former Soviet Union, for example, would still cost less than 

2 weeks of current operations in Iraq alone.84 And unlike preemptive 

warfare, a strategy aimed at capping the terrorist threat by limiting WMD 

access would pose little downside risk of political instability or state failure 

via unsuccessful efforts at nation-building. 

 Prospects for success in this narrower mission are enhanced by the 

inherent difficulty of WMD acquisition. For nuclear weapons in particular, 

the relative scarcity of fissile material and extant weapons pose major hurdles 

to would-be WMD terrorists, and this scarcity facilitates control efforts by 

their opponents. The binding constraint for nuclear bomb construction is 

normally the material, which requires specialized facilities to produce and 

is held in comparatively modest quantities around the world. Aggressive 

efforts to bring the production facilities and existing stocks under tighter 

control can increase significantly the barriers to terrorists obtaining such 

material and fashioning a weapon from it. And today’s completed nuclear 

weapons can, in principle, be accounted for and secured in ways that would 

make terrorist capture or illicit smuggling very difficult. As Ashton Carter 

recently put it: 

To make a nuclear weapon, terrorists must get fissile materials, either 

plutonium or enriched uranium. But these materials do not occur in 

nature, and because they require building and operating uranium 

enrichment facilities or plutonium production reactors and reprocessing 

facilities, making them will remain beyond the reach of even large and 

well-organized terrorist groups for the foreseeable future. Therefore, 

terrorists must obtain fissile materials from governments, and relatively 

few governments have made such materials thus far . . . Nuclear terrorism, 

accordingly, must be stopped at the source, and the formula for doing so 

is simple and clear . . . No material. No bomb. No nuclear terrorism.85

 BW proliferation could prove to be the greater challenge―especially 

if bioengineering techniques using recombinant DNA are directed at the 
26

creation of new pathogens. Unlike nuclear weapons, BW can be produced 

using low-profile, dual-use technologies that are hard to distinguish from 

civilian pharmaceutical or food production, and are difficult to detect or 

interdict. And their low cost of production (by comparison with nuclear 

weapons) means that a wider range of actors could undertake such 

proliferation, at a much wider range of sites.86

 Even BW, however, poses challenges to would-be proliferators. In 

practice, nonstate actors have to date had considerable difficulty fashioning 

and using such agents. In 1984 the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh cult poisoned 

a reservoir and restaurant salad bars in rural Oregon with salmonella 

bacteria; though several hundred were sickened, none were killed.87 Aum 

Shinrikyo, probably the most successful WMD terrorist group to date, 

failed in at least three known attempts to cause casualties with botulinus 

toxin in Tokyo in April to June 1990.88 With assets exceeding $1 billion, 

a membership of over 40,000 which included accomplished Japanese and 

Russian scientists, contacts with the Russian KGB and Spetsnaz special 

forces, and access to a network of private laboratories, Aum Shinrikyo 

far exceeded the sophistication and resources of most nonstate terrorist 

groups.89 Yet they still failed to induce mass casualties on a scale anything 

like what al Qaeda produced using hijacked airliners. In 2001, an unknown 

assailant killed five people and sickened 23 by impregnating letters with 

anthrax spores; although the perpetrator has not been identified, the 

extreme sophistication required to produce spores milled finely enough to 

produce airborne contamination by this means has led many investigators to 

believe that the agent could not have been produced outside a government 

weapons lab, whether in America or abroad.90 Even so, the attacks caused 

only a handful of casualties. States, by contrast with nonstate terrorists, 

clearly can develop the needed expertise and production capability. But 

states are subject to some of the same coercive and persuasive levers that 

the international community can in principle bring to bear on nuclear 

proliferators: unlike terrorists, states can be deterred, inspected, induced, 

or coerced. And BW’s effects are easier to defend against than are nuclear 

weapons’―vaccination programs and public health system mobilization 

can make an important difference in limiting the spread and virulence of 

BW releases. An aggressive effort to dissuade states from assisting terrorists 

in BW use, coupled with greatly expanded homeland defenses against BW 

attack, might reduce the danger of BW terrorism significantly.91

 None of these methods are fool-proof; while they would reduce the 

odds of terrorists obtaining WMD, they would not eliminate them. But a 

strategy built around capping the threat via such means would probably 

yield a lower risk of terrorist WMD use in any given year, than a strategy 
27

that sought to end the threat via forcible regime change across the Mideast. 

If the latter succeeded, it would radically reduce the danger of subsequent 

WMD use by terrorists. But if it failed, it would make the problem worse 

rather than better. A Mideast of failed states and chronic instability would 

be a proliferation nightmare. Not only would it provide a vast haven for 

terrorist planning cells and a massive recruitment base for al Qaeda, but 

it could engulf a number of active WMD sites and extant WMD weapon 

inventories. It is widely suspected that Iran and Syria have active biological 

and/or nuclear weapons programs. And Pakistan is a declared nuclear 

weapons state with an unquestionable inventory of actual weapons. 

Instability stemming from failed nation-building efforts elsewhere in 

the Mideast could easily spill over into Pakistan, whose stability is itself 

questionable under the best of conditions. And if so, then the odds of 

terrorists obtaining WMD would skyrocket. 

 The means required to pursue these contrasting goals of capping the 

terrorist threat, as opposed to eliminating it, are thus quite different. They 

are also mutually inconsistent―it is difficult to pursue them both at once 

and succeed. In particular, active pursuit of near-elimination undermines 

the means needed for suppression. 

 In part, this is because the anti-proliferation measures emphasized 

in suppression require multilateral action―yet the preemptive warfare 

needed to cut more deeply into the terrorist threat makes multilateral 

cooperation harder, for the reasons discussed in the previous section. A 

control regime for restricting nuclear material transfers, for example, is 

of no use if key suppliers opt out―to be effective, export controls must 

include all exporters. More broadly, a suppression strategy centered on 

antiproliferation depends on cooperation from other great powers, yet a 

deep-cut strategy built around preemptive regime change tends to reduce 

such cooperation. 

 Perhaps more important, preemptive regime change’s failure 

modes make it difficult to change strategies in midstream and retreat to 

suppression if political reengineering fails. An antiproliferation approach 

would be much more effective with a Mideast of stable states; if regime 

change fails and key states collapse into chaos, then multilateral export 

controls, for example, could become irrelevant―if Pakistan collapses and 

its nuclear weapons disperse, then terrorists will have all the materials 

they need without importing them from the former Soviet Union. The 

further we travel down the road of preemptive regime change, the harder 

it becomes to retreat to suppression if things go awry―the more regimes 

we change, the greater the risk of instability if regime-change fails, and 

instability promotes WMD proliferation. 
28

The Costs of Strategic Ambiguity. 

 Ambiguous goals never promote strategic coherence. But heretofore, 

the costs of ambiguity have been relatively manageable. In effect, we could 

simply take aim at terrorism broadly and go as far as we could get toward 

eliminating it without ever setting a specific goal. If we fell short of complete 

elimination, then at least we would diminish terror as much as we could in 

the process. But a serious pursuit of near-elimination eventually requires 

the political reconstruction of the entire Mideast―and this reconstruction 

effort eventually imposes major costs that other plausible goals would not 

require, and which increasingly foreclose other goals as options. 

 The war in Iraq is quickly moving us to this point of decision. If 

regime change were cheap, easy, or low risk, then we could afford to 

pursue ambitious deep cuts in the terrorist threat without incurring heavy 

opportunity costs against other options, and without seriously aggravating 

nonterror threats―and thus, we could safely muddle through without ever 

really deciding on a specific strategy. Before the invasion of Iraq, it might 

have been possible to defend a supposition that regime change could be this 

easy. It is certainly not now. Regime change may yet succeed in Iraq, but if 

so, it will not be without major costs―and risks. And the longer we pursue 

this goal―even in Iraq, much less elsewhere in the region―the greater the 

cost, the greater the risk, and the harder it will become to change direction 

if we ultimately decide to settle for less ambitious ends.92 The time has 

come to decide. 

RESOLVING THE AMBIGUITIES 

IN AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY 

 Two broad alternatives exist for resolving the ambiguities sketched 

above: rollback and containment.93

 Rollback would make explicit the vague but bold ambition of current 

declaratory policy, and accept the associated costs. In particular, it would 

entail a continued―indeed increased―commitment to democratic nationbuilding in Iraq, and would follow this with muscular efforts to promote 

democracy elsewhere in the region―at the cost of further warfare elsewhere 

if necessary. The goal would be to reduce Islamist terrorism to negligible 

levels: to a severity or frequency no greater than that of pre-9/11 groups 

such as the ETA or Black September that few Americans thought worthy 

of a wartime footing. To do this would require a preclusive focus on 

terrorism, and would relegate the challenge of great power competition 

to a distant second place in which no significant opportunity costs against 

counterterror effectiveness would be accepted. 
29

 Containment would settle for more modest goals. It would aim at 

capping the terrorist threat at a painful but tolerable level while awaiting 

an eventual internal collapse of the Islamist terror movement. The key here 

would be combating WMD proliferation via concerted multilateral efforts 

to control existing materials, to prevent transfer of production technology, 

and to improve defenses against biological agents in particular. With no 

requirement to reconstruct the Mideast politically, this strategy would 

permit the United States to settle for stability in the region rather than true 

democracy. This in turn would permit an earlier withdrawal of American 

forces from Iraq, and would reduce the odds of other deployments or 

invasions elsewhere in the region. These steps would in turn tend to 

retard great power competition: the need for multilateral action to enforce 

nonproliferation regimes would encourage more benign interpretations of 

American intent; ceteris paribus, reduced expenditures for nation-building 

and warfighting would conduce to economic growth and prolong American 

economic predominance. Although the primary focus would still be 

Islamist terrorism, the means adopted to counter it would be less prone to 

worsen other threats, and could more easily accommodate institutionalist 

hedging strategies aimed at nonterror challenges. 

 Either alternative would provide an internally consistent resolution to 

the ambiguity of today’s declaratory policy. Neither, however, is without 

serious disadvantages as well as important strengths―and neither can 

guarantee success.94

 For rollback, the central disadvantages are its greater near-term risks 

and the higher costs needed to do it right. These risks are grave, and the 

costs are ultimately much higher than we now seem willing to bear. 

 Containment, by contrast, entails a cynicism that is distasteful at best, 

and poses domestic political management challenges regardless. A policy 

of stability in the Mideast aligns us with dictatorship and puts American 

power behind the preservation of police states whose inability to meet their 

peoples’ legitimate needs gave rise to al Qaeda in the first place. A retreat 

to autocratic stability in Iraq would be particularly hard to defend, given 

our public commitment to democracy as a rationale for invasion, and the 

inevitable suffering our invasion imposed. To impose this suffering merely 

to replace one tyrant with another would be hard to justify. One could 

argue that overthrowing tyrants is properly their own people’s job and 

not America’s; we can usually decline tyrannicide as others’ responsibility. 

But not in Iraq. By invading the country, we have taken responsibility for 

its governance. We may share that responsibility with the Iraqis, but to 

abdicate it altogether would incur an important moral cost in America’s 

standing in the world, and in our ability to sustain domestic political 

consensus behind a strategy. 
30

 A second major disadvantage of containment is its inability to end 

the war. Eventually, it is likely that the internal contradictions of Islamist 

ideology (to borrow Kennan’s phrase) will cause the movement to collapse 

on its own―the recent stirrings of democratic dissent in Iran, for example, 

suggest the possible long-term trajectory for Islamism elsewhere.95 Islamist 

theocracy, especially on the medievalist lines advocated by Osama bin 

Laden, is not an ideology that can answer in the long run the political needs 

that have stimulated it in the short run. So it is reasonable to suppose that, 

if contained, our Islamist enemy will eventually collapse of its own weight, 

as the Soviet Union did in the Cold War. But there is no reason to expect 

this to happen soon, and containment offers little means of hastening 

this denouement. In Iran, Islamist theocracy has lasted a quarter-century 

already, and though the beginnings of an end may be discernable, it is 

debatable how successful this democratic resistance will be. Either way, 

Iranian theocracy is unlikely to be overthrown in the immediate future, 

and Iran is much further down this road than any other society in the 

region. If anything, containment’s tolerance of secular autocracy in the 

Mideast would probably extend the natural lifespan of Islamist ideology 

by keeping it an abstract longing rather than an experienced reality for 

most Muslims. 

 In the long run, this inability to end the war could lead to a greater 

ultimate likelihood of WMD terrorism for containment than for rollback. By 

leaving the enemy in the field for the long term, containment would give al 

Qaeda many chances to beat its proliferation controls and acquire WMD in 

spite of them. No conceivable anti-proliferation program can be perfect; all 

have some chance of failure. The antiproliferation means outlined above 

can reduce the odds of WMD acquisition in any given year, perhaps to a 

very low level. But failure to eliminate the threat means the conflict will 

extend over many years. Even low probability events eventually occur, 

given enough trials; if we give al Qaeda enough opportunities, even a 

nearly fool-proof antiproliferation system would eventually fail. In the 

short term, containment would probably reduce the odds of WMD use, but 

in the long term, its cumulative risks could ultimately exceed rollback’s. 

 Containment and rollback thus pose very different risks, and very 

different tradeoffs against nonterror challenges. Neither is risk free. But 

they imply very different distributions of risk over time. Rollback trades 

higher near-term risk of catastrophe for a chance to end the war in the 

foreseeable future and thereby cut the risk of any major Islamist terrorism 

dramatically thereafter. Containment trades a lower near-term risk of 

catastrophe for a steady-state condition of chronic non-WMD terrorism, 

and a long-term danger of al Qaeda eventually getting WMD and using 
31

it. Neither can guarantee that WMD will not be used; neither can exclude 

some prospect of major non-WMD terrorism before the passing of Islamist 

ideology. Both offer a reasonable mechanism by which to obtain an 

explicitly specified goal. Where they differ is ultimately in the goals they 

seek―in the level of terrorist violence they will accept as tolerable―and the 

consequences this implies for our ability to hedge against other threats, 

and for the distribution of risk and cost between the near term and the long 

run. 

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 

 Three years of post-9/11 strategic debate have left America with a 

combination of ambition and ambiguity. And whereas the costs of strategic 

ambiguity were relatively modest for the first 2 years of the War on Terror, 

the campaign in Iraq is now rapidly increasing the financial, human, and 

strategic opportunity costs of leaving basic choices unmade. Perhaps 

the most important of these ambiguities concerns our end-state goal for 

countering terrorism: should we insist on reducing this threat to a level 

as close to eradication as we can manage, or should we tolerate greater 

terrorist violence as a quasi-permanent condition? 

 The natural answers to this question imply the strategic alternatives 

of rollback and containment. Rollback accepts the implicit ambition of 

today’s declaratory policy―and the high costs and near-term risks required 

to realize that ambition. Containment fills in the ambiguities in today’s 

strategy with an explicit acceptance of noncatastrophic terror in order to 

avoid the near-term risks and costs of seriously seeking an end to Islamist 

terror altogether. 

 Neither strategy is unambiguously superior to the other. They each 

have important drawbacks―in particular, they each imply serious risks. 

For rollback, the chief risk is of near-term chaos resulting from failed 

political engineering in the Mideast―and the ensuing danger of Islamist 

terrorists obtaining WMD and using it against Americans. Rollback also 

involves heavy financial costs if done properly; it implies an elevated risk 

of additional military campaigns in the Mideast; and it aggravates the 

challenge of great power competition. Containment, by contrast, is hard 

to justify normatively and leaves Islamist terror organizations in the field 

long enough to pose a long-term risk of terrorist WMD use, even if the 

likelihood in any given year is low. It also, by definition, tolerates the 

greater terrorist violence associated with al Qaeda’s long-term survival as 

the price of reducing the risk of near-term chaos in the effort to remake the 

Mideast politically. 
32

 These costs, benefits, and risks cannot be resolved analytically. The 

choice between rollback and containment turns on a series of value 

judgments. Should we prefer higher risk and cost now in order to get a 

chance at something closer to absolute security in the future? Or should 

we prefer lower risks and lower costs now, with a danger that sometime 

in the unspecified future al Qaeda might eventually hit a longshot chance 

and obtain WMD? How much security is enough? What risks and costs are 

appropriate to pursue it? And how should we balance risk today against 

risk in the possibly distant future? Analysis can identify these risks and 

costs, bound their magnitudes, and show how these vary and interact over 

time. But analysis cannot provide the value choices needed to select among 

them. The latter is a fundamentally political process. Indeed, it is perhaps 

the most important political responsibility of our elected officials in the 

defense domain.

 My purpose here is thus not to prescribe a choice between rollback and 

containment―it is to advise those who must choose by clarifying the choices 

to be made, illuminating the strengths and weaknesses of the alternatives, 

and identifying the values at stake in the choice. There are no easy options 

for grand strategy in the aftermath of 9/11: something important must be 

sacrificed whichever way one chooses. But the failure to choose embodied 

in the ambiguity of today’s grand strategy is fast becoming intolerable. For 

better or worse, we must decide. 

ENDNOTES

 1. Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace, New Haven: Yale University 

Press, 1991, pp. 1-7; Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy, New York: Penguin, 1991 ed. of 1954 orig., 

pp. 353-360, xvii-xxi, 319-337. 

 2. See, e.g., Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace and War: America’s Grand Strategy 

in a World at Risk, New York: Knopf, 2004; John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security and the 

American Experience, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004; Niall Ferguson, Colossus: 

The Price of America’s Empire, New York: Penguin, 2004; Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice: 

Global Domination or Global Leadership, New York: Basic Books, 2004; Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: 

The Means to Success in World Politics, New York: Public Affairs, 2004; G. John Ikenberry, 

“The End of the Neo-Conservative Moment,” Survival, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 7-22; 

Deepak Lal, In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 

2004; Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, New 

York: Owl Books, 2004 ed. of 2001 orig.; Gary Hart, The Fourth Power: An Essay Concerning 

a Grand Strategy for the United States in the 21st Century, New York: Oxford University 

Press, 2004; Amitai Etzioni, From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International 

Relations, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Colin Dueck, “New Perspectives on 

American Grand Strategy: A Review Essay,” International Security, Vol. 28, No. 4, Spring 

2004; Jonathan Stevenson, Counterterrorism: Containment and Beyond, London: International 

Institute for Strategic Studies, 2004, Adelphi Paper No. 367; Lisa Anderson, “Shock and 

Awe: Interpretations of the Events of September 11,” World Politics, Vol. 56, January 2004, 
33

pp. 303-325; Robert J. Lieber, “Rethinking America’s Grand Strategy,” Chronicle of Higher 

Education, June 4, 2004; Audrey Kurth Cronin and James M. Ludes, eds., Attacking Terrorism: 

Elements of a Grand Strategy, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004; Charles 

Kupchan, The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twentyfirst Century, New York: Vintage, 2003; John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power 

Politics, New York: W.W. Norton, 2003; Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and 

Europe in the New World Order, New York: Knopf, 2003; Dimitri Simes, “America’s Imperial 

Dilemma,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 6, November/December 2003, pp. 91-103; Robert 

J. Art, A Grand Strategy for America, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003; Ivo H. Daalder 

and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, Washington, 

DC: Brookings, 2003; Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure 

of Good Intentions, New York: Basic Books, 2003; Stephen Rosen, “An Empire, If You Can 

Keep It,” National Interest, Spring 2003, pp. 51-61; Max Boot, “Imperialism!” The Weekly 

Standard, May 7, 2003; Walter Slocombe, “Force, Preemption, and Legitimacy,” Survival, 

Spring 2003, pp. 117-130; Edward Rhodes, “The Imperial Logic of Bush’s Liberal Agenda,” 

Survival, Spring 2003, pp. 131-154; Philip B. Heymann, Terrorism, Freedom, and Security: 

Winning Without War, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003; Wesley K. Clark, Winning Modern Wars: 

Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire, New York: Public Affairs, 2003; David Frum and 

Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, New York: Random House, 

2003; Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment Revisited,” National Interest, Winter 

2002/03, pp. 5-17; Robert Kagan, et al., “One Year After: A Grand Strategy for the West?” 

Survival, Vol. 44, No. 4, Winter 2002-03, pp. 135-156; Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: 

The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 

2002; Henry Nau, At Home Abroad: Identity and Power in American Foreign Policy, Ithaca: 

Cornell University Press, 2002; Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the 

World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go it Alone, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; Walter 

LaFeber, “The Post September 11 Debate Over Empire, Globalization, and Fragmentation,” 

Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 117, No. 1, 2002, pp. 1-17; Stephen G. Brooks and William C. 

Wohlforth, “American Primacy in Perspective,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 4, August 2002, 

pp. 20-33; Kimberly Kagan, “Hegemony, Not Empire: How the Pax Americana Differs From 

the Pax Romana,” The Weekly Standard, Vol. 7, No. 33, May 2002; John Mueller, “Harbinger 

or Aberration?” National Interest, Fall 2002, pp. 45-50; G. John Ikenberry, “American Grand 

Strategy in the Age of Terror,” Survival, Winter 2001-02, pp. 19-34; Lawrence Freedman, “The 

Third World War?” Survival, Winter 2001-02, pp. 61-88; Kurt M. Campbell and Michele A. 

Flournoy, To Prevail: An American Strategy for the Campaign Against Terrorism, Washington, 

DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2001. 

 3. William J. Perry, Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to the President and the Congress, 

Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995, p. 1. 

 4. A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement, Washington, DC: The 

White House, February 1996; The National Security Strategy of the United States, Washington, 

DC: The White House, September 2002; William S. Cohen, Secretary of Defense, Report of the 

Quadrennial Defense Review, Washington, DC: Department of Defense, May 1997; Quadrennial 

Defense Review Report, Washington, DC: Department of Defense, September 30, 2001; The 

National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, Washington, DC: Department of 

Defense, March 2005. 

 5. The U.S. Cold War “2-1/2 War” and “1-1/2 War” strategies are the best known 

examples of this approach. See, e.g., Robert J. Haffa, Jr., The Half War: Planning U.S. Rapid 

Deployment Forces to Meet a Limited Contingency, 1960-1983, Boulder: Westview, 1984, 

especially ch. 2. The Joint Army-Navy Planning Board’s initial efforts at pre-World War I 
34

strategic planning also directed war planners to consider categories of threat (e.g., “a South 

American country” or “two European continental powers”), rather than specific enemies. 

Adolf Carlson, Joint U.S. Army-Navy War Planning on the Eve of the First World War: Its Origins 

and Its Legacy, Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 1998, pp. 13-16. 

 6. President George W. Bush, Address to Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 

2001. For subsequent characterizations, see, e.g., General Richard B. Myers, Remarks 

as Presented to the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, Nashville TN, August 31, 2004, 

available at http://www.dtic.mil/jcs/chairman/040831NashvilleCofC.html; General Peter 

Pace, “A Conversation with Peter Pace,” Council on Foreign Relations, Washington, DC, 

February 17, 2004; General Peter Schoomaker, “Serving a Nation at War,” Testimony Before 

the House Armed Services Committee, April 7, 2001, available at: http://www.house.gov/hasc/

openingstatementsandpressreleases/108thcongress/04-07-21Schoomaker.pdf. 

 7. “Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in 

peril.” Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Samuel B. Griffith, trans., New York: Oxford University 

Press, 1963 ed., p. 84. 

 8. This claim is based on official strategic documents available to the public: see 

references below. 

 9. This is an important shortcoming of “capabilities-based planning” (CPB). CPB 

directs defense planners to size and structure a military to respond to generic threat types 

rather than specific opponents. This reduces our ability to design a military force that can 

either exploit the specific weaknesses of any actual enemy, (since these are necessarily 

particular to the opponent), or to pit our potential strengths most effectively against those 

weaknesses. In a wartime environment with a special premium on getting the most out 

of the available resources, the inefficiencies associated with such generic, peacetime-like 

planning are particularly costly. 

 10. Tim Ripley, CDISS Database: Terrorism Incidents 1960-1997, Lancaster, UK: Lancaster 

University Center for Defense and International Security Studies, 2002, as coded by Elizabeth 

Chasin. Data are available from the author upon request. 

 11. The National Security Strategy of the United States, 2002, p. 5. 

 12. Statement as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to the NATO 

North Atlantic Council, Brussels, Belgium, December 18, 2001, p. 2. 

 13. Remarks by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to the Conservative 

Political Action Conference, Marriott Crystal Gateway, Arlington, Virginia, February 1, 

2002, p. 2. 

 14. President George W. Bush, Address to Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 

2001. 

 15. Owais Tohid, “Al Qaeda’s Uzbek bodyguards,” Christian Science Monitor, September 

28, 2004, pp. 6ff.; Alex Rodriguez, “Uzbek Unrest Blamed on Policies,” Chicago Tribune, April 

4, 2004, pp. 4ff.; Bradley Graham and Walter Pincus, “U.S. Hopes to Divide Insurgency,” 

Washington Post, October 31, 2004, pp. A1ff.; Karl Vick, “Flurry of Violence Kills at least 15 

Across Iraq,” Washington Post, October 26, 2004, pp. A18ff. 

 16. Todd S. Purdum, “Ten Asian Nations Join with U.S. in Pledge to Fight Terrorism,” 

New York Times, August 2, 2002, pp. 5ff.; Barbara Crossette, “The War on Terror Points 

a Country Toward Peace,” New York Times, March 3, 2002, pp. 4ff.; Dan Eggen, “Justice 

Department Report Details Use of Patriot Act,” Washington Post, July 14, 2004, pp. A7ff.; 

Rachel Van Dongen, “Plan Puts Colombia on Offensive,” Christian Science Monitor, June 22, 

2004, pp. 6ff. 
35

 17. Remarks by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to the Conservative 

Political Action Conference, Marriott Crystal Gateway, Arlington Virginia, February 1, 

2002, p. 2. 

 18. Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, April 

2004, Appendix B. 

 19. This is not to suggest that American foreign policy will not oppose the entire range 

of terror groups identified above, or still others unnamed, or that the United States will not 

take action to thwart their funding, prosecute their members, or obstruct their operations. 

America did this before 9/11, and will surely continue to do so regardless of our grand 

strategic choices for waging the war. There is an important difference, however, between 

such ordinary diplomatic and police activities and the waging of war, which implies levels 

of violence far beyond those of peacetime activity, and involves very different standards 

of evidence and proof in the use of force. Terrorists themselves surely recognize this 

difference: it is a very different matter to be the target of American warmaking (as was 

al Qaeda in Afghanistan) rather than American criminal investigation (as the IRA has 

been, for example, for many years). Identifying the enemy in a time of war is thus a critical 

distinction, even if it does not relieve those groups left off the enemy list from any American 

interference whatever. 

 20. Patterns of Global Terrorism, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2003, 

Appendix B, pp. 118, 120-122, 133. 

 21. Hezbollah has been more active against American targets than the others, but even 

Hezbollah has been focused primarily on Israel: ibid., pp. 121-122. 

 22. Cf., e.g., Holger H. Herwig, “The Dynamics of Necessity: German Military Policy 

during the First World War,” and Paul Kennedy, “Britain in the First World War,” in Allan 

R. Millett, Williamson Murray, and Kenneth H. Watman, eds., Military Effectiveness, Vol. I: 

The First World War, London: Unwin Hyman, 1988, pp. 80-115 and 31-79, respectively. 

 23. Vague definition of the enemy has other potential disadvantages as well. In 

particular, this degree of ambiguity complicates planning. Warmaking is inherently a 

sprawling, interagency undertaking, involving dozens of agencies and organizations and 

hundreds of thousands of people. How is this massively complex project to be coordinated 

when it is unclear who the enemy is? 

 24. Even here, though, the debate often miscasts the issue. Assessments of great power 

military potential are usually framed in terms of material wherewithal: it is the quantity 

and quality of weapons, microelectronic technology, or economic potential that receives 

the lion’s share of attention. Yet there is good reason to believe that nonmaterial factors―

such as training, tactics, or leadership―are more important determinants of real military 

outcomes, and thus real military power. Sound assessment of real military power requires 

the integration of material and nonmaterial factors in a determinate, empirically sound 

way: for a detailed discussion, see Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and 

Defeat in Modern Battle, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 

 25. See, e.g., Roger Barnett, Asymmetrical Warfare: Today’s Challenge to US Military 

Power, Brassey’s, 2003; Anthony Cordesman, Terrorism, Asymmetric Warfare, and Weapons of 

Mass Destruction: Defending the U.S. Homeland, New York: Praeger, 2001; Stephen J. Blank, 

Rethinking Asymmetric Threats, Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies 

Institute, 2003; Robert Cassidy, Russia in Afghanistan and Chechnya: Military Strategic Culture 

and the Paradoxes of Asymmetric Conflict, Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic 

Studies Institute, 2003; Melissa Applegate, Preparing for Asymmetry: As Seen Through the Lens 
36

of Joint Vision 2010, Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2001; 

Douglas V. Johnson II and Steven Metz, Asymmetry and US Military Strategy: Definition, 

Background and Strategic Concepts, Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies 

Institute, 2001; Christopher Bowie, The Anti-Access Threat and Theater Air Bases, Washington, 

DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2002. 

 26. For more detailed articulations of similar arguments, see, e.g., Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The 

Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go it Alone, New York: 

Oxford University Press, 2002; Robert Pape, “The World Pushes Back,” Boston Globe, March 

23, 2003, p. H1. 

 27. See, e.g., Larry Diamond, “What Went Wrong in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, 

No. 5, September/October 2004, pp. 34-56; Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks, “US Faces 

Growing Fears of Failure,” Washington Post, May 19, 2004, p. A1; Thomas L. Friedman, 

“Three Conversations Needed to Save Iraq,” International Herald Tribune, April 12, 2004; 

Francis Fukuyama, “The Neoconservative Moment,” The National Interest, January 6, 2004; 

Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson, “Iraq and U.S. Legitimacy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, 

No. 6, November/December 2004, pp. 18-32; also Christopher Gelpi, The Power of Legitimacy: 

Assessing the Role of Norms in Crisis Bargaining, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 

 28. See, e.g., Roger Cliff, Sam J. Tangredi, and Christine E. Wormuth, “The Future of 

U.S. Overseas Presence,” in Michele Flournoy, ed., QDR 2001: Strategy-Driven Choices for 

America’s Security, Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2001, ch. 9. 

 29. Japanese and Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury debt are currently growing at the 

rates of $26 billion and $5 billion a month, respectively: Eduardo Porter, “Private Investors 

Abroad Cut their Investments in the U.S.,” New York Times, October 19, 2004, p. C13. A 

single nation, Japan, now holds 16 percent of all outstanding U.S. Treasury Bonds: David 

R. Francis, “Losing Patience with U.S. Trade Deficit,” Christian Science Monitor, July 29, 

2004, p. 17. For the fraction of all U.S. national debt held by foreigners, see U.S. Office of 

Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2005: Analytical 

Perspectives, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004, Table 15-6, p. 235. 

 30. See, e.g., Andrew Cassel, “The Economy: Fill ‘Er Up, and Curse the Euro’s 

Strength,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 5, 2004, pp. C1ff.; David Streitfeld, “Dollar’s Decline 

is Reverberating,” Los Angeles Times, November 14, 2004, pp. A1ff.; Michael Klare, “Policy 

and Bush’s Second Term,” Washingtonpost.com, November 9, 2004; Charles Grant, “EuroMuscle,” Washington Post, July 8, 2001, pp. B2ff.; Porter, “Private Investors Abroad Cut their 

Investments in the U.S.;” Francis, “Losing Patience with U.S. Trade Deficit.” 

 31. See, e.g., Mark Crescenzi, Economic Interdependence and Conflict in World Politics, 

Cambridge, MA: Lexington Books, forthcoming 2005; Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. 

Nye, Jr., Power and Interdependence, 3rd edition, New York: Longman, 2000. 

 32. Robert Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Don’t Work,” International Security, Vol. 22, 

No. 2, Fall 1997, pp. 90-136. 

 33. See, e.g., Claude Barfield, “U.S. Steel Tariffs Give Safeguards a Bad Name,” 

Financial Times, December 8, 2003. This experience reinforces an important point: whereas 

the sanctions debate tends to assume that the United States will be the enforcer, it can also 

be the target of sanctions imposed by others―and in fact, it has been. There is no reason to 

suppose that economic leverage cannot be employed by others against the United States. 

 34. Although the effectiveness of these measures is disputed: see, e.g., James Noren, 

“CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Economy,” in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett, eds., 
37

Watching the Bear: Essays on the CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union, Washington, DC: CIA 

Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2003, ch. 2. 

 35. For introductions to the mercantilist tradition, see, e.g., Jacob Viner, “Power vs. 

Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” World 

Politics 1:1-29, 1948; Albert O. Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade 2d 

ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980; Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World 

Politics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981; Joseph Grieco, Cooperation Among 

Nations, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. 

 36. Information is often cited as another crucial element of state power: the mnemonic 

“DIME,” for Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic dimensions of power, is 

commonplace in the American defense planning community. America’s ability to affect 

others’ information through public diplomacy, however, is often exaggerated. In a world 

of proliferating, globalized communications media, there are many voices competing 

for attention. Many of these benefit from deep knowledge of local values and norms in 

their primary audience. American public diplomacy is just one among this cacophony of 

sources competing for audiences’ attention―and it will often seem less in touch with its 

audience, given its necessarily greater cultural distance. More broadly, all great powers’ 

efforts to use “information power” strategically must increasingly compete for attention 

with sophisticated local voices, and this may erode public diplomacy’s efficacy as a tool of 

state power even as broadcast technology increases the role of information in politics. This 

is not an argument for abandoning public diplomacy or the informational dimension of 

power―all instruments should be used to their maximum potential. But it is an argument 

for caution in projecting the likely impact of public diplomacy in a world of increasingly 

diverse sources of public information. (The author is indebted to Prof. Peter Katzenstein of 

Cornell University for this observation.) 

 37. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979, 

p. 168. For a recent overview of the theory of balancing, see Jack S. Levy, “Balances and 

Balancing: Concepts, Propositions and Research Design,” in John A. Vaquez and Colin 

Elman, eds., Realism and the Balancing of Power: A New Debate, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 2002, pp. 128-153. 

 38. Cf., e.g., James F. Hoge, Jr., “A Global Power Shift in the Making,” Foreign Affairs, 

Vol. 83, No. 4, July/August 2004, pp. 2-7; George J. Gilboy, “The Myth Behind China’s 

Miracle,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 4, July/August 2004, pp. 33-48. 

 39. See, e.g., Harold Brown, Joseph W. Prueher, and Adam Segal, Chinese Military Power: 

Independent Task Force Report, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2004; Nicholas R. 

Lardy, Integrating China into the Global Economy, Washington, DC: Brookings, 2002; Charles 

Wolf, Jr., et al., Fault Lines in China’s Economic Terrain, Santa Monica: RAND, 2003, RAND MR1686-NA/SRF; Charles Wolf, Jr., et al., Asian Economic Trends and their Security Implications, 

Santa Monica: RAND, 2003, RAND MR-1143-OSD/A; Hans Binnendijk and Ronald N. 

Montaperto, eds., Strategic Trends in China, Washington, DC: National Defense University 

Press, 1998; Carolyn Pumphrey, ed., The Rise of China in Asia: Security Implications, Carlisle, 

PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2002. 

 40. International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2002-3, London: 

Oxford University Press, 2002; idem, The Military Balance 2003-4, London: Oxford University 

Press, 2003. 

 41. C.f., e.g., the discussions in David P. Calleo, “The Broken West,” Survival, Vol. 46, 

No. 3, Autumn 2004, pp. 29-38; James B. Steinberg, “An Elective Partnership: Salvaging 

Transatlantic Relations,” Survival, Spring 2003, pp. 113-146; Ivo Daalder, “The End of 
38

Atlanticism,” Survival, Spring 2003, pp. 147-166; Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: 

America and Europe in the New World Order, New York: Knopf, 2003; Charles Kupchan, The 

End of the American Era, New York: Knopf, 2002; Philip Gordon, “Bridging the Atlantic 

Divide,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 1, January/February 2003, pp. 70-83; James Kitfield, 

“US to NATO: Change or Else,” National Journal, October 12, 2002; Angela Stent and Lilia 

Shevtsova, “America, Russia, and Europe: a Realignment?” Survival, Vol. 44, No. 4, Winter 

2002-3, pp. 121-134; Josef Joffe, “Axis of Envy,” Foreign Policy, September/October 2002; 

James Thompson, “US Interests and the Fate of the Alliance,” Survival, Vol. 45, No. 4, Winter 

2003-4, pp. 207-220; Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, Allies at War: America, Europe, and 

the Crisis over Iraq, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004; Dominique Moisi, “Reinventing the 

West,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 6, November/December 2003, pp. 67-73. 

 42. See, e.g., Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War, Ithaca: Cornell University 

Press, 2000; Jacek Kugler and Douglas Lemke, eds., Parity and War, Ann Arbor: University 

of Michigan Press, 1996. 

 43. See, e.g., Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict, Ithaca: 

Cornell University Press, 1999, pp. 24, 103, 146-147; George W. Downs and David M. Rocke, 

Tacit Bargaining, Arms Races, and Arms Control, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 

1990, ch. 3; Samuel Huntington, “Arms Races: Prerequisites and Results” in Robert Art 

and Kenneth Waltz, eds., The Use of Force, 4th edition, Lanham, MD: University Press of 

America, 1993, pp. 85-118; Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World 

Politics, January 1978, Vol.30, No.2, pp. 167-214. 

 44. On the role of multilateralism in economic sanction effectiveness, for example, see 

M. S. Daoudi and M. S. Dajani, Economic Sanctions: Ideals and Experience, Boston: Routledge 

and Kegan Paul, 1983, pp. 159-173; Margaret Doxey, International Sanctions in Contemporary 

Perspective, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. 

 45. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, Washington, DC: U.S. Government, 

February 2003, p. 1. 

 46. Ibid., p. 12. 

 47. Paul Wolfowitz, speech to the Munich Conference on European Security Policy, 

Hotel Bayerischer Hof, Munich Germany, February 2, 2002, http://www.defenselink.mil/

speeches/2002/s20020202-depsecdef1.html (emphasis added). 

 48. Douglas Feith, as quoted in Jeremy Feiler, ‘”Battle of Ideas’ Central to War on 

Terrorism, Feith Says,” InsideDefense.com, November 24, 2003. For a similar formulation, see 

the 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, pp. 23-24. 

 49. See, e.g., Robin Dougherty, “A New Anarchy on the High Seas,” Boston Globe, May 

30, 2004, p. D8; Ellen Nakashima and Alan Sipress, “Singapore Goes it Alone in Maritime 

Security Drill,” Washington Post, June 2, 2004, pp. A12ff.; Office of the Undersecretary for 

Global Affairs, Trafficking in Persons Report, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing 

Office, rev. June 2003, Department of State Publication 11057; Todd S. Purdum, “Several 

U.S. Allies Criticized in Powell Report on Slave Trading,” New York Times, June 6, 2002, pp. 

A15ff.; Colum Lynch, “U.S. Urges Aid to Spur Peace in Sudan,” Washington Post, November 

15, 2004, pp. A21ff.; Emily Wax, “In Sudan, A Sense of Abandonment,” Washington Post, 

November 16, 2004, pp. A1ff. 

 50. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, p. 13. 

 51. Elizabeth Arias, et al., “Deaths: Final Data for 2001,” U.S. Centers for Disease Control 

National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 52, No. 3, September 18, 2003, Table 10, which lists 4,491 

American deaths from peptic ulcers and 3,454 from malnutrition. 
39

 52. The bombings of the USS Cole, the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 

Khobar Towers, Pan Am Flight 103, and the initial World Trade Center attack of 1993, for 

example, all long predated 9/11, and all were organized products of international terrorist 

groups that had access to state support in Afghanistan and elsewhere. 

 53. Such threats may suffice to coerce concession without actual warfare―a threat does 

not necessarily imply a war. And not all threats will be carried out, even without concessions 

from the target (especially where the threat is implicit or indirect). Ceteris paribus, however, 

the more frequent the threat, the more frequent the war: a policy that relies on such threats 

is likely to yield a higher incidence of warfare against terrorist sponsors than one that does 

not. 

 54. See, e.g., Kier Lieber and Gerard Alexander, “Waiting for Balancing: Why the 

World Isn’t Pushing Back,” Paper prepared for delivery at the 2004 Annual Meeting of 

the American Political Science Association, September 2-5, 2004; Stephen Walt, “Keeping 

the World ‘Off-Balance’: Self-Restraint and U.S. Foreign Policy,” in G. John Ikenberry, ed., 

America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002; 

Josef Joffe, “Who’s Afraid of Mr. Big?” National Interest, Summer 2001, pp. 43-52; Robert W. 

Tucker, “The End of a Contradiction?” National Interest, Fall 2002, pp. 5-7; James Chance, 

“Avoiding Empire,” National Interest, Fall 2002, pp. 21-23. 

 55. Andrew Kohut et al., A Year After Iraq War: Mistrust of America in Europe Ever Higher, 

Muslim Anger Persists, Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 

March 16, 2004, p. 6. In each country, opinion of America has improved since the immediate 

aftermath of the war, March 2003, but in no case has it reached the prewar levels of summer 

2002: ibid. 

 56. Tom Hundley and Michael Martinez, “Voters in Spain Oust U.S. Ally; Anger over 

Iraq War, Blasts Helps Socialists,” Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2004, p. 1; Keith B. Richburg, 

“Madrid Attacks May Have Targeted Election; Wiretaps Bolster Theory That Blasts Were 

Timed to Hurt Chances of Leader Who Backed Iraq War,” Washington Post, October 17, 

2004, p. A16. 

 57. More broadly, most great powers see the terrorist threat much less gravely than 

does the United States, and this divergence in threat perception makes American energy in 

counterterrorist warfare seem less explicable and less benign. For most other great powers, 

terrorism is an ugly fact of life, but not an acute crisis warranting war as a solution. This 

difference in perception is rooted in a variety of historical and structural differences, but its 

consequence is to magnify the negative effects of maximum counterterrorist exertion for the 

benign impression of American intent that underlies the failure to date of others to balance 

American power. 

 58. Richard Oppel, “Congressional Unit Analyzes Military Costs in Iraq,” New York 

Times, November 1, 2003; Tim Weiner, “A Vast Arms Buildup, Yet Not Enough for Wars,” 

New York Times, October 1, 2004. 

 59. Estimated Costs of Continuing Operations in Iraq and Other Operations of the Global War 

on Terrorism, Washington, DC: U.S. Congressional Budget Office, June 25, 2004, p. 3. 

 60. Ibid., pp. 3, 7-8. 

 61. See http://www.worldbank.org/data/databytopic/GDP.pdf, and assuming nonzero GDP 

growth in 2004. 

 62. See Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables, available at: http://www.

whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/pdf/hist.pdf. 
40

 63. An Analysis of the President’s Budgetary Proposals for FY 2005, Washington, DC: U.S. 

Congressional Budget Office, March 2004, available at: http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?inde

x=1944&sequence=0. The White House’s most recent projection for FY 2004 is slightly lower, 

at $440 billion: see Dana Milbank, “White House Predicts 2004 Deficit Of $445 Billion―the 

Biggest Ever,” Washington Post, July 31, 2004, p. A02. 

 64. See, e.g., C. Fred Bergsten, “Foreign Economic Policy for the Next President,” 

Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 2, March/April 2004, pp. 88-101, at p. 92; Peter G. Peterson, 

“Riding for a Fall,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 5, September/October 2004, pp. 111-125. In 

fact, in many third world countries, deficits of this magnitude have produced acute crises 

leading to sweeping financial crashes: ibid. 

 65. See, e.g., Glenn Kessler, “Right-Leaning Policy Won a Nickname: Reaganomics,” 

Washington Post, June 6, 2004, pp. A27ff.; David R. Francis, “How Moves Abroad can Force 

Dollar’s Dive,” Christian Science Monitor, February 10, 2003, pp. 17ff. 

 66. See, e.g., Andrew Cassel, “The Economy: Fill ‘Er Up, and Curse the Euro’s 

Strength,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 5, 2004, pp. C1ff.; David Streitfeld, “Dollar’s Decline 

is Reverberating,” Los Angeles Times, November 14, 2004, pp. A1ff.; Michael Klare, “Policy 

and Bush’s Second Term,” Washingtonpost.com, November 9, 2004; Charles Grant, “EuroMuscle,” Washington Post, July 8, 2001, pp. B2ff.; Porter, “Private Investors Abroad Cut their 

Investments in the U.S.;” Francis, “Losing Patience with U.S. Trade Deficit.” 

 67. On multilateralism and cooperation, see, especially, G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: 

Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars, Princeton: 

Princeton University Press, 2001; also, e.g., Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox of American Power: 

Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go it Alone, New York: Oxford University Press, 

2002; Josef Joffe, “Who’s Afraid of Mr. Big,” The National Interest, Summer 2001, pp. 43-

52; Lisa Martin, “Interests, Power and Multilateralism,” International Organization, Vol. 46, 

Autumn 1992, pp. 675-792; Beth C. Yarbrough, and Robert M. Yarbrough, “International 

Institutions and the New Economics of Organizations,” International Organization, Vol. 

44, 1990, pp. 235-259; inter alia. An interesting gap in the large (and growing) literature 

on multilateralism and cooperation, however, concerns relative magnitudes. It is widely 

agreed that multilateralist policies induce some increase in cooperation from other states. 

Many conservatives, however, see the gain as small relative to the cost; most liberals expect 

the opposite. Yet there is no systematic analysis of the relative magnitudes of multilateralist 

constraint and cooperative payoff in the scholarly literature, nor is there any treatment of 

the conditions under which this magnitude might be larger as opposed to smaller. This gap 

is an important shortcoming in this literature as a basis for policy prescription. 

 68. See, e.g., James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of 

International Disputes,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 3, September 1994, 

pp. 577-592; the seminal analysis of this “costly signaling” phenomenon is Michael A. 

Spence, “Job Market Signaling,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 87, 1973, pp. 355-374. 

 69. Note that this is not to suggest that other powers are any less (or more) self-interested 

than the United States. The importance of costly signals lies in communicating to states 

whether their interests will be served by another’s actions—not whether their motives are 

more (or less) pure or altruistic than ours.

 70. Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes;” 

Spence, “Job Market Signaling.” Of course, many forms of cooperative alliance behavior 

increase military effectiveness by inducing the assistance of others―by ensuring overflight 

or transit rights, by affording diplomatic support, by providing for allied troops to augment 
41

one’s own, for example. While valuable, however, these behaviors only convey meaningful 

signals of intent when they incur cost on the actor, not when they convey benefit. 

 71. In principle, heavy spending to counter terror could be accommodated without a 

tax increase or increased deficits by cutting government spending elsewhere. In practical 

terms, this is highly unlikely. The Bush administration, for example, has increased nondefense 

“discretionary” expenditures since 2001, not decreased them: Budget of the United States 

Government: Historical Tables, available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/pdf/

hist.pdf. 

 72. On the relationship between defense expenditure and economic performance in 

developed states, generally, see, e.g., Todd Sandler and Keith Hartley, The Economics of 

Defense, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, ch. 8; Lee D. Olvey, James R. Golden 

and Robert C. Kelly, The Economics of National Security, Wayne, NJ: Avery, 1984, ch. 8; on 

defense expenditure and American long-term economic growth in particular, see Chi 

Huang and Francis W. Hoole, “Military Burden and Economic Hegemonic Decline: The 

Case of the United States,” in Alex Mintz, ed., The Political Economy of Military Spending in 

the United States, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 238-260. The majority view 

in this literature is that, for developed states, defense expenditure’s marginal effects on 

growth are modest but negative, and most significant in the long run. For a well-known 

assertion of more substantial effects, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: 

Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York: Random House, 1987. 

For less developed countries, on the other hand, the evidence suggests a variety of effects 

depending on the peculiarities of the states concerned. See, especially, A. Chowdhury, “A 

Causal Analysis of Defense Spending and Economic Growth,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 

Vol. 35, 1991, pp. 80-97; R. Ram, “Defense Expenditure and Economic Growth,” in K. 

Hartley and T. Sandler, eds., Handbook of Defense Economics, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 

1995, pp. 251-273; Steve Chan, “The Impact of Defense Spending on Economic Performance: 

A Survey of Evidence and Problems,” Orbis, Vol. 29, No. 2, Summer 1985, pp. 403-434. 

 73. Don Van Natta, Jr., and Leslie Wayne, “Al Qaeda Seeks to Disrupt U.S. Economy, 

Experts Warn,” New York Times, August 2, 2004, pp. 12ff.; Patrick Olsen and Molly Marinik, 

“Bin Laden’s Vow: Bleed U.S. Economy,” Chicago Tribune, November 2, 2004, p. 12. 

 74. Gail Makinen, coordinator, The Economic Effects of 9/11: A Retrospective Assessment, 

Washington, DC: U.S. Congressional Research Service, September 27, 2002, p. 58. See also 

former Undersecretary of Commerce Robert Shapiro, “Al Qaeda and the GDP,” Slate, 

February 28, 2003; Robert Looney, “Economic Costs to the United States Stemming From 

the 9/11 Attacks,” Strategic Insights, Vol. 1, No. 6, August 2002. 

 75. A major WMD attack would pose stiffer economic costs than even a severe 

conventional strike: some have estimated, for example, that a 10 kiloton nuclear explosion 

in downtown Manhattan might cause perhaps $1 trillion in economic damage: Nicholas 

Kristof, “A Nuclear 9/11,” New York Times, March 10, 2004. 

 76. See, e.g., Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World 

Order, New York: Knopf, 2003; Andrew Moravcsik, “Striking a New Transatlantic Bargain,” 

Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 4, July-August 2003, pp. 74-89; Jonathan Stevenson, “How 

Europe and America Defend Themselves,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 2, March-April 2003, 

pp. 75-90. 

 77. Moravcsik, “Striking a New Transatlantic Bargain.” 

 78. See, e.g., Robert Block and David Cloud, “Experts Reassess Al Qaeda’s Strength: 

Extremist Network’s Leadership, Once Thought Crippled, Is Constantly Replenished,” Wall 
42

Street Journal, August 16, 2004, p. 4; Owais Tohid, “Next Wave Of Al Qaeda Leadership,” 

Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 2004, pp. 1ff.; Zahid Hussain and Jay Solomon, “Al 

Qaeda Gaining New Support,” Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2004, p. 11. 

 79. For more detailed articulations of this argument, see, e.g., Fareed Zakaria, “The 

Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?” Newsweek, October 15, 2001, pp. 22ff.; idem, “How 

to Save the Arab World,” Newsweek, December 24, 2001, pp. 22ff.; idem, “Bush, Rice and The 

9/11 Shift,” Newsweek, December 16, 2002, pp. 35ff.; idem, “How to Wage War,” Newsweek, 

April 21, 2003, pp. 38ff.; Thomas L. Friedman, “Fighting Bin Ladenism,” New York Times, 

November 6, 2001, p. A21; idem, “Hama Rules,” New York Times, September 21, 2001, p. 

A35; idem, “Breaking the Circle,” New York Times, November 16, 2001, p. A25; idem, “Wall of 

Ideas,” New York Times, March 3, 2002, Sec. 4, p. 15; Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy 

War and Unholy Terror, New York: Modern Library, 2003. 

 80. See, e.g., “President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and the Middle East,” Remarks 

by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, 

U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Washington, DC, November 6, 2003; “President Speaks to 

the United Nations General Assembly,” Remarks by the President at the United Nations 

Headquarters, New York, September 21, 2004; “A Strategic Approach to the Challenge of 

Terrorism,” Remarks as prepared for delivery to RAND by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul 

Wolfowitz, Grand Hyatt, Washington, DC, September 8, 2004; “Defense, Democracy and 

the War on Terrorism,” Remarks as prepared for delivery by Under Secretary of Defense for 

Policy Douglas J. Feith, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, April 22, 2004; 

Thomas Ricks, “Holding their Ground: As Critics Zero In, Paul Wolfowitz is Unflinching on 

Iraq Policy,” Washington Post, December 23, 2003, p. C1. On some of the limitations of more 

modest liberalizing strategies, see Daniel Brumberg, Democratization Versus Liberalization in 

the Arab World: Dilemmas and Challenges for U.S. Foreign Policy, Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War 

College Strategic Studies Institute, forthcoming. For a formal analysis of the causal dynamics 

that might underlie the spread of democracy from Iraq to other states in the region, see 

Lars-Eric Cederman and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, “Conquest and Regime Change: An 

Evolutionary Model of the Spread of Democracy and Peace,” International Studies Quarterly, 

Vol. 48, 2004, pp. 603-629. 

 81. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies 

Go to War, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 

 82. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Testimony Before the House Defense 

Appropriations Subcommittee, March 27, 2003; Michael R. Gordon with Eric Schmitt, “U.S. 

Plans to Reduce Forces In Iraq, With Help of Allies,” New York Times, May 3, 2003, pp. A1ff.; 

Michael R. Gordon, “Allies to Begin Seizing Weapons from Most Iraqis,” New York Times, 

May 20, 2003, pp. A1ff.; Christopher Dickey, “The Cost,” Newsweek, July 21, 2003, pp. 28ff.; 

Thomas E. Ricks, “U.S. Troop Level In Iraq To Grow,” Washington Post, December 2, 2004, 

pp. 1ff. 

 83. See, e.g., Ashton B. Carter, “How to Counter WMD,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 

5, September/October 2004, pp. 72-85; Graham T. Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate 

Preventable Catastrophe, New York: Times Books, 2004; Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie 

Slaughter, “A Duty to Prevent,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 1, January/February 2004, 

pp. 136-151; Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer, America’s 

Achilles’ Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack, Cambridge: MIT 

Press, 1998; Jessica Stern, The Ultimate Terrorists, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001; 

Charles D. Ferguson, et al., The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism, Monterey: Monterey Center 

for Nonproliferation Studies, 2004; Graham T. Allison, et al., Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: 
43

Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Nuclear Weapons and Fissile Material, Cambridge: MIT 

Press, 1996; Matthew Bunn, Anthony Wier, and John P. Holdren, Controlling Nuclear Warheads 

and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan, Washington, DC: Nuclear Threat Initiative 

and the Project on Managing the Atom, Harvard University, 2003; Joseph Cirincione, 

ed., Repairing the Regime: Preventing the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction, New York: 

Routledge, 2000; Philipp C. Bleek, Global Cleanout: An Emerging Approach to the Civil Nuclear 

Material Threat, Cambridge: Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 

2004; Peter Stein and Peter Feaver, Assuring Control of Nuclear Weapons: The Evolution of 

Permissive Action Links, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989. 

 84. For Nunn-Lugar program expenditures, see, e.g., Amy F. Woolf, Nunn-Lugar 

Cooperative Threat Reduction Programs: Issues for Congress, Washington, DC: Congressional 

Research Service, March 6, 2002, CRS 97-1027F, p. 1. 

 85. Ashton B. Carter, “How to Counter WMD,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 5, 

September/October 2004, pp. 72-85 at pp. 76, 77. Of course, production controls cannot 

prevent completed weapons from being transferred to terrorists. Aggressive control of 

existing weapons would be required for any production control regime to be meaningful. 

 86. Chemical weapons, while a potential terror threat, are widely considered a lesser 

challenge than nuclear or biological weapons. See, e.g., Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. 

Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer, America’s Achilles’ Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical 

Terrorism and Covert Attack, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. 

 87. Thomas J. Torok, et al., “A Large Community Outbreak of Salmonellosis Caused by 

Intentional Contamination of Restaurant Salad Bars,” in Joshua Lederberg, ed., Biological 

Weapons: Limiting the Threat, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, pp. 167-184; Bruce Hoffman, 

Inside Terrorism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 121. 

 88. Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, p. 126. Their better-known attack in the Tokyo subway 

using chemical weapons (sarin nerve gas) proved more lethal, killing a dozen commuters 

and sickening several thousand: ibid., p. 121. 

 89. Ibid., pp. 121-127. 

 90. Frank James, “FBI Hits Wall in Anthrax Investigation,” Chicago Tribune, March 

2, 2004, pp. 9ff.; Marilyn W. Thompson, “The Pursuit of Steven Hatfill,” Washington Post 

Sunday Magazine, September 14, 2003, pp. 6ff.; Keith Rhodes, Issues Associated with Anthrax 

Testing at the Wallingford Facility, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accounting Office, 

May 19, 2003. 

 91. On BW countermeasures, see, e.g., Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and 

Bradley A. Thayer, America’s Achilles’ Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and 

Covert Attack, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998, especially ch. 5; Lederberg, Biological Weapons. For 

a more pessimistic view, see Christopher F. Chyba and Alex L. Greninger, “Biotechnology 

and Bioterrorism: An Unprecedented World,” Survival, Vol. 46, No. 2, Summer 2004, pp. 

143-162. 

 92. The decision has been made to pursue forcible democratization in Iraq―but not 

yet elsewhere. And it is always possible that policy could change even for Iraq: it is not 

inconceivable that the administration could eventually opt for a fallback position of stability 

in Iraq as opposed to full democracy. This is not current policy, but even strongly held 

policies can change under the pressure of future events. 

 93. My usage here deliberately parallels the Cold War debate between advocates of 

containment and rollback vis-à-vis Soviet communism. See, e.g., John Lewis Gaddis, 
44

Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, 

New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 128-129, 155-156. 

 94. Either rollback or containment would need to be accompanied by a more specific 

identification of the enemy to provide a fully coherent articulation of national grand 

strategy. In principle, either rollback or containment could be practiced against a broader 

or narrower target. The long-term cost-limiting focus of containment would encourage 

a narrower definition of the enemy; on the other hand, its emphasis on antiproliferation 

encourages a broad effort, given the range of actors who might either use WMD themselves 

or act as conduits for its transfer. Conversely, rollback’s necessary acceptance of greater cost 

and more energetic effort lends itself to a broader, more ambitious definition of the enemy; 

yet its very ambition counsels effort to limit the scope of its application in order to afford 

greater traction versus the targets against which it is ultimately directed. 

 95. See, e.g., Shahram Chubin, Whither Iran? Reform, Domestic Politics and National 

Security, London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002, Adelphi Paper No. 342; 

Afshin Molavi, “Iran’s Young Are Restless Under Islam,” Washington Post, December 28, 

1999, pp. A17ff; “Iran: Crisis and Consensus,” in International Institute for Strategic Studies, 

Strategic Survey, 1999/2000, London: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 174-182. Of course, 

it is far from clear that these stirrings will produce real reform; many recent assessments 

have tended toward the pessimistic. See, e.g., Dan De Luce, “Not Much of an Opening in 

the Mullahs’ Robes,” Washington Post, November 21, 2004, p. B2; Ray Takeyh and Nikolas 

K. Gvosdev, “Pragmatism in the Midst of Iranian Turmoil,” Washington Quarterly, Vol. 27, 

No. 4, Autumn 2004, pp. 33ff.; “Iran: Domestic Retrogression and International Scrutiny,” 

in International Institute for Strategic Studies, Strategic Survey, 2003/4, London: Oxford 

University Press, 2004, pp. 183-196.