What has actually changed since the hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
The Bush administration, whose foreign policy seemingly had not jelled until two weeks ago, has made an astonishing transformation for the better. The president and his team have come together, and their, shall we say, “individualistic” personalities have been subsumed into what they all clearly see as a great calling and cause.
Before, most Americans were wondering, “These are supposed to be the most accomplished men and women in America?” Today, they’re declaring, “This is the most accomplished team in America!” President Bush deserves a great deal of the credit for, at least so far, keeping such a collection of egos in line and for overseeing them in pursuit of a far larger goal.
As for the world, the terrible events of Sept. 11 have not caused, but surely have illuminated deep changes that have been stirring for a long time. As the administration, particularly under the burgeoning and balanced leadership of Secretary of State Colin Powell, has tightened a geopolitical noose around Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, countries have suddenly declared themselves in new ways.
Central Asia’s “stans” (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, even fundamentalist-influenced Tajikistan) have opted with remarkable swiftness for the anti-terrorist campaign. Russian agreement shows that the wooing of Russia was not for naught. Arab moderates such as Egypt and conservatives such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, all of them direly threatened by Islamic fundamentalism themselves, have courageously joined the campaign.
These moves, made with the force of a great machine changing gears, mark the ratification of changes that will be with us for decades to come.
But anti-terrorism is not a question of the old-style wars of borders and serried ranks, as the administration has made clear. These dramatic alliances that are taking form every hour will constantly alter political, social, police, economic and psychological alliances led by our own cell-like, cross-issue alliances, often called in military parlance “coalitions of the willing.”
Or, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld perceptively put it this week: “We will see revolving coalitions that will evolve and change over time depending on the activity and the circumstance of the country. The mission needs to define the coalition, and we ought not to think that a coalition should define the mission.”
Take the case of NATO. At this week’s session at the Atlantic Council, the organization’s leaders and analysts noted carefully that, when NATO voted immediately after the bombings that the attack on the United States was essentially an attack on all member states, it was in effect saying that consequent U.S. military action would be approved as a matter of “self-defense.” As one German diplomat put it, “Although the attack on America was not a military attack in the traditional sense, we consider it an attack on our territory.”
These quick and decisive NATO actions have much further reach today than they would have had 10 years ago. In addition to the European member-nations of the alliance, potentially active players now include members of the Partnership for Peace, which are countries as diverse as Georgia in the Caucasus and the Baltic nations that are awaiting NATO membership. As former NATO Supreme Commander George Joulwan put it: “The alliance has been going through a series of adaptations, and this is just a further adaptation. I’m optimistic, not pessimistic.”
In his congressional speech, the president defined the terrorists as a “fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teaching of Islam,” setting a new standard of making room for genuine scholarship in the political debate. He also showed that the GOP, until now not particularly adept at understanding other cultures and at using that knowledge for American interests, are forging ahead of the Democrats in this important field.
Certainly, difficult, even dark, days are to come. The possibility that Pakistan will collapse under the strain of its own Talibanized fundamentalists, before bin Laden can be dealt with, is real. It could change the entire equation if another country were to be taken over by the fundamentalists. We also need to watch for countries using this crisis to advance interests that are contrary to ours, such as China further repressing Tibet and Central Asia, and Russia moving into independent Georgia.
Yet two weeks after the horrors and the attendant fears, the world is indeed changed. Would that we had been able to understand and initiate these changes beforehand.
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E-mail: gigi-geyer@juno.com
