George Friedman - The Next Decade

Terrorism is normally undertaken in lieu of more effective action. Had the Germans been able to destroy the British navy or the Palestinians been able to destroy the Israeli army, they would have done so. It would have been a more efficient and direct route to their ends. Terrorism derives from weakness, focusing on the psyche in order to make the terrorist appear more powerful than he is. The terrorist’s goal is to be treated as a significant threat when in fact he isn’t one. As the name implies, the terrorist is creating a state of mind. His ultimate goal is to be taken as an enormous, indeed singular threat. This creates the foundation for the political process the terrorist wants to initiate. Some merely want to be taken seriously. Al Qaeda wanted to convince the Islamic world that it was so powerful it was the most important thing on American minds.

Al Qaeda in fact achieved that goal.

By declaring a war on terror, the United States signaled that it regarded this single threat as transcending all others. Protecting the United States against terrorist acts became the central thrust of American global strategy, consuming enormous energy and resources. But terrorism as practiced by al Qaeda does not represent a strategic danger to the United States. It can and at times will kill perhaps thousands of Americans, and it will cause pain and generate fear. But terrorism in and of itself cannot destroy the material basis of the American republic.

Because terrorism—even including nuclear terrorism—does not represent an existential threat to the United States, a foreign policy focused singularly on terrorism is fundamentally unbalanced. The lack of balance consists of devoting all available resources to one threat among many while failing to control other threats that are of equal or greater significance and danger. This is not an argument to ignore terrorism, but rather an argument that terrorism needs to be considered within the context of national strategy. This is where George W. Bush got trapped, and his successors run the risk of falling into the same snare.

Like Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan, Bush had to manage the psychology of the country while pursuing his strategic end, but two phenomena proved to be his undoing. First, the more successful he was at blocking al Qaeda, the more the psychological trauma faded. Some of the public moved from demanding the most extreme measures to being shocked at the measures being taken. Bush should have anticipated this, but by regarding the war on terror as an end in itself, he lost his sense of its place in the broader strategic and political context. Second, he was not able to shift his focus in keeping with the change in public opinion, because he did not understand the purpose of his own global war on terror. That purpose was not to defeat terrorism but to satisfy the psychological needs of the public. Yet Bush continued at full bore long after the country no longer felt at risk.

In being fixated on terrorism as a freestanding strategic goal, Bush devoted huge resources to battles he couldn’t win and to theaters that were not obviously connected to terrorism. In fighting a Global War on Terror, he not only lost perspective, he forgot to manage the full range of other U.S. strategic interests. He was so obsessed with the Islamic world, for example, that he didn’t devote the attention and resources necessary to deal with the reemergence of Russia.

The issue therefore is how to transition from a complete focus on terrorism and the Islamic world to a more balanced strategy. Part of the problem is public opinion. Dealing with the Islamic world is a passionate subject in the United States, one that divides the country. Many regard the Islamic world as not only the prime issue but the only issue on the American agenda. It is the president’s job to align with public opinion and to tack with it while quietly pursuing his own moral and strategic ends. The problem that President Obama and other presidents will face in the next decade is to place terrorism and al Qaeda in perspective while redefining American interests in the Islamic world. This needs to be done in such a way that the public doesn’t turn on the president, particularly when the inevitable terrorist attacks do occur. He must satisfy public opinion both when it is terrified and outraged by attacks and when it turns complacent about terrorism and is shocked at the things that have been done to battle it. Above all, the president must deal with the Islamic world as it is, without allowing public passion to influence his ultimate intentions.

This is not an argument for complacency. For example, even though the likelihood is small, the consequences of an attack with weapons of mass destruction would be enormous. Appropriate resources must be devoted to the threat. That does indeed mean war, covert or overt, and war potentially involves costs and commitments that run the risk of outstripping the threat. The president’s task is to align threat, consequences, and effort with other challenges, and shape them into a coherent strategy. The United States has many threats and interests and cannot respond to only one. Fear alone cannot drive strategy.

The president must, as we have said, always soothe the nerves of the public, and must always show his commitment to stopping terrorism. At the same time, he must resist the temptation to try the impossible or undertake actions that have disproportionate costs relative to effect. He can lie to the public, but he must never lie to himself. Above all, he must understand the real threats to the country and act against those.

Apart from the killings at Fort Hood in 2009, September 11 was the only successful attack in the United States during ten years of war. Those coordinated attacks on New York and Washington were the result of a multiyear, intercontinental operation that cost al Qaeda nineteen of its most committed and capable operatives. Two major office buildings were destroyed in New York, and in Washington the Pentagon suffered extensive damage. Three thousand Americans were killed. But for a nation of 300 million people, the material consequences of the attack were in fact minimal.

This is not meant to trivialize the deaths or to dismiss the horror that Americans experienced on that day. My point is merely to emphasize that while you and I are allowed the luxury of our pain, a president isn’t. A president must take into account how his citizens feel and he must manage them and lead them, but he must not succumb to personal feelings. His job is to maintain a ruthless sense of proportion while keeping the coldness of his calculation to himself. If he succumbs to sentiment, he will make decisions that run counter to the long-term interests of his country. A president has to accept casualties and move on. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt called for vengeance but privately decided to focus on Germany and not Japan. He understood that a president could not allow himself to craft strategy out of emotion.

The purpose of war, according to von Clausewitz, is to impose your will on another nation by rendering that other nation incapable of resisting. The primary means for doing this is to destroy the nation’s military, or to undermine the population’s will to resist. Instilling terror can destroy an army; for example, the Mongols paralyzed their enemies with the knowledge of their relentless and ruthless cruelty. The Greek city-states would fight their wars to the bitter end, spurred on by fear of the slavery that awaited them if they were conquered. So the net effect of terror is hard to predict.

During World War II, neither the Germans nor the British made any bones about the purpose of what the British called “nighttime area bombing.” The targeting of civilians was a tactic designed to generate terror among the public, in the hope that the civilians would at the very least become less effective in running the wartime economy, and at the extreme possibly rise up against their own regimes. In Japan, the Americans pursued the same ends by using incendiary devices, taking advantage of the fact that most Japanese buildings were made of wood. In three days of conventional bombing over Tokyo, U.S. air forces killed 100,000 Japanese civilians, more than were killed at Hiroshima. Yet until the introduction of the atomic bomb, the terror strategy failed, just as it had failed in both Germany and Britain. Rather than destroying faith in the government, the bombing of civilian areas rallied the public to support the war effort. The attacks inspired outrage while making it easy for the targeted governments to portray the consequences of defeat as being too horrible even to contemplate. If the enemy was willing to go to such lengths to divert resources during a war simply to kill civilians, imagine what they would do when the war was over. Terror made it easy to demonize the enemy and made surrender unthinkable.