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By Root 1461 0

we need to recognize is that the security environment we face today is fundamentally different from the one that existed fifty, twenty-five, or even ten years ago. When Truman, Acheson, Kennan, and Marshall sat down to design the architecture of the post–World War II order, their frame of reference was the competition between the great powers that had dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that world, America’s greatest threats came from expansionist states like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, which could deploy large armies and powerful arsenals to invade key territories, restrict our access to critical resources, and dictate the terms of world trade.

That world no longer exists. The integration of Germany and Japan into a world system of liberal democracies and free-market economies effectively eliminated the threat of great-power conflicts inside the free world. The advent of nuclear weapons and “mutual assured destruction” rendered the risk of war between the United States and the Soviet Union fairly remote even before the Berlin Wall fell. Today, the world’s most powerful nations (including, to an ever-increasing extent, China)—and, just as important, the vast majority of the people who live within these nations—are largely committed to a common set of international rules governing trade, economic policy, and the legal and diplomatic resolution of disputes, even if broader notions of liberty and democracy aren’t widely observed within their own borders.

The growing threat, then, comes primarily from those parts of the world on the margins of the global economy where the international “rules of the road” have not taken hold—the realm of weak or failing states, arbitrary rule, corruption, and chronic violence; lands in which an overwhelming majority of the population is poor, uneducated, and cut off from the global information grid; places where the rulers fear globalization will loosen their hold on power, undermine traditional cultures, or displace indigenous institutions.

In the past, there was the perception that America could perhaps safely ignore nations and individuals in these disconnected regions. They might be hostile to our worldview, nationalize a U.S. business, cause a spike in commodity prices, fall into the Soviet or Communist Chinese orbit, or even attack U.S. embassies or military personnel overseas—but they could not strike us where we live. September 11 showed that’s no longer the case. The very interconnectivity that increasingly binds the world together has empowered those who would tear that world down. Terrorist networks can spread their doctrines in the blink of an eye; they can probe the world economic system’s weakest links, knowing that an attack in London or Tokyo will reverberate in New York or Hong Kong; weapons and technology that were once the exclusive province of nation-states can now be purchased on the black market, or their designs downloaded off the Internet; the free travel of people and goods across borders, the lifeblood of the global economy, can be exploited for murderous ends.

If nation-states no longer have a monopoly on mass violence; if in fact nation-states are increasingly less likely to launch a direct attack on us, since they have a fixed address to which we can deliver a response; if instead the fastest-growing threats are transnational—terrorist networks intent on repelling or disrupting the forces of globalization, potential pandemic disease like avian flu, or catastrophic changes in the earth’s climate—then how should our national security strategy adapt?

For starters, our defense spending and the force structure of our military should reflect the new reality. Since the outset of the Cold War, our ability to deter nation-to-nation aggression has to a large extent underwritten security for every country that commits itself to international rules and norms. With the only blue-water navy that patrols the entire globe, it is our ships that keep the sea lanes clear. And it is our nuclear umbrella that prevented Europe and Japan from entering the