The head in the sand approach to foreign policy

March 29, 2004

In Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria diagnoses a key problem with the Bush Administration's "grown-up" approach to foreign policy: a dogmatic belief in state-centric realism. While the Clinton Administration began to respond to the threat of terror networks supported by super-empowered individuals, rather than states, the members of Bush's eventual foreign policy team downplayed or ignored this trend. According to Zakaria, members of the Bush Administration continue to downplay the threat today: Terrorists Don't Need States:

Stepping away from the partisan screaming going on these days, the 9/11 commission hearings and—far more revealing—the panel's staff reports paint a fascinating picture of the rise of a new phenomenon in global politics: terrorism that is not state-sponsored but society-sponsored. Few in the American government fully grasped that a group of people without a state's support could pose a mortal threat. The mistake looks obvious in hindsight, but was, sadly, understandable at the time of 9/11. What is less understandable is that this same error persists even today.