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Introduction
According to President Bush (2003b) 'September 11 changed the strategic thinking' of the US. Yet despite proclaiming a 'new war on terror', there was little evidence that the Bush administration fundamentally altered America's approach to international security. A Cold War phenomenon, the national security state, which provided an institutional framework for marshalling American economic, military and political interests in the global struggle against Soviet communism, remained largely intact and continued to frame American security policy after 9/11 in mainly state-centric terms. In fact, the ideas of global primacy and pre-emptive war, articulated in President Bush's National Security strategy of September 2002, reinvigorated and extended the boundaries of the American national security state.
However, the Bush's administration's emphasis on a distinctly American approach to the war on terror, exemplified by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, bumped up against the operational requirements of waging a counter-terrorist campaign in an increasingly interconnected world. The persisting gap between US policy and a transformed security environment indicated that the Bush administration had failed to fully come to terms with the events of 9/11 and still clung to 'a Cold War-derived understanding of military power' (Bacevich, 2002, p. 137).
America, under the Bush leadership, did not make the necessary transition from an extraordinary superpower to a truly global power. And given the United State's enormous structural power in military and economic terms within the international system, this was not just a problem for America but also for much of the world (Oliver, 2003).
Furthermore, the economic, political, and diplomatic costs of Bush's post-9/11 national security state are not sustainable in the contemporary global context. Thus, Washington, in the post-Bush era, will have to end the fiction that America can determine its own security in an globalizing world and move towards a multilateralist strategy for addressing the challenges of terrorism, in particular, and international security, in general.
This article proceeds in seven stages. The first section outlines the rise of the US national security state. The second part examines the US approach to security and the rise of al Qaeda after the Cold War. The third section analyses the evolution of the Bush administration's response to 9/11. The fourth part chronicles the expansion of the national security state under...