July 14, 2003
THE NEW WAY OF WAR
Nuclear Terrorism Poses The Gravest Threat Today (Graham Allison, Wall Street Journal Europe, 7/14/2003)What is the gravest threat to the lives and liberties of Europeans and Americans today? Europeans and Americans differ profoundly in their answers to this fundamental question. Recent conversations with 100 security experts at NATO in Brussels and in Berlin, London and Athens underscored for me just how profoundly.
The American security community is unanimous. Democrats as well as Republicans agree with the Bush administration that the gravest threat to civilization as we know it is the marriage of terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. The specter is not just 9/11, but a nuclear 9/11.
Europeans disagree. Many express a mixture of skepticism and bemusement with what they imagine is a peculiar Bush fixation. Even as good a friend of America as Czech President Vaclav Klaus summarized his own view of the matter in what he called "a fundamental question: Was 9/11 an isolated act, or typical of phenomena the world will face in the first half of the 21st century?"
Beneath the headlines, deeper trendlines point to the latter.
Mr. Allison gives several reasons to believe nuclear terrorism is likely, but he misses the greatest of all: the experience of Israel since 1973.
Prior to developing nuclear weapons, Israel fought 5 conventional wars against its Arab neighbors in 26 years. Since developing nuclear weapons, Israel has fought not one conventional war, but a continuous battle against terrorism, in which its hostile neighbors fight by deception and stealth, using secretive private armies whom they pretend are not their own.
In a nuclear-armed world, only the most powerful nations can conduct war openly. Weaker nations will wage war by deception and stealth, working through proxy states and proxy organizations. The goal of such clandestine warfare is to hurt the enemy while deflecting his blame. This method of war is particularly effective against democracies, which typically need firm evidence of guilt before fighting back. It is this reluctance to go to war which has made Israel so helpless. Ultimately, terrorism will end only with a commitment from civilized nations to wage war -- nuclear war if necessary -- against any nation that aids, sponsors, or supports terrorism.
Because half the world, including the European Union and the United Nations, aids anti-Israeli terrorist groups, Israel has been poorly placed to initiate such a policy themselves. The Europeans have no excuses: blind to the threat civilization faces, they continue to feed that threat. The United States, on the other hand, must once again choose whether "We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth."