was now continually interconnected twenty-four hours a day. And it meant, more than anything else, the Internet. Silicon Valley and cyberspace—those were the places to be. All this, along with the end of the Cold War and rapidly growing world trade, inaugurated a new self-confident era of globalization. “Distance” was disappearing, along with borders, as both finance and supply chains tied production and commerce together around the planet. It was an increasingly open world, freely communicating, freely trading, freely traveling—and, as it turned out very definitely, “visa-lite.” It was a world of rising living standards and ever-wider possibilities. It was an optimistic time.
THE DAY THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
On September 11, 2001, two jets hijacked by Al Qaeda operatives slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and a third into the Pentagon. The fourth, aimed at the Capitol, was brought down by passengers in a cornfield in Pennsylvania. For the first time since the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, which had taken the United States into World War II, America had been directly attacked, and with a greater loss than on that unsuspecting Sunday morning in Hawaii.
In retrospect, the warnings had been there with a series of attacks—initially on the World Trade Center in 1993; then on the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, where hundreds perished; and on the U.S. destroyer Cole in a port in Yemen in 2000—along with an attempt to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 2000 that had been aborted by an alert guard at the Canadian border. And there were also all the pieces of intelligence that were not connected—ranging from the CIA and FBI databases that did not talk to each other, to the Arab students at flying schools in the United States who were interested in learning only how to take off but not how to land.
That morning transformed international relations. Security now became the central preoccupation. Borders and barriers went up. The world was no longer so open a place. In the autumn of 2001, in what became known as the “war on terror,” the United States and its allies counterattacked in Afghanistan, the base from which Al Qaeda operated. They pushed the Taliban, Al Qaeda’s ally, from power, and in just a matter of weeks achieved a decisive victory. Or so it seemed at the time.
Globalization suddenly looked different. The world might be much more interconnected, but new vulnerabilities arose out of the much-denser network of trade and communication lines on which this interconnected world relied. “Homeland security” went from being a title for think-tank reports to the name of a massive new U.S. cabinet agency. September 11 revealed a dark underside to globalization. Empowered with the tools of globalization, shadowy groups with militant ideologies could take advantage of the openness—easy travel, easy movement, cheap cellular communication, and easy Internet access—to disrupt globalization and seek to undermine the more open world.
Petroleum had, since the beginning of the twentieth century, been entwined with security and the power and position of nations. But 9/11 led to a new emphasis on oil’s risks, including the fact that the world’s biggest oil region, the Middle East, was also the region from which Al Qaeda had emerged. One of Al Qaeda’s original grievances, in addition to the impact of modernity on the region, was the presence in Saudi Arabia of U.S. troops, which had remained after the 1991 Gulf War to help contain Saddam Hussein. The militant messages and sermons in some of the Mideast mosques were very similar to those of Al Qaeda, and recruits and money came from that region. Some fifteen of the nineteen suicide hijackers on 9/11 had been Saudi Arabian nationals.
The “special relationship” between the United States and Saudi Arabia went back to the meeting between President Franklin Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud on the Great Bitter Lake, in the Suez Canal, in February 1945. From Harry Truman onward, U.S. presidents had made the security of Middle East, and in particular Saudi Arabia and its oil, a fundamental national interest. Jimmy Carter made the commitment much more explicit in response to the Christmas Eve 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which was seen as a possible “stepping stone” for the Soviet Union to try to gain control over the Persian Gulf and “much of the world’s oil supplies.”
“An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region,” said the Carter Doctrine, “will be regarded as an assault