It was on a crisp, brilliant September morning that the United States experienced the worst terrorist attack in its history. Onlookers watched in disbelief as two hijacked passenger jets slammed into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. As audiences across the world watched the collapse of the structures that were synonymous with New York and the financial might of the United States, one thought stood out: the world would never be the same.

Melodramatic as that thought might have seemed at the time, it is now clear that the terrorist attacks were a critical turning point for both the United States and the international community. September 11 not only altered the New York City skyline forever, but also fundamentally changed the nature of international relations and US foreign policy as well.

The immediate manifestation of that change is the sudden emergence of what the United States has termed a “coalition against terror.” Not since George Bush senior’s ambitious attempt to build support against Iraq in the Gulf War has the United States thrown its full diplomatic, financial, and military muscle behind such a task. But George W. Bush faces an entirely different challenge from the one his father did in 1991: fighting terrorism is very different from waging war on a specific state. Indeed, the very nature of this campaign—from its vague, undefined enemy to its basic need for broad international support—ensures that it will be a protracted effort whose effects will reverberate for years, even if the coalition itself fails to last.

The terrorist attacks have forced the Bush administration to adopt a foreign policy of active international engagement, which some see as a complete about-face from Bush’s initially unilateralist and isolationist foreign-policy directives. But this new activist foreign policy threatens to polarize the international community, as the United States attempts to classify countries as allies or terrorist-aiding enemies. At the same time, the fledgling coalition carries a tantalizing hint of how multilateral cooperation might work to resolve broad global crises. We are at a crossroads in the development of yet another new world order—defined by either the realization of a new multilateralism, or its rejection in favor of a more unilateralist US interventionism following the mold of the Cold War.

A Uni-Multipolar World

In many ways, the new world order that is emerging in the aftermath of September 11 will resolve the contradictions inherent in the nature of post-Cold War international relations. The end of the Cold War represented not only a political victory for the United States and its allies but also the ideological triumph of Western-style democracy and capitalism embodied in the American way of life. The United States enjoyed a tremendous increase in international prestige and influence, not just politically but culturally and economically as well. During this period, the world seemed to be headed toward a unipolar system in which the United States would dominate the international scene, supported by the international community.

But this new world of US-led capitalist democracies never materialized. Instead, this initial triumphalism quickly evaporated with the fall of the Soviet Union, revealing previously hidden fault lines. Without an opposing force to provide legitimacy, post-Cold War US primacy became increasingly viewed as self-serving unilateralism rather than altruistic globalism. Governments from Western Europe to Asia and Africa openly criticized the United States for deliberately undermining its allies to ensure US supremacy. Susan Strange, a British international political economist, encapsulated the grievances of many US allies when she accused the United States in 1995 of exercising a “hegemonic, do-nothing veto on better global governance” as a result of the “natural but destructive unilateralist tendency in the US political system.”

Thus, by the mid-1990s, the “Pax Americana” had vanished. The post-Cold War world seemed to be a unipolar one with the United States as its sole superpower, yet the United States no longer commanded the broad unconditional support characteristic of a unipolar system. Rather, countries around the world pushed for a more multipolar framework for international relations. Indeed, the post-Cold War world has been defined by this tension between the US image of a unipolar world—an image captured in Madeleine Albright’s characterization of the United States as the “indispensable nation,” implying that other nations are, by contrast, dispensable—and the international movement toward a more egalitarian multipolar system.

Political scientist Samuel Huntington most aptly captures this tension in his 1999 article “The Lonely Superpower,” in which he dubs the contemporary international framework a “uni-multipolar” system of one superpower and several major powers. On the one hand, the United States has, as the world’s sole superpower, the military and financial capacity to take any form of action it desires. But on the other hand, there is a strong international movement toward establishing a truly multipolar world in which no one nation dominates others. As a result, the United States has the physical ability to pursue a unilateralist foreign policy, but it is politically constrained from doing so.

The current coalition against terrorism and the new US approach to foreign policy in the wake of the terrorist attacks will likely resolve this tension. As the United States pursues the terrorist organization Al Qaeda while simultaneously working to rebuild its international credibility through extensive diplomacy, only two long-term outcomes seem possible. First, this new international activism can quickly revert into an expression of US primacy in a confusing struggle between the United States and its allies on one side and terrorist organizations and states supporting them on the other. Alternatively, renewed US involvement in international crises could also form the foundations of a new era of multilateral cooperation.

A Flawed Coalition

The US response to the terrorist attacks seems eerily reminiscent of Cold War-era policy, especially in the initial US reaction and in its approach to the military campaign in Afghanistan. “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists,” Bush warned in his initial television address following the attacks. While the Bush administration has since moderated its tone considerably, the perception that this conflict will divide the world into two distinct camps has remained. This is a dangerous mindset, for international terrorism cannot cleanly divide the world into two antagonistic blocs, as was possible in the Cold War. Terrorism is a diffuse, multifaceted issue that involves a wide range of nations in a variety of different ways, rendering clean distinctions impossible. Some states do tacitly sponsor and support terrorism, but many countries are simply unable to root out terrorists within their borders. Others may be unaware that terrorists are even present within their country.