During the 1990s the strategy of openness had encountered sporadic resistance. But that resistance – an earlier attack on the World Trade Center, the bombing of American embassies and barracks abroad, the disabling of the USS Cole – had never quite risen above the level of nuisance. Now – as various policymakers had been predicting – the openness that had been the lodestar of U.S. grand strategy had facilitated an act of mass murder on U.S. soil, planned by Osama bin Laden and carried out by his al Qaeda network. Yet rather than prompting members of the Bush administration to reevaluate their commitment to an open world, the disaster of September 11 energized them to press on. There was seemingly no alternative. Once again the reluctant superpower found itself called upon to act.
