London
IN ATTACKING LONDON ON JULY 7, al Qaeda once again demonstrated its global reach. The attacks, carried out by a handful of British-born suicide bombers inspired by al Qaeda, overshadowed the presence in Gleneagles, Scotland, of the world's most powerful leaders at an expanded Group of Eight summit. Among this elite group, the United States, Britain, Russia, and India have suffered al Qaeda-inspired attacks on their soil in the past four years. Other G-8 countries, including Canada, France, Germany, and Italy, have disrupted terrorist cells operating on their territory. And that's not to mention the many other victims of al Qaeda violence: Spain, Turkey, Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Jordan, Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Kenya. Global terrorism is recasting international politics--but not necessarily to the advantage of the terrorists.
True, the globalization of Islamist terror demonstrates that an important source of power in international affairs--the ability to seize the geopolitical initiative--lies with today's transnational jihadists as much as with the strong states that traditionally order the international system. Further terrorist attacks could encourage vulnerable states to make a separate peace with al Qaeda, as did Spain after the 2004 Madrid bombings. But al Qaeda's string of attacks do not reflect a brilliant grand strategy of dividing the West. To the contrary, Osama bin Laden's historic accomplishment has been to unite most of the world against his cause; to deprive his movement of a national base; and to demonstrate the impotence of violent Islamist extremism in the face of popular aspirations to democratic modernity.
Since September 2001, al Qaeda has accomplished an extraordinary feat. Rather than dividing and weakening its declared enemies, it has spurred the formation of a global alliance dedicated to its defeat that would have been unimaginable four years ago. Few other challenges could bring together the United States, the states of Europe, Japan, Russia, and China in a grand coalition as strange as the World War II alliance of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin--but al Qaeda has done so, at significant cost to its own cause.
The effect of the London bombings on the G-8 summit demonstrates the shortsightedness of the terrorists' strategy. Before the attacks, observers were gleefully anticipating a summit rife with discord--on global warming, aid to Africa, the future of Europe, and Iraq. The London attack instead united the world's most powerful leaders as nothing else could. The attacks militarized a gathering previously dedicated to a soft agenda of Third World development and protecting the environment. Terrorists, not hydrocarbon emissions, were back in the crosshairs of the world's most powerful leaders.
Al Qaeda's rise has produced the kind of great power entente not seen since the Concert of Europe took shape in 1815 to sustain the post-Napoleonic international order. Today, thanks to bin Laden and his acolytes, the world is witnessing an international concert of power that includes America's natural allies in Europe and Japan as well as natural adversaries in Russia and China, and an array of unlikely new allies, from Pakistan to Uzbekistan.
There are drawbacks to this common sense of strategic purpose. China is exploiting America's strategic preoccupation to expand its influence in Asia, and Russia is reconstituting its internal political order along lines of czarist autocracy. At the same time, the threat from al Qaeda is constraining states like China and Russia from challenging Washington directly. It has overlaid an artificial structure of cooperation on an underlying logic of competition. In doing so, it has had the perverse effect, for the terrorists, of reinforcing America's hegemony.
Membership in this global concert includes regional adversaries--Israel and Egypt, India and Pakistan, China and Japan. It includes the very Arab autocracies the West is pressuring to reform, and emerging democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq. It encompasses regional powers like Brazil, South Africa, and Thailand. It also includes the world's largest Muslim state, Indonesia; Europe's largest Muslim state, Turkey; and India, with more Muslim citizens than any state in the Middle East--all democracies whose leaders represent far more Muslims than bin Laden and whose publics, polls show, overwhelmingly reject his vision of a violent, hateful Islam.
Al Qaeda has more state adversaries than nearly any force in history. That is a strategic failure of the first order.
