ABSTRACT
The end of the Cold War and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union left the United States bereft of an existential threat. The administrations of George H.W. Bush and William Clinton struggled with the intellectual challenge and policy task of substituting the containment of the Soviet Union with a positive security strategy facilitating the political and economic transitions of the former Warsaw Pact states and the successor republics of the former Soviet Union (FSU). The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 accelerated the reorientation of the American security strategy and the reconceptualization of security. Just as in the past communism and the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to the American way of life, ‘radical Islam’ and Muslim terrorists pose one today. The simplicity of the struggle between capitalism and communism has been largely reduced to a simplistically conceived clash between Christendom and Islam, despite public protests to the contrary. The ambiguities of the immediate post-Cold War world have given way to the certainties of an Islamic ‘other’ at war with the West.
