ABSTRACT
September 11 did more than change the face of American domestic and foreign relations; it ensured that the two would be inextricably linked. The terrorist attacks removed any illusion that America’s domestic well-being could be considered in isolation from its international position. This was by no means an unprecedented state of affairs. In fact it was a case of re-learning an old lesson in a new context. Combating international communism, especially in the early phases of the Cold War, had forced a comparable awareness of the interdependence of the foreign and the domestic. Countless domestic measures, from Truman’s unsuccessful national health plan of 1948, to the building of the interstate highway system and federal aid to education in the 1950s, were justified in part on the basis of the need to meet the Soviet challenge. The whole McCarthyite episode demonstrated the tight link between foreign and domestic security in a world polarized between competing systems and values. Indeed war itself – and the Cold War must be considered as such in its psychological dimensions – has always been a powerful solvent of the boundary between domestic and foreign affairs. However, the Cold War was history. Relations between the domestic and the foreign were always subject to renegotiation and reinterpretation according to new circumstances. International terrorism of the sort pursued by al-Qaeda against the United States forged a peculiarly close connection between the domestic and the foreign since it represented foreign groups operating inside the
United States on a mission of destruction, not, as in the Cold War case, merely of ideological subversion. The political messages most likely to meet the sense of crisis would be those which most successfully responded to the dual challenge. In this context, one of the neoconservative movement’s strengths was its crusading sense of urgency about the external threat, which brought with it a psychology of domestic mobilization. Neoconservatism was geared up for war; it thrived on a sense of embattlement; it craved a mission.
