ABSTRACT
Experts warned of terrorism as a serious threat to America's national security and suggested that it needed to be integrated into the national security strategy, they almost always thought of nightmare scenarios: Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the hands of terrorists. While the bipartisan US Commission on National Security/21st Century highlighted the danger of WMD in the hands of terrorists, it also pressed for a national security strategy and policies that included threats from nonstate actors. In its "Phase I Report on the Emerging Global Security Environment for the First Quarter of the 21st Century" that was released in September 1999, the commission made the following, utterly alarming andas 9/11 would showprophetic assessment. President Bush and his closest advisors did not wait for the foreign policy establishment and international relations scholars to fit what was widely perceived as a novel type of catastrophic terrorism into a post9/11 national security strategy and the nation's foreign policy priorities.
