International Relations

Introduction

The extent to which 9/11 has contributed to changing the nature of international relations .This has provided legitimacy to the American military operations in Afghanistan and the Philippines. The US attempted to use the post 9/11 international consensus about the evil of terrorism to bolster the ideological grounds for attacking Iraq. This attempt was largely unsuccessful, and resulted in a broken image of the West. While this fact is now obvious to all, there has been no real attempt by other powers to counterbalance the United States in the traditional realist sense (Ruby: 9).

The massive terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have placed the threat of terrorism on the front burner and have exposed the failure of the U.S. government to protect its citizens. The U.S. is using the threat of terrorism to justify a series of controversial policies, including tougher immigration laws, high military and intelligence budgets, and restrictions on civil liberties. Terrorism is rooted in political problems requiring political solutions and necessitating a major reevaluation of U.S. foreign policy as a whole.

It is important to know the internal economical factors which effected to U.S due to 9/11 attack, it also effected to global internal economical sectors of countries too. When the terrorist attacks occurred it was known that the U.S. economy was in a transition from an unsustainable to a sustainable rate of growth. There for after 9/11 attack I will highlight some economical aspects of U.S which effected internally.

Background

Colin Gray writes that terrorism is as old as strategic history (Jenkins: 321). The roots of terrorism can be traced back in time to ancient Greece, and terrorist acts have occurred throughout history since that time. The term terrorism, however, originated in the French Revolution's Reign of Terror and was popularized at that time. Terrorism in this era carried a very positive connotation as it was undertaken in an effort to establish order during the anarchy that followed uprisings in France in 1789. It was considered to be instruments of governance instituted to intimidate counter-revolutionaries, dissidents and subversives and was associated with the ideals of democracy and virtue. In fact, according to Hoffman, the revolutionary leader Maximillien Robespierre claimed that virtue, without which terror is evil; terror, without which virtue is helpless and that terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe and inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.

Terrorism at the start of the twentieth century retained the revolutionary connotations it had acquired during the French Revolution as it took aim on the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires (Hoffman: 29 ). In the 1930s, the meaning of terrorism mutated to describe activities of totalitarian governments and their leaders against their citizenry in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Stalinist Russia. For instance, in Germany and Italy, gangs of brown shirts or black shirts harassed and intimidated opponents, although leaders of these nations denied that this occurred. After World War II, the meaning of terrorism changed once again, returning to its revolutionary connotations where it remains ...