Attempts to evaluate any forward movement since 9/11 can be located in the anarchic nature of the international system and its realist foundations. Nations, at all times, will choose national interest to maximise power over their international commitments.

   The post 9/11 scenario has witnessed the creation of a new imperial order with its roots in this anarchic international system, in which states have to seek their security in a self-help environment. A concern for survival breeds a preoccupation with security. Since the early 1970s the realist school has strengthened, and is concerned with the relationship between hegemony and international economic openness, better understood as hegemonic stability theory. Structural realists or neo-realists have focussed on the international system, and have examined how different structures produce varying patterns of world politics. Hans Morgenthau’s classic statement ‘statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power’ is pertinent. Kenneth Waltz has also said, ‘At a minimum states seek their own preservation and at a maximum, desire for universal domination’. Only after survival is assured, he continues, can they afford to seek other goals; as a result, states act first and foremost to maximise their security while pursuing national interests. 

   9/11 led to the US restructuring its Cold War alliances, like that with Pakistan, and forging new ones with the Central Asian states. It also resulted in a massive increase of US military spending and in shaping public opinion for a specific value system designed against Islamic fundamentalism, and a certain disciplining of its political culture by surveillance within the US society. 

   Within the larger framework of the ‘war against terror’, the US military-industrial complex justified a huge increase in the military budget. The result has been an increase in the US military budget to 400 $ billion; it is now more than 25 of the largest military spenders in the world combined. But these are off-shoots of the war on terror. Over the longer term, the US perceives China, and not Al Qaeda or Islamic Fundamentalism, as its primary strategic concern. Since the ‘Discriminate Deterrent’ doctrine was voiced by the Reagan Administration, its priority has been the prevention of an emerging global or regional rival to itself. One of the major aims of the Bush Administration is containing and intimidating China, apart from meeting the missile threats from ‘rogue nations’ that are the driving force behind the Bush Administration’s TMD plans. This was largely responsible for the US abrogating the 1972 ABM Treaty.

   Since 9/11, the Bush Administration has acted out of political expediency, but also to push its foreign and military policy agenda. The US wants to win the first war of the 21st century. By using its global power dominance, with its nuclear and hi-tech arsenal supplementing this.

   US arrogance, coupled with military unilateralism, has led to great discomfort among its traditional allies, and a widening of the schism between the US and Europe. The US goal is to reinforce the Pentagon’s ‘full spectrum dominance’ doctrine, with new generation, high tech weaponry, revolution in military affairs, nuclear weapons and the militarisation of space to ‘control’ space. As the US prepares to counter new threats to its security, the Bush Administration has made clear that the US would leave no stone unturned to champion democratic values and freedom, whilst retaining a dominant nuclear posture. This is reflected in its Nuclear Posture Review. 

   A natural corollary of 9/11 has been the growth of authoritarian forces both within American society and the Bush Administration. They seek American dominance by military technology, justifying this by promoting alliance interoperability and non-proliferation. The anthrax attacks in the post 9/11 phase has further strengthened such forces. And WMDs have got linked to irrational non-state actors which makes all theories of rational deterrence redundant. 

   A casualty of this new US spirit of unilateralism has been the rejection of painstakingly crafted arms control and other multilateral treaties. The US has walked out of the negotiations on the Verification Protocol for the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. It has dumped the ABM Treaty, the International Criminal Court and has decided not to join in the Kyoto Protocol. 

   The US remains convinced that the world has been transformed post 9/11, but one year later, its disarmament goals seem to be lost, and it is leading the international community away from multilateral disarmament processes. It would do well to re-engage with the international community and strengthen multilateralism.