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Originally published in War on the Rocks.
COVID-19 and America's counter-terrorism response
About the author
Lydia Khalil
Lydia Khalil is Program Director of the Transnational Challenges Program at the Lowy Institute.
Topics
Ever since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. foreign policy and national security have been swallowed whole by counter-terrorism considerations, even as a number of counter-terrorism experts have cautioned against overemphasizing the terrorist threat.
If anything could ever shake the United States out of its counter-terrorism fixation it would be a crisis of even greater magnitude than 9/11. It seemed like that moment finally came with the COVID-19 pandemic, as the death toll in New York alone has been greater than the 9/11 attacks. Yet what we have seen so far is the opposite. Instead of reorienting toward other paradigms and reexamining its strategic priorities, the United States continues to reflexively overextend its counter-terrorism tools to deal with some of the more problematic aspects of the virus’ spread.
Read the full article on the War on the Rocks website.