COVID-19 and America's counter-terrorism response
Originally published in War on the Rocks.
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.
