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by Harim Peiris

The post cold war world of the last decade and the new global economy was destined to offer a brand new world. A world which was not polarized along ideological lines, where goods and services traded with a minimum of restriction, capital flowed freely and up to date information was only a mouse click away. The new problems requiring urgent resolution were deemed to be the digital divide and trade barriers. Global security threats were deemed to come from rogue nations and fringe groups who would be contained and eliminated, their bark being worse than their bite. The defense priority of the Bush administration was seemingly the aerospace and defense industry defined as a missile defense shield against a missile attack.

Last Tuesday that equation changed drastically to challenge the very presumptions and the foundations on which the new world order of the new global economy was being built upon. The sole remaining superpower in the world, was challenged within its borders by an as yet unknown group. They struck at the very heart of the American nation, its financial center of New York and its defense nerve center of the Pentagon. With a couple of coordinated blows, caused by several civilian airliners hijacked with sharp instruments and knives, a terrorist group accomplished what no nation has ever done or will in the future likely do, attacked the United States within its land borders and brought the global economy to a standstill.

What rogue state missiles were feared might do, hijacked American civilian aircraft actually did.

The global financial markets will in all probability reopen on Monday, recover and life will go on. The global economy though, going through its first slowdown in a decade will probably move into a recession or negative GDP growth, with disastrous consequences for the Asian region, including Sri Lanka, which followed an economic growth model of exporting to the USA.

More importantly though the fundamentals that underpin the global economy will be questioned, including the dominance of the US Dollar. Even the level of civil liberties in the United States, that is touted as the model for countries to follow, might now be seen as impractical. The danger free world after the collapse of communism might well be a myth with the new danger not being red hordes pouring across the border, but a relatively few indistinguishable individuals wrecking havoc at will.

It is also interesting to note that Sri Lanka has had her own parallels to the situation the United States is now facing though with a relative lack of international outrage and sympathy. Our own bombing by the LTTE of the World Trade Center and the Central Bank in Colombo is similar in concept to the attack on New York's WTC, while the attack some years ago on the Joint Operations Command (JOC) Headquarters in Colombo and more recently the attack on the Katunayake Airbase is similar to an attack on the Pentagon.

The Sri Lankan incidents are relatively insignificant in a global sense. If twenty million people on a small island cannot live together in peace, defying every international and national effort to bring them together, then we are free to go about destroying ourselves. At least we don't impact the world. The US attack on the other hand threatens global economic interests not just the America. Accordingly there will be a global response to this outrage. But the incident also demonstrates the near impossibility of defending against a determined terrorist attack.

Recovery in the United States from a global perspective had been less than satisfactory. All indicators are that New York financial market will only reopen on Monday after a lapse of essentially a week. By contrast when Colombo's World Trade Centre was hit by the LTTE, the Colombo Stock Exchange reopened from an alternative site and the Central Bank moved to Rajagiriya and recovery was arguably relatively faster for a smaller nation that suffered greater devastation, had much less disaster recovery resources and with much less at stake. With New York, as the financial center for all dollar transaction, the global financial markets were brought to a standstill and stood still for too long.

The attack was a horror, an outrage and it should be unreservedly condemned. But perhaps it might also cause a rethink of American foreign policy, which has generally contended that problems abroad were none of its concern, while prosperity at home was the priority. That complacency has been rudely disturbed. The collapse of Communism created a unique opportunity for the United States to shape a new world order, by being multilateralist and joining hands with global partners to create a cleaner, safer and better world. Instead particularly the current Bush Administration and its like minded supporters in Congress, defined American interests much more narrowly, eschewing the United Nations, dispensing with global imitatives such as the Kyoto treaty on global warming and generally acting as if the problems of the world at large would never impact Americans at home. Well it did. A globally engaged United States would still have been a target at home, but a more global role would have created the domestic public acceptance of the requirements of a truly new world order, greater security, more effective disaster recovery, active contingency planning and a greater and multilateral global engagement.

Ultimately we can perhaps only hope and pray that such disasters never occur again.

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