Similarly, Osama bin Laden’s extraordinarily skillful surprise attack of September 11 darkened the mood of Americans with shock, anger, and even a touch of mawkish self-pity (some Americans plaintively asking: “Why do they hate us so much?”). But the attack did not reach the threshold that would have weakened the deportment of Americans. On the contrary, it made the United States somewhat stronger. For many years before 9/11, government experts and high-level commissions knew full well what ought to be done to prevent terrorists from hijacking an airplane. Yet nothing was done to implement their recommendations until the body politic responded to the horrific image of the collapsing World Trade Center, the multiple airplane crashes, and the casualties. Osama bin Laden raised America’s defenses against terrorist tactics to a level that the U.S. Government, left to itself, could not reach.
“What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Friedrich Nietzsche’s apothegm captures a rugged truth.
A Nuclear Power-Grab
The cause of freedom would not have advanced so far but for the strategic folly of the enemies of democracy. “The good news from history is that attackers often fail to win the wars that they start with stunning surprises,” noted Richard Betts, Professor of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.11 This is also true of terrorist attacks. Walter Laqueur’s exhaustive studies of the subject led him to conclude that “in most cases, terrorism, in the longer run, made no political difference one way or another—in some, it caused the exact opposite of what the terrorists hoped and intended to achieve.”12 Terrorist leaders often have the most nebulous strategic goals, or more often, no achievable strategic goals at all. Like many other aggressors, they lack a grand strategy and are prone to strategic folly. The greatest danger for the international order in this century will be the emergence of an aspiring dictator who is utterly ruthless, brilliantly cunning, and possessed of strategic vision. This malignant combination has been exceedingly rare in the past, and we have no reason to fear it will now be more frequent. What will be altogether different in the decades ahead is that such an adversary can gain access to weapons of mass destruction.
Perhaps the most relevant historic parallel is Lenin’s power grab in St. Petersburg, in November 1917. With his ruthlessness and extraordinary strategic smartness, Lenin exploited the chaos in post-Czarist Russia to impose his Bolshevik dictatorship. The First World War had dissolved the Czarist armed forces, torn apart the social order in Russia’s countryside, and fractured the civil society in Russia’s capital. This political destruction enabled Lenin to wrest dictatorial power from the short-lived Provisional Government which had replaced Czarist rule in Russia. Aleksandr Kerensky, who presided over that liberal-socialist government, wrote that the word “revolution” was an understatement for what had happened in Russia: “A whole world of national and political relationships sank to the bottom, and at once all existing political and tactical programs, however bold and well conceived, appeared hanging aimlessly and uselessly in space.”13
The First World War was the wrecking ball and sledgehammer that cleared the site for building the Bolshevik regime. A future Lenin need not wait for a third world war to create a social wasteland on which to impose his new tyranny. A few nuclear weapons will do just as well.
But physical destruction by itself, even on a large scale, will not empower the would-be dictator to rule the ravaged country. In the 1990s, Slobodan Milosevic’s violent marauders surely broke apart multiethnic Yugoslavia, but in 2002 Milosevic’s political career ended in the jail of the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, where he died four years later. Pol Pot annihilated the existing regime in Cambodia and inflicted immense casualties throughout the country, but in the end he was driven from power to hide in the jungle where he died a reviled murderer. To achieve a more lasting victory, the aspiring dictator would likely use a stratagem that Leon Trotsky called “dual power.” This stratagem is “the historic preparation of a revolution,” according to Trotsky, and it played a critical role in Lenin’s takeover. For decades since then, it has been used by Communists trying to get a foothold in the West while remaining loyal to Moscow.
As Trotsky explained the concept:
The political mechanism of revolution [or in my story here, the mechanism of a “nuclear power-grab”] consists of the transfer of power from one class to another. The forcible overthrow is usually accomplished in a brief time. But no historic class lifts itself … to a position of rulership suddenly in one night, even though a night of revolution…. The historic preparation of the revolution brings about in the pre-revolutionary period a situation in which the class which is called to realize the new social system, although not yet master of the country, has actually concentrated in its hands a significant share of the state power, while the official apparatus of the government is still in the hands of the old lords. That is the initial dual power in every revolution.14
To make the dual-power stratagem more relevant for our time, replace Trotsky’s out-of-date expression “old lords” by “incumbent leadership,” and “the class called to realize the new system” by “dictator’s followers.”
